Why You Keep Forgetting Things (And What to Do About It)

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you were there? Lost your train of thought in the middle of a conversation? Or felt like your brain simply couldn't hold onto one more thing?

In this episode of Your Inner Economy, we explore one of our most important mental resources: working memory.

We'll break down the difference between long-term memory, short-term memory, and working memory using simple, everyday examples, and discuss why working memory often feels overloaded in our fast-paced world.

More importantly, we'll explore how gentle systems can reduce the burden on your brain by moving information out of your head and into reliable external supports. Because the goal isn't to remember everything—it's to steward your attention and mental resources wisely.

If you've ever wondered why you forget things even though you're intelligent and capable, this episode will help you better understand how your mind works and what you can do to support it.

New episodes weekly. 

Contact me at sonya@yourinnereconomy.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical, mental health, psychological, legal, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional regarding your individual circumstances.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to your inner economy. I hope you're having a great week, and I hope your celebration of our 250th year in the USA was amazing. I know mine was. Mine was. Well, I've got something I want to talk about today. But before we get into it, I want to ask you a couple questions. Have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you were even in there? Have you forgotten someone's name seconds after hearing it? Or started one task and end up doing five others? Yeah? Well, you are not alone. I have been struggling with that for probably 30 years that I can recall, but it got to be really, really overwhelming and a problem, I'd say maybe two years ago. And that's when I decided to go and get myself officially diagnosed. And I discovered that I truly, in fact, did have ADHD. Well, I had figured it. If you know my story, then you know that I had sort of figured that out when I was taking a class and saw a lot of similarities between myself and the people that the students that we were we were learning about. But there's lots of people that struggle with that who don't have a diagnosis. They just have what I like to call overwhelm. Well, I wanted to talk about that today and what are some things we can do about it. So before we dive into it, we got to really understand what working memory is. And in order to understand what working memory is, we probably need to look at all types of memory. So first we have long-term memory. And long-term memory is like the filing cabinet, it stores all of our long-term information. You know, all the birthdays that you remember, um, the fact that you know how to ride a bicycle, all those long-term things that you picked up when you were a kiddo and you still know, like saying the alphabet, right? Now the short-term memory is kind of like all that short-term information. Uh, for instance, something you just heard, you'll remember it. Like if you have to go to the grocery store and you need to pick up something and you Google the aisle that the item is on at the grocery store, and so you remember what aisle it's on. That's your short-term memory. And then you have the working memory. The working memory is where that information is actively used. So to kind of give you a little visual, the long-term memory is like the filing cabinet, it stores all of our information. The short-term memory is sort of like the waiting room, so to speak. It holds our information that we're gonna, you know, need for a little bit of time, so it holds information briefly. And then you have the working memory. So the visual for that would be like the working bench, you know, like you say, you got a basketball team and you've got a bench of players that are waiting to get in there and they're going back and forth and they're participating in the game. So the working memory is where we use the information and we sort of hold it there too. It's how we actively, you know, retrieve that information. So that working memory is the brain's temporary workspace. It's sort of like a mental sticky note, it holds the information just long enough for us to use it. Like you're making a recipe, and while you're doing that recipe, you have to remember, you know, what ingredient to use and what to do with it, that kind of thing. So it's that memory that you're using while you're actively working. Like if you're driving a car and someone's giving you directions, you're remembering the directions they gave you while you're driving the car, while you're actually doing the thing that you have to use the memory for. Got it? All right. So the reason we have problem with, we have a big problem with, you know, remembering things is because that that working memory, it gets overused and it gets overloaded, and so you can be an otherwise perfectly healthy individual, and you can just end up overloaded. Now, we do know that there are health reasons that can cause uh memory problems, we know that. But I'm talking about the memory loss in otherwise healthy individuals, you know, you're not dealing with dementia, you don't have uh anything significantly impairing you, you may have some attention deficit hyperactivity, but you don't really require medication for it, you know what I mean? Or you're just someone that's just got an overwhelmed, high stress lifestyle. Because fun fact if you don't take care of yourself, get the proper sleep, eat the proper foods, get the good exercise, then you're gonna create some temporary memory problems for yourself because uh memory needs you to be calm, right, in order to work at its best. You can't be stressed because when you're stressed, you increase those levels of cortisol, and that just wreaks havoc on your whole system. And if the system's not working, your memory's not gonna be really good. You know what I mean? So you really have to make sure that you're doing all the things, you're getting the water, you're getting the healthy foods, you're getting the vitamins and the minerals, and you're getting the sleep, and you're keeping that stress level down. So if you're doing all those things and you're still struggling, then chances are you're fitting into the category that we're talking about today, which is overloaded, too much input, too many interruptions, breaking your concentration, uh, too much stress in your life. You know what I'm saying? That's why we have to be very intentional about how we how we live. We have to make sure that we don't respond or we don't allow our phone to set off every notification, right? You can't always be living life with bells going off, reminding you to do other things while you're in the you're in the middle of doing an activity. So we've got to really be strategic about how we set up our notifications and how we allow interruptions to happen in our day. Because we've talked a lot about decision fatigue, and really at the the root of the poor memory is that you are dealing with decision fatigue. And as we all know, decision fatigue is sort of like when you have withdrawn all of the mental capacity out of your mental bank account, and you just don't have any of those things that I like to call your inner resources, your inner economy. You don't have the attention, you don't have the energy, you don't have the stamina to actually get that information filed away in your memory banks. And so we have to really be thinking about how we manage our lives and how we you know get away from the overloaded system. The other thing that can happen is that we can be um just living lives where we're stretched too thin. And when we do that, we give away our resources cheaply because we have to remember that our inner economy is our attention, it is our ability to uh decide what's going to be important in our lives and where we're gonna place our focus. Because when you don't, your decision making suffers and your follow-through suffers because you can't attend to what you need to attend to. Now, you might be thinking, what are some things you can do to strengthen your memory so that you don't have an issue? And you know, we've already talked about you got to keep the health, you got to keep the health in the game because you don't want your cortisol to be wonky. You want to make sure that you're being healthy and you're doing all the things. We talked about that and we'll talk about that some more on this channel. But I think a better question that I want you to ask yourself today is this instead of asking how do I remember more, which is a valid question, but for today, I want you to ask yourself, how do I ask my brain to have to work less? How do I ask my brain to have to remember less? So, what I mean by that is, you know, modern human lives are so much more complex in terms of information that we're expected to process and to manage. I mean, you got to think about it. Centuries ago, you know, the average woman had what her family to contend to contend with and to be concerned about. And yes, they had challenges. Humans have always had challenges throughout history, but the amount of information that the average female was expected to manage 400 years ago, heck, 200 years ago. What am I talking? 55 years ago. You know, the amount of information that men were expected to handle, that children were expected to handle, was way less than what it is today. We've got information overload, and we're expected to act on the information we get and to perform and to be highly productive as if we are robots, and we are not. So I guess for this segment of our show, we should be asking ourselves how do we get our brains to do less, to have to remember less. And that's why we are always talking about gentle systems, because gentle systems are those things that you put in place, they're the external systems that keep your brain from having to work so, so, so hard. They keep you on track, they sort of act as an external brain, if you will. Because when you use things like visual anchors, and those are those little environmental clues that you leave out so that when you see them, they sort of trigger, you know, your memory. Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to do this. They also serve as a way to help you transition into the next activity because when you see that thing that you've set up as your visual anchor, for me, that's my daily drift dashboard, sort of left out by the table where I work. I see it and I instantly think, okay, I have to work. What's the next thing on the list? Sometimes it's my coffee mug. I'll leave out a special mug, and when I see that special mug, it'll encourage me to go take a seat where that mug is left out and start my quiet time. So it's all those little visual things that you do that sort of help you remember to do something, they give you that little gentle nudge. Writing things down. You know, we're in a tech society where everyone wants to get an app. And I had a dear, dear friend share with me that she was being encouraged to stop using so much paper. And she has a very uh high stress, high status uh profession that she's operating in. And so her uh supervisor had instructed her to ditch her paper tracking strategies that she's used effectively for decades and to move to the apps. And she shared that with me. And because I know her personally, we talked also about the overwhelm and the feeling of being scattered. And I said, Well, I wouldn't do that so fast because the that writing serves as a tactile and a kinetic, kinesthetic, like a movement. When you write, there's movement in how you're spelling those words. You can feel that sticky note in your hands, and all those things give you extra uh data, extra, you know, information, a shot to your nervous system to get that activity done. And you also get the dopamine hit, right? Of being able to throw that sticky note in the trash when the activity's done or cross it off the list with the pen. So all those things that we have gotten away from because we're such a technology-driven society, those things we got to bring them back because people that feel overwhelmed and scattered, particularly people that might be dealing with ADHD, those things really help. Those physical, tangible things really help us stay on track. We also need to be thinking about routines and systems. So, not so much a checklist, a to-do list, those aren't really as effective as setting up routines and systems. We'll talk a lot about systems because systems allow you to chain events together, and so you're not really crossing off a list of what to do, individual items, you're sort of chaining activities to another activity. So I think I mentioned earlier how I'll have the mug at the kitchen table, which encourages me. It's a really cute mug. I get a really cute mug every morning. It encourages me to sit down. Well, sitting down and drinking that tea, I've sort of chained the behavior of getting out my journal. So I have connected in my brain when I drink my tea in the morning, I do my journal, my quiet time. And oh, look, I've got my daily dashboard also somewhere near at my other table. And so when I see my daily dashboard, oh, that triggers me to move to that next activity. So I've chained three events with those different uh activities. Drinking the tea, doing my churnal, my quiet time, and then getting busy with my daily drift dashboard and whatever I have to do that day. Now, all of this is not done just to, you know, be doing it. No, we're doing it because we're trying to reduce the number of decisions that you have to make each day. Because you're kind of already allowing the systems to think for you. You're also trying to reduce how much information you have to remember. That's why you have everything captured on, you know, the sticky notes that you write down and on your daily drift dashboard. You're trying to kind of, you know, offshore some of those tasks to these external systems to help support you. And the thing you've got to understand is that these external systems aren't cheating. Because a lot of people will say, Well, I want to, you know, use my own brain to make sure I don't lose my memory skills. Because we all know that back in the day, y'all, we used to be able to remember, I can't even tell you how many seven-digit phone numbers we would remember. And if the person lived in a different um area code, we had to remember those three different numbers. So we routinely remembered, I don't know, 50 numbers. You remembered all of your best friends' numbers and all of the people they knew. You remembered all of your, you know, your boyfriend, girlfriend numbers for decades. And then we've gotten lazy, and honey, we can all barely remember our numbers now, right? So I do get how we do want to also be actively doing things to strengthen our memory and using different devices to strengthen our memory. We do that too. But remember, we are expecting our brains to do a heck of a lot more than what they may be conditioned to do based on biology. You know what I mean? And human, the human condition and how we've lived our lives. So to use these external systems isn't cheating, they are leveling the playing field so that you can manage your very, very overwhelmed life. Don't give those gentle systems up, no matter what people tell you. Use both if you have to. If you're in a workplace where they're telling you you've got to use the app, I guess you're gonna have to use the app, but don't let them convince you to stop using your tangible, you know, movement, pencil and paper type activities to keep you on track as well. So these systems they are how we steward our resources. So I call these external systems, they are like a stewardship system. They give me the stewardship tools to steward my inner economy. And that inner economy, you guys know that's our attention, it's our decision-making skills, it's our follow-through skills, it's our problem solving, it's our judgment, it's our insight, it's our critical thinking, it's all of that. These general systems help make sure that we steward those systems that we have inside the correct way. So our working memory isn't just about memory, it's about protecting those most valuable internal resources so that we can have them to use on the things that we consider important. I hope that all made sense to you. And until next time, I want you to take care of your inner economy. Bye now.