Forgetfulness In Young Adults, Causes And What To Do About Them

Forgetfulness is often associated with illnesses such as dementia or Alzheimer’s and old age.  However the average age of my clients who complain from severe forgetfulness is a around 30.  This week I want to clarify the reasons why younger people become forgetful and how to improve your memory.

What Do We Tend To Forget Most?

Forgetting is a normal human feature.  In fact we cannot manage our lives without it. Even though we often refer to it as a nuisance forgetfulness helps us to simplify the enormous amount of data reaching our senses.  What we remember becomes the foreground and captures our attention longer whilst the forgotten goes to the background, sometimes referred to as the unconscious.

Forgetfulness becomes a problem when it starts having a bad effect on our quality of life.  My clients, often, report that their memory problems go hand in hand with short attention span and lowered ability to concentrate.

Spending hours every week looking for your lost objects such as the car keys, glasses, or cell-phone wastes time and energy, and may lead to feelings of incompetence.  When we forget important dates, such as birthdays, anniversaries and travel schedules we may well upset our loved ones.

Another example of forgetfulness is not remembering whether we unplugged the iron, or switched off the cooker before leaving the house.  We can also forget events, either from the past or from the present.  I meet a fair number of people in my practice who cannot remember much of their childhood.

Each of us develop our own personal ways of handling difficult events, people and emotions.  Our reptilian brain, as you may have read in one of my previous post, only knows how to either fight, flight or freeze.  Forgetting can represent flight or freeze response where we avoid remembering the unpleasant events and feelings.

Reasons Behind Young Age Forgetfulness And How To Improve Your Memory

There are many reasons contributing to memory problems among younger people.

1) Are You Emotionally Overloaded?

According to Freud’s motivated forgetting theory when we feel too disturbed and upset about an experience a strong desire to forget arises.   In order to avoid the anxiety of remembering painful memories would evoke we use repression or suppression.  Repression occurs when pushing the memory below awareness happens without us realising. We talk about suppression when we consciously choose to forget our memories and thoughts.  Such defences and coping mechanisms take so much of our energy that new experiences cannot find space to make connections.  The image of a glass overflowing with liquid with a lid on might represent the fuzzy, out of controlled state of such young minds.

Therapy helps bringing these memories back to awareness in a controlled way for healing.  The energy used to keep emotions repressed or suppressed gets released. This in turn leads to improved concentration and boost of energy the person can use to make their life work for themselves.

2) Do You Get Enough Sleep?

Many suffer from sleep problems.  Not getting enough sleep has severe consequences on energy levels, on concentration, on health and on overall quality of life.  You might choose to sleep less with commitments for work and family.  Or you might find it difficult to fall into a good peaceful night-long sleep when your day time coping mechanisms weaken, unpleasant memories want your attention and keep you awake.

During pregnancy and early years of nursing the baby, mothers often suffer from memory loss.  This can relate to not getting enough sleep as well as having to share certain essential nutrients with the baby.  Often good diet with additional supplements such as omega 3 helps with mothers’ brain power.

There are  responsibilities and jobs that require you to have irregular sleep patterns, such as doctors, nurses, security guards, factory workers and parents of newly born babies.  There are those who have to travel across continents whose body-mind has to adjust to changing time-zones.

You need to take responsibility for your own needs and do what you need to do for finding solutions to bring your sleep time to a healthy level.  This may involve changing jobs, even asking help from your in-laws asking help from a therapist.

3) Hormonal Imbalance, Depression and The Side Effects Of  Medications

When a person’s thyroid gland is underactive their memory and their sleep suffer; they become more vulnerable to depression.  A simple blood test would show if it the case. Often lifestyle changes, including the way you think, occasionally with the help of some medication, solve the hormonal imbalance associated with forgetfulness.

However you must be careful which medication you are using.  Some anti depressants and blood pressure pills can lead to lowered ability to concentrate and therefore to forgetfulness.  You can consult your doctor for an alternative.

I am not a doctor and I am not the person to give advice on medication.  All I can do is to stress how important is to listen to your own body-mind, to take responsibility for your own health and to aim to improve your overall well being to live a happy and healthy life.  You can do this by making good lifestyle choices every day.

4) Are Your Lifestyle Choices Good for Your Memory?

Experts advise us including vitamin E in our diet.  Vitamin E is a powerful antioxidant and is thought to protect our neurons, so that they continue serving us better and longer.  You can find vitamin E in olives and olive oil, peanuts, sunflower seeds, avocado, dark green leafy vegetables such as broccoli, kale and spinach.  If you include whole grains, fish, berries and nuts in your diet in addition to the vitamin E rich foods you can be sure to have adopted a memory-friendly diet.

Research also suggests that regular exercise is very important in keeping your memory in good condition.

Alcohol affects your memory even when you drink moderately.  You might have noticed your short-term memory getting worse even after the effects of alcohol have worn off. Through regular alcohol intake our production of new brain cells decrease enormously without us even realising.  Over time this makes new learning more and more difficult.

Research shows very clearly that smoking harms memory by reducing the amount of oxygen that gets to the brain.

5) Do You Create Your Own Stress?

In times of danger stress helps us to protect ourselves.  However if we don’t know how to relax our body-mind it has the potential to make us ill and even kill.  Like alcohol, stress also makes it harder to concentrate, hinders our ability to learn new skills and can lead to memory problems.

If you do not know how to handle stress in your life effectively you might develop depressive symptoms.  These involve lack of drive, intense sadness, not enjoying things you normally used to enjoy and forgetfulness.

If you have been exposed to stressful situations for a longtime and have not yet achieved a perceptual shift you may be vulnerable for depression.  If you feel you are losing your way you may need to ask the help of a competent therapist you can trust.

6) Are You Exposed To Chemicals?

Some employment requires the workers to use certain chemicals.  Farmers, factory workers, gardeners, cleaners, car mechanics are only a few.  If you are working in poisonous environments you need to protect yourself by using whatever the technology offers you; special gloves, clothing, masks, etc.  This is your health you really need to demand from your employer to invest for the right protective equipment even if it requires some financial investment on their part.  You might also need to make alternative career plans if you want to have a long and healthy life.

Listen, Read, Watch And Learn From Dr Daniel Amen

Dr Amen is an American psychiatrist and a brain disorder specialist.  If you care about your health I strongly advise you to follow his presentations.  He communicates scientific information in a way you and I can understand and relate to easily. More importantly his style has this persuasive quality that helps you to take action.  I speak from experience, he certainly helped me make significant changes in my life choices:)