You KNOW you know ….
That word
That name
That number

You just can”t THINK of it.

So what’s happening??

Brain overload?
Too many things in your mind at once?
Too many drinks?
Didn’t take enough notice in the first place?
Exhausted?

These are all likely causes or short-term memory loss.

Given space to think and recall – or sleep – that lost thought will most often come back to you.

Lack of sleep could be the main culprit.

Sleep researchers say for every two hours we spend awake, the brain needs an hour of sleep to sort out the meaning of all that we’ve experienced. To read more about this study

Sleep not only helps store facts, it also helps make connections between them.

Sleep-deprivation experiments show that a tired brain has a difficult time capturing memories of all sorts, and an even tougher time making decisions.

Look after your brain to protect it against short-term memory loss.

It’s not fatal – but it can be darned embarrassing!

To find out about other ways you can sharpen your memory skills, sign up for Brain Tune. It’s a six-part memory training course that is easy, fun to do and hundreds of our readers tell us it has worked for them. It’s also free because we want everyone to have the opportunity to build a buffer of new brain connections. Research tells us that is the best, non-prescription protection against Alzheimer’s.

We will never reveal your details to anyone else.

Memory loss coming on!

One of my followers on Twitter posted this tweet and I could understand just how he felt! Sometimes life’s just like that -  after a weekend partying, hitting the books for exams, going through a stressful relationship break up or just too much of everything!

I’ve seen lots of Twitter jokes about memory loss – like this one: Memory loss runs in my family – um, do I have a family? Or
When my doctor knew I had memory loss, she made me pay in advance.

But it isn’t really a joke because if your memory is being affected so much that you are forgetting things, then the what is causing the stress needs to be taken seriously.

What are the warning signs of stress?

Rapid breathing, increased heart rate, withdrawal, headaches, chain smoking, chest pains, insomnia, ulcers, and reduced sex drive. These symptoms often lead to thoughts and feelings of despair or panic (I’m doomed, I’ll never succeed, I’m useless). And of course, stress can mean dollars lost, projects delayed, poor morale, arguments with friends, poor heath, and failure in your job. So, although the jokes are a bit of fun, stress bad enough to cause memory loss is far from a joke.

I’ve just moved house and taken up a new job so I’ve been feeling a bit stressed lately. How can I tell? I put out my mobile to be sure to take it to work – then left it behind on the table where I placed it so carefully. I wake up in the middle of the night with a To Do list rolling round in my head. I spend minutes searching for an important paper that is actually sitting on the desk where I placed it. Silly things that wouldn’t happen if I was thinking straight, and not stressed

There are many natural stressors in our lives, both positive and negative. A constant barrage of noise, being fired, facing fierce competition, the death of someone close or divorce cause a lot of stress for us. So do moving, starting a new job, making a large purchase, going on holiday, marriage…any of these circumstances evoke our emotions . while some are joyful, often the opposite is the case, causing worry, grief, or depression. All stressors cause tension and tension is the enemy of memory.

Time honoured ways of reducing stress include:

1. Relaxation: When anxious, find a friend, a book, or learn relaxation techniques. This can take the form of breathing exercises, a gradual relaxation of the body, or an imaging process. At first the mind technique you choose may take half an hour to ‘bring you down’, but once you become adept all it need is ten seconds or so.
2. Time Management: Manage your phone calls and interruptions. Make a daily plan: this helps accomplish critical or urgent jobs, the ones that create the most stress and take the highest toll on memory. The simpler the management plan, the better
3. Cut yourself some slack: Tell yourself that mistakes happen and the world hasn’t ended and that there is usually no one clear right and wrong way to do things, and so on.
4. Assert yourself in a tactful, flexible way which makes your needs and wants known but does not cause aggression and anger. Try using statements with “I believe…” or “I would like to try…” rather than “you…” This negotiating approach is much less stressful and more likely to be successful.
5. Problem solving. Evaluate many possible solutions, then decide and implement the one that seems best. This frees your thinking and memory capacity.
6. Risk-taking. Be willing to be embarrassed and non-traditional. Have fun. The discomfort of opening yourself up will gradually fade as you experiment by taking risks. As life becomes more satisfying, you can be more relaxed about the way your life is progressing; your stress will lessen, and your memory will improve.

If you feel stress coming on, take 90 seconds to:

1. STOP. Abandon what you are doing
2. RELAX. Free your mind of distractions
3. THINK. Identify your irrational and panicky thoughts and replace them with positive statements.
4. RISK. Break the routine; try something new.

With a bit of space to think and recall, I could begin to organize combinations of garments in my mind and, even better, after a decent night’s sleep, my mind was clear. I didn’t need either of them because I found a skirt in the wardrobe that I had scarcely worn that was a better match. Well, I guess this doesn’t count as a life-changing event but it reminded me that sometimes, under pressure, it is hard to sort out and combine all of the thoughts you have that are relevant to the problem in hand.

That sleep I had was important in helping me sort out what I wanted to do as well. It was no surprise, then, to find out that sleep researchers believe that for every two hours we spend awake, the brain needs an hour of sleep to figure out what all the experiences we have engaged in mean.

Sleep not only helps store facts, it also helps make connections between them. It’s the time when the brain’s two memory systems—the hippocampus and the neocortex—”talk” with one other, which plays a crucial role in constructing meaning in our lives.

Conversely, sleep-deprivation experiments have shown that a tired brain has a difficult time capturing memories of all sorts, and an even tougher time making decisions. We need our sleep.

“Relational memory is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” explains senior author Matthew Walker, PhD, Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

“It’s not enough to have all the puzzle pieces — you also have to understand how they fit together.”

Researchers Walker and Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, a postdoctoral fellow at HMS and sleep neurologist, hypothesized that relational memory develops during “off-line” periods and that, like procedural memory, it would be enhanced following a period of sleep.

They tested 56 healthy college students, each of whom was shown five pairs of unfamiliar abstract patterns — colourful oval shapes resembling Faberge’ eggs. The students were then told that some of the patterns were “correct” while others were “incorrect,” but were not told that there was a hidden “hierarchy” linking all five of the pairs together. The three groups were then tested for their understanding of the larger “big picture” relationship between the individual patterns. The results showed that the students who had had periods of sleep between learning and testing, significantly outperformed the other groups.

“This strongly implies that sleep is actively engaged in the cognitive processing of our memories,” says Ellenbogen.

“Knowledge appears to expand both over time and with sleep.”

Help Short Term Memory

Walker added, “These findings point to an important benefit [of sleep] that we had not previously considered. Sleep not only strengthens a person’s individual memories, it appears to actually knit them together and help realize how they are associated with one another.”

And this may turn out to be the primary goal of sleep: You go to bed with pieces of the memory puzzle, and awaken with the jigsaw completed.”

No! I completely forgot!

After 45 minutes I couldn’t stand it any longer and I sent her a text. Next minute the cossack tune blared from my mobile, and it was her. She’d forgotten all about meeting me. She’s sorry, can’t think what happened, how could she forget, so on and so on ….

That’s a baby boomer in action. To be honest, I’ve forgotten some things, too, of late. And my memory specialist sister, Dr. Allison Lamont, tells me that there’s a heap of reasons why it might be happening, not many of them good news!

People call memory loss by many names: forgetfulness, amnesia, impaired memory, loss of memory, mild cognitive impairment but basically it refers to any forgetting that is out of the ordinary. And it seems that boomers have growing worries about it because it’s not fun to miss appointments, forget birthdays or to take medication. That could even be dangerous.

There are heaps of causes of memory loss, getting older being one of them. But boomers can push back against forgetting with training so that’s a comfort for me and my friend. More significant memory loss occurs, though, when diseases are involved.

There’s a whole list of those and I’ll put some of the most common of them for you at the end of this article. You’ll need to visit a doctor to be sure if you are worried that your memory loss is more serious than just standing me up for lunch.

The doctor will ask you all kinds of questions to help understand what kind of memory loss it is. Can you remember recent events (is there impaired short-term memory) Can you remember events from further in the past (that’s about your long-term memory)? Have you just forgotten what happened before or after a specific experience (amnesia)? Do you make up stuff to cover gaps in memory?

The doc will also want to know about whether your moods affect your concentration and whether the memory loss has been getting worse over years, weeks or months. It’s also important to know if it’s there all the time or only now and then. Knowing if you’ve had a head injury in the recent past, surgery needing anaesthetic, seizures or an emotionally traumatic event will be taken into consideration.

You probably know that alcohol and illegal/illicit drugs are bad news for memory, so you’d better be honest with the doc about that.

Other symptoms might have something to do with your memory loss so knowing if you have been confused or disoriented, whether you can eat, dress, and generally look after yourself will be on the check list of questions. Of course, they’ll do all the normal things you would expect, like blood tests looking for low vitamin B12 or thyroid disease, CT scan or MRI of the head, cognitive or psychometric tests, an EEG or even a lumbar puncture.

So, memory loss shouldn’t be taken lightly, particularly if you have other worrying symptoms.

For most boomers, though, actively challenging and training your perfectly normal brain will overcome memory loss and, in fact, in Seven Second Memory Plus Six Other Powerful Memory Techniques: Rewire your Brain for a Youthful Mind, you will find out how easy it is to remember as well as you did in your youth – maybe even better.

Common Causes of More Serious Memory Loss

Alcoholism
Alzheimer’s disease
Brain damage due to disease or injury
Brain growths (caused by tumors or infection)
Brain infections such as Lyme disease or syphilis
Depression or emotional trauma
Drugs such as barbiturates or benzodiazepines
Encephalitis of any type (herpes, West Nile, Eastern Equine)
General anesthetics such as halothane, isoflurane, and fentanyl
Head trauma or injury
Hysteria, often accompanied by confusion
Illness that results in the loss of nerve cells
Nutritional problems (vitamin deficiencies such as low vitamin B12)
Seizures
Stroke
Temporal lobe brain surgery

For further information, go to Memory Questions: True or False and Avoid or Delay Dementia Later in Life and improving your memory, please visit the Brain and Memory Foundation.