Dissatisfied with ADHD and Memory Loss? Four Promising Ways You'll Have a Badass Memory
Are you tangled in a web of jumbled memories, struggling to recall events from just an hour ago, let alone years past? Beyond its well-known impacts on focus and hyperactivity, ADHD can significantly disrupt your long-term memory and retention abilities.
Memory challenges are a lesser discussed but profound aspect of ADHD, affecting how we recall, organize, and retain information over time. Understanding these effects and finding ways to enhance memory is crucial for navigating daily life with ADHD.
Working Memory and Long-Term Memory 
When we think about long-term memory, we look at how our minds turn short-lived experiences into enduring knowledge. Take reading a novel, for example: as you dive into its pages, your working memory becomes crucial in several significant ways:
1. Processing Information: Your working memory meticulously absorbs each character, setting, and plot twist, unraveling the narrative's tapestry as you progress.
2. Connecting Concepts: Your mind seamlessly weaves new revelations with existing knowledge, forging pathways that illuminate connections across the story's unfolding drama.
3. Organizing Information: Themes emerge—conflicts, clues, character arcs—each finding its place in the mosaic of your understanding.
4. Rehearsing and Reviewing: Vital details are mentally rehearsed, ideas are reviewed, and refinements are made, cementing the story's essence deep within your consciousness.
5. Linking with Prior Knowledge: Insights from the novel resonate with your own experiences and broader conflicts, enriching your understanding through thoughtful comparison and contrast.
When you later seek to recall these memories, cues, and prompts drawn from the novel's narrative serve as guideposts, triggering recollections that unfold like chapters in a mental storybook.
In this way, working memory acts as a vital bridge between initial comprehension and enduring retention, preserving events, viewpoint nuances, and lasting impressions that enrich our understanding.
ADHD and the Long-Term Memory System
The science behind ADHD and its impact on long-term memory involves several interconnected factors. Deficits in executive functions such as attention regulation, cognitive control, and working memory characterize ADHD.
These deficits can affect the four parts of the memory processing system:
1. Encoding: the act of getting information into our memory system (encoding)
2. Consolidation: reorganizing and integrating new memories into existing memory networks over time, making memories resistant to interference
3. Storage: the creation of a permanent record (from sensory to short-term to long-term memory)
4. Retrieval: the process of accessing stored information from memory and bringing it into conscious awareness
Research suggests that individuals with ADHD may experience difficulties in encoding information due to distractibility and poor sustained attention.
Additionally, problems with working memory can hinder the effective transfer of information into long-term storage. Working memory is like a sticky note that helps you hold onto new information and organize it into short-term and long-term storage. When that note isn’t sticking, or the data wasn’t captured on the note, it can get in the way of adequate storage.
Furthermore, other research has shown that the hyperactivity and impulsivity seen in ADHD can disrupt the consolidation of memories during sleep, a critical phase for memory formation.
These combined challenges often result in weaker retrieval cues and difficulty accessing stored memories, contributing to long-term memory deficits in individuals with ADHD.
Here are four ways you'll have a badass long-term memory when you live with ADHD.
Reduce Your Stress
You might recognize this when trying to recall information, possibly leading to panic. Attempting to force retrieval or fixating on a lost memory can heighten stress. Conversely, stepping back, taking a breath, or shifting focus can help calm your mind.
By reducing the fight-or-flight response, you regain the ability to process relevant and meaningful information effectively.
• Take breaks during the day to refresh your mind. Have a drink, eat a healthy snack, and allow yourself to relax.
• Practice brief meditation sessions, even just one or two minutes. Use apps like Insight Timer, Calm, or Headspace, or sit quietly and focus on your breathing. When your mind drifts, gently bring your attention back to your breath without judging yourself.
• Practice deep breathing by expanding your abdomen, not just your chest. This technique can help promote relaxation and clarity of mind.
• Take control of your day. Set aside dedicated times—such as a "sacrosanct" period—for personal tasks and another for handling emails and meetings. Avoid letting interruptions from others dictate your schedule. By prioritizing what matters most to you, you improve access to your working memory and can handle information more effectively and meaningfully.
Use External Aids
Physical aids like planners and calendars are helpful for memory in people with ADHD because they provide external reminders and organization. They establish routines and reduce the need to rely on memory alone, freeing up mental energy for tasks. These tools help individuals stay organized, remember important information, and manage daily responsibilities more effectively.
• Write down ideas and tasks as they come to you, but avoid acting on them immediately.
• Set up reminder alerts to perform tasks so you can stay focused on your current task.
• Create a weekly master list and review your day each evening before or morning upon waking.
• Streamline tasks by dividing project-related tasks and one-off tasks, such as making a doctor’s appointment.
• Schedule your tasks and events on your calendar. The calendar tells you when you will work on the task (the list tells you what is the task). Don’t worry if you must move a task around for completing another task, or to complete that task. Most important is committing to getting tasks/events on the calendar so you have a placeholder for accomplishing them.
• Break tasks into the smallest possible “most laughably doable” step. You want each task distilled into “so easy to do, that you can almost laugh.”
Practice Repetition with Mnemonics
• Singing a song, which involves putting information to music, can help encode information in long-term memory. For example, elementary school kids learn the names of the states and capitols through song, and the ABC song teaches the letters of the alphabet.
• Acronyms or Acrostics are great for remembering lists. In an acronym, you use the letter to represent each word or phrase; in an acrostic, you use a sentence to help you remember. For example, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is an acrostic for Parentheses, Exponent, Multiply, Divide, Add, and Subtract.
• Rhyme what you want to recall. Many use a familiar mnemonic rhyme: "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,” to recall the months that have 30 days.
• Creating connections is connecting information to something you already know. Rephrase the new information using visual imagery to help you remember, such as shape, size, and color. For example, you’re going to the grocery store, and you want to remember your list. You have cucumber, lettuce, celery (fresh vegetables), watermelon, apples, oranges (fruit), and shampoo, soap, and detergent (sundries). Group the items by common characteristics, such as category, color, and shape, to help you remember your list.
Get Good Sleep
Poor sleep, low energy, and daytime drowsiness can reduce focus and disrupt memory and learning.
During sleep, the brain consolidates memories, processes information, and releases chemicals crucial for memory, learning, and attention. Not getting enough sleep prevents the brain from releasing these chemicals, making it harder to focus and learn. Sleep deprivation disrupts the normal memory-building process, which depends on NREM and REM sleep. NREM sleep helps with remembering facts, while REM sleep aids in recalling sequences of actions.
- Charge your devices in a separate room and get a regular alarm clock. Just about all light, whether from bulbs, phones, screens, e-readers, or TVs, have blue wavelengths that suppress melatonin production, producing a later circadian schedule.
- Turn off all electronics at least an hour before bedtime.
- Establish calming rituals before sleep, such as a warm bath, reading, or listening to calming music.
• Stick to a schedule by waking up at the same time every day. Sleep experts advise you cannot catch up on sleep by sleeping in over the weekend. This irregular pattern can sabotage your circadian rhythm.
• Avoid long naps. If you must nap, take a 30-minute nap and do not nap too close to evening.
• Go to sleep before midnight. Non-REM (rapid-eye-movement sleep) happens in the early part of the night, and deep sleep happens later. Give your body the opportunity for both.
• Reduce the Stress
• Use External Aids
• Practice Repetition with Mnemonics
• Get Good Sleep
Experiment with any or all of these, and let me know how it goes for you!
Warmly,
PS. Need more assistance with your badass memory?
Contact me for an ADHD Strategy Assessment and we can talk about game-changing actions you can put into place right now!