Why I forget and can't concentrate

Everyone forgets. You forget where you put your keys, the password to an account you open twice a year or what you ate last Tuesday, and that is the normal way memory works, since it is not made to keep everything.

What is worth watching is change. The problem starts when forgetting looks different from how it looked for you a year ago: you forget things you never used to forget, you lose the thread in the middle of a sentence, you reread messages to understand them, and at work you miss details that your colleagues notice before you do.

And one more thing worth knowing before the rest. An international group of researchers who have spent years studying the feeling that memory is declining published an analysis in The Lancet Neurology in 2020 showing that most people with this feeling do not go on to a progressive decline. A study of young adults published in 2025 went further and found that memory complaints were not linked to actual results on memory tests. They were linked to depressed mood.

This does not mean you are imagining it. It means the feeling is real, but its cause often lies somewhere other than in memory itself.

Working memory is the small space where you hold what you are doing right now, for example a code you got by text message until you type it in, or the idea you wanted to finish a sentence with. It is a small space, and worries get into it.

A meta-analysis published in 2016, covering 177 groups of participants and more than 22,000 people, found that anxiety consistently goes together with weaker working memory. The effect was largest in tasks where information has to be updated continuously, which is exactly the kind of effort an office day with 20 things open at once demands.

Stress that lasts for months adds something on top of that. A review published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describes how long-term exposure to stress hormones affects the brain structures involved in memory and in regulating emotions, and the best known of these hormones is cortisol.

This is where a pattern many people recognise comes from. On holiday your memory works fine, and in the week of deadlines you no longer know where you put your phone, even though you are holding it. If you are not sure what you are feeling, ordinary stress or anxiety, the difference is explained in detail in the guide to anxiety and panic attacks.

There is one cause that differs from all the others in how far back it goes. ADHD does not appear at 35, because the diagnosis requires the signs to have been there since childhood, only in many adults nobody noticed it at the time.

The figures show how often this happens. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Global Health in 2021 estimates that about 2.6% of adults have ADHD that started in childhood and carried on, and World Health Organization data, gathered from 20 national surveys, show that in adults the disorder is very rarely recognised and even more rarely treated. Many end up at the doctor for anxiety or depression, and the ADHD behind them stays unseen.

How can you tell whether it is worth thinking about? Look back at your school years. If homework got done at the last minute, things got lost often, and your mind wandered off in the middle of a lesson the same way it wanders off now in the middle of a meeting, the pattern is old and has nothing to do with this year's tiredness. We have written separately about what ADHD looks like in adulthood, in the article on ADHD in adults.

You have probably read that screens and multitasking damage your attention. The study that started the discussion was published in PNAS in 2009 and found that people who use many screens at once are more easily distracted by things unrelated to what they are doing.

The story got more complicated after that. When other researchers repeated the tests, the result held in only a few cases, and a 2017 meta-analysis found a weak link that disappears after correcting for small studies. A 2018 review leans towards the idea that the effect exists, but admits that nobody yet knows what is cause and what is effect.

So we cannot honestly say that your phone lowers your attention in the long run. You can, however, find out for yourself whether it matters in your case, with a simple one-week experiment, with notifications turned off during working hours. If you want to understand what happens in the brain with social media, we have written about it in the article on digital trauma.

An assessment at the BrainMap Institute starts from a map of the brain's electrical activity, that is, a quantitative EEG recording, read together with your history and the questionnaires. It does not replace blood tests or a consultation with a neurologist, and if anything you tell us calls for one of them, we tell you so before anything else.

Where it helps is with the order of the pieces. When you have poor sleep, anxiety and concentration that has gone all at once, it is hard to say what is pulling on what, and the map, placed next to the conversation, shows us more clearly where it is worth starting. That is also the idea behind the assessment for brain fog and concentration.

If the assessment shows that it makes sense, the next step can be a brain training programme, built on what was measured and on what gets in your way in daily life. We set the target and the pace together, based on the map.

If you recognised yourself in what you have read, the first step with us is a conversation, not a decision. The first call is free and takes about 20 minutes: you tell us how long you have been forgetting things, what has changed and what you have already checked, and we tell you honestly whether an assessment makes sense in your case.

When the answer is that you first need tests or a doctor, you get it just as directly. It happens often, and it is fine for it to be that way.

Book a free call 037 171 0020