BoomerGirl Diary

Dear Crabby:

It seems like ever since I went through menopause, I can’t remember anything! I lose things, forget people’s names, and even why I went into a room in the first place. Am I going crazy or becoming senile?

Forgetful

Dear Forgetful:

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for some time, but I kept forgetting what I did with my notes …

Memory problems seem to be a common complaint for midlife women. We’ve all had our “menopausal moment.” My sister and I, both menopausal, have some really obscure phone conversations:

“… By the way! I picked up that book at um — the big store, you know, and it was the one you said to get …”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, the one about the woman, with uh, the thing, and she … Didn’t you just love it?”

“Oh, I’m sure I will, once I find it again. It’s somewhere around here. Now, what was I saying?”

“Uh, I don’t remember.”

So, Forgetful, I know of what you speak. I, too, am a member of the “Can’t-Remember-Jack-You-Know-What Club.” I spend hours searching for misplaced keys, books, etc. I greet familiar faces with vague, generic comments, since I have no idea who these people are. I have trouble word-finding. I call my kids by the dog’s name and vice versa. My memory is a fuzzy, dark area, with things floating in and out at random.

At first, science blamed these memory problems on our fluctuating hormones, and this sort of chapped me. Our girly hormones take the rap from the time we’re prepubescent until we hit the dirt. Science (and our spouse) is always blaming things on our hormones. If they’re not “raging,” then they’re “unstable,” or they’re “falling”—frankly, I’m sick of it. So when scientists finally reversed their thinking on this issue, I rejoiced. (Can I get a Hallelujah, sister?)

Turns out, the problem lies with a little thing called OUR ENORMOUSLY STRESSFUL LIVES. It’s no secret (to midlife women, at least) that midlife women have a lot of stress. We have the kids, the aging parents, the hot flashes, the lousy sleep, the financial stress; many of us have full-time jobs outside the home, and most of us pull another shift inside the house, too. We’ve been socialized to do more, want more, and to juggle multiple roles. We are multitaskers.

All of this stress, poor sleep, and multitasking disrupts what scientists call “encoding.” The problem isn’t really that we can’t remember stuff; it’s that we didn’t store it in the brain properly to begin with. (Random digression: It seems like that should be called “membering,” if later it’s “re-membering.” Don’t you think so? Darn it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about…distraction.)

Our brains used to be the quicker-picker-upper. We easily stored information, and it still sticks in there today. Quick: sing the lyrics to a Beatles song. (“Eleanor Rigby, died in a church and was buried along with her name”….) See? But as our lives become increasingly complex, our brains are more like a cheap motel towel—they absorb in some spots, but completely miss others. We don’t encode the information properly for later retrieval. We sort of shove it in there, along with all the other million things we’re thinking about, and hope that later we can sift through the detritus and pull out what we need. Obviously, this system has problems. Ask any teenager digging through the laundry on the floor of her room, looking for a favorite shirt. She might find it, but will it be wearable?

There are some things we can do, though, to combat this problem. The first is general mental calisthenics. The brain is similar to a certain other organ somewhat further south — we have to use it or lose it. We can’t just sit around watching reality TV all day and expect our brains to be sleek and functional. We have to exercise them! (Thankfully, our brain has no abs.)

Try brainteasers, take a class, learn one new fact per day. In other words, be curious! The world is full of interesting things. Novelty is very stimulating. Some of you may even want to start doing sudoku. I say: Good for you, you masochists. I apparently am lacking the brain part that handles sudoku, and find it excruciating. But whatever.

The second thing deals directly with the encoding issue, and involves a concept called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a concept associated with specific types of meditation, and is, at its essence, bringing your attention fully to the present moment. Whatever it is you are doing, you bring your complete attention to it and you do it in the most mindful (conscious) way possible. Let’s say, for example, you are cutting up carrots for dinner. Are you also watching television, holding the phone against your ear with your shoulder, and thinking about how tired you are? Mmm-hmmm. I thought so.

If you cut the carrots mindfully, you focus on the carrots, the look and smell of them, the pleasant repetition of the blade thudding against the board, the pleasing symmetry of each carroty moon — “oh, for pete’s sake, they’re just carrots! This is ridiculous, I must hurry, I must hurry” … This is how the mind works it tries to pull us away from what we’re doing to what we’re not doing. When you first practice mindfulness, this happens often. Like every 1.2 milliseconds. And your job is to bring your mind back to what you are currently doing. Again and again. This is the essence of mindfulness. If we can bring even a little of that to our everyday lives, we can probably do a better job of really being attentive and entering data into our memory banks. Think back to a time you were really engaged, really fully present with what you were doing…the memories are vivid, aren’t they? That’s because you were really tuned in, no distractions. This is what we need to shoot for.

So now that you know your hormones aren’t to blame, you know what you have to do. Exercise that brain, and stop being such a superwoman, already! Practice mindfulness, be fully present in the moment, manage your stressors, and you just might find your car keys in time to get to that art class.