Manage Your Gray Moments
Short-term memory lapses are a fact of life as we grow older.
Would you believe memory loss begins increasing at age 25? For
every fact of life there's a management solution!
Do you find yourself forgetting such little things as unplugging
the iron, leaving groceries or animals in the car, missing
important meetings, turning off lights and appliances and all
the other mundane activities? Too mundane to worry about?. They
are annoying enough to erode confidence in yourself. Worse, they
cause others to lose confidence in you. Some lapses could cause
your house to burn down.
Manage to place reminders in doorways or with unusual placement
in passageways. Identify the trouble spots for these reminders.
Whenever you say to yourself, "I must remember to do ..." is a
good identifier. This is just a variation of that old trick of
putting an elastic around your finger. Gradually, strive to wean
yourself from these props.
Do you experience lapses in concentration such as throwing the
good part in the garbage while walking away with the trash still
in your hand?
Manage a program for reinforcing your habit of snapping your
thoughts away from preoccupying moments at each change in
movement or action. This assumes your short-term memory can span
a few microseconds until you return to your musings.
It's similar to your action, when driving your car, where a
street intersection triggers a snap-to-attention interval. At
our coffee counter, I grew weary of pouring honey into the spoon
cup instead of into my coffee cup. Once I became aware this was
a snap-to-attention spot, the honey went into the coffee more
often.
Are you increasingly forgetting people's names? There are many
younger people with that problem. So, it's easy to be superior
in that skill. If, instead of being a "has-been rememberer" you
are a "never-were," it's not too late to learn.
Manage to practice various methods for aiding your recall
function such as an alphabetic association method. For a
refresher of instantaneous recall you can manage a schedule for
reviewing membership or client lists, all the people you know in
various area and people attending a gathering. Include the ideas
or mnemonics you associate with each person. Practice recalling
names of people you see wherever you go. It's not too late to
learn and practice the many techniques for remembering names.
Some general management solutions for combating memory loss.
1. Learn more about memory processes by taking courses and
including memory as a topic in your reading regimen. 2. Exercise
the brain by practicing recall techniques and increasing your
demand upon your brain functions. 3. If there's still a good
rapport between your conscious and your subconscious, convince
your subconscious to smarten up and to stop forgetting things!
4. Admit to yourself you are aging and develop the habit of
making lists to store in places where you will easily find them.
5. Recognize your long-term memory certainly works very well.
Younger people are probably thinking or saying behind your back,
"too well!" 6. Firmly believe that you are not losing your
short-term memory. Today's faster pace is adding too much
information. Convince others this is so by impressing them with
all the stuff you do remember from the recent past.
These management solutions may not eliminate loss but, they will
slow the loss rate or cause you to think so.
Early in life, I read a little pamphlet which mentioned about
living in the world of "I am." Since I found this brown-stained
booklet amid the papers of a famous and successful person, I
took the advice quite seriously. Later, I learned this was a
simplification of the four stages of memory