I actually struggled a lot with this for a year or so after my stroke, which damaged my short-term memory retrieval (among other things). Mostly, I found my best strategy was to develop mindful awareness of things I actually wanted to remember, and write everything else down.
Writing things down was relatively easy (though my fine motor control was also damaged, so writing was… tedious).
Getting over the feeling of awkwardness when I had to interrupt someone to write down what they were saying took some doing, but was worthwhile.
The real problem for a while was remembering that I had written something down that I should look at in the first place. It was a few days before it occurred to me that I could designate a single location to write all things down in, and then develop the habit of looking at that location regularly. (Yes, I reinvented the concept of a “list” from first principles. I never know whether to be proud of that or not, but boy did I feel brilliant when I came up with it.)
Anything routine (like whether I took my pills today) was best written down, since developing an awareness of today’s pill-taking as distinct from yesterday’s pill-taking required a level of mindfulness I could not reliably achieve.
There’s lots of techniques for mindfulness, but what I found worked best for me was:
tie the desired memory to an action, not just a thought (reciting it out loud worked well, though I also got into the habit of using idiosyncratic hand gestures that were otherwise meaningless)
practice “remembering” the target right now (this is hard to describe, but it’s different from not having forgotten it yet)
tie the desired memory explicitly to other things I’m observing right now, including my own thoughts (sometimes just observing the juxtaposition would do, but constructing puns or observing similarities/contrast or constructing little narrative stories worked better)
I don’t think the specifics really matter, they just forced me to pay attention rather than simply tell myself I was paying attention.
Another technique that sometimes helped was singing things rather than just saying them.
Things that I might not remember to do in the first place (like your refrigerator example) I would either put a reminder where I would see it when I ought to do it (like a note saying “Push the door closed” on the door), or I would rehearse doing it right a few dozen times (open and close the door over and over) to establish muscle memory. Often both. The latter made me feel much more in control.
I think your problem was not only that your memory was damaged, but that you had more stuff to remember, probably stuff that you used to take for granted.
Oh, there were several problems, and they reinforced each other. That was one of them, yes. Another was that executive function and attention were damaged, which of course made noticing things in the first place challenging and sometimes painful.
Idea: Mark each pill with one of seven different colors, each assigned to a day of a week; surely it’s easier to distingiush this tuesday’s pill from last tuesday’s pill and this monday’s pill (and in the process you also train your memory by making it remember consistently on an easy level)
I do this for supplements and medication too, and highly recommend it. I think it’s in general difficult for people to remember to take something regularly.
I actually struggled a lot with this for a year or so after my stroke, which damaged my short-term memory retrieval (among other things). Mostly, I found my best strategy was to develop mindful awareness of things I actually wanted to remember, and write everything else down.
Writing things down was relatively easy (though my fine motor control was also damaged, so writing was… tedious).
Getting over the feeling of awkwardness when I had to interrupt someone to write down what they were saying took some doing, but was worthwhile.
The real problem for a while was remembering that I had written something down that I should look at in the first place. It was a few days before it occurred to me that I could designate a single location to write all things down in, and then develop the habit of looking at that location regularly. (Yes, I reinvented the concept of a “list” from first principles. I never know whether to be proud of that or not, but boy did I feel brilliant when I came up with it.)
Anything routine (like whether I took my pills today) was best written down, since developing an awareness of today’s pill-taking as distinct from yesterday’s pill-taking required a level of mindfulness I could not reliably achieve.
There’s lots of techniques for mindfulness, but what I found worked best for me was:
tie the desired memory to an action, not just a thought (reciting it out loud worked well, though I also got into the habit of using idiosyncratic hand gestures that were otherwise meaningless)
practice “remembering” the target right now (this is hard to describe, but it’s different from not having forgotten it yet)
tie the desired memory explicitly to other things I’m observing right now, including my own thoughts (sometimes just observing the juxtaposition would do, but constructing puns or observing similarities/contrast or constructing little narrative stories worked better)
I don’t think the specifics really matter, they just forced me to pay attention rather than simply tell myself I was paying attention.
Another technique that sometimes helped was singing things rather than just saying them.
Things that I might not remember to do in the first place (like your refrigerator example) I would either put a reminder where I would see it when I ought to do it (like a note saying “Push the door closed” on the door), or I would rehearse doing it right a few dozen times (open and close the door over and over) to establish muscle memory. Often both. The latter made me feel much more in control.
I think your problem was not only that your memory was damaged, but that you had more stuff to remember, probably stuff that you used to take for granted.
Oh, there were several problems, and they reinforced each other. That was one of them, yes. Another was that executive function and attention were damaged, which of course made noticing things in the first place challenging and sometimes painful.
Idea: Mark each pill with one of seven different colors, each assigned to a day of a week; surely it’s easier to distingiush this tuesday’s pill from last tuesday’s pill and this monday’s pill (and in the process you also train your memory by making it remember consistently on an easy level)
An easier variation was getting a pillbox with seven compartments, and loading it at the beginning of each week.
I do this for supplements and medication too, and highly recommend it. I think it’s in general difficult for people to remember to take something regularly.