7 Causes Of Forgetting And How To Eliminate Them Quickly

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If you’re wondering what specific causes of forgetting are holding you back from acing exams or getting (and keeping) a great job, you’re in the right place.

As a graduate student, and later as a professor, I worked hard on eliminating various issues that harmed my memory.

I’m talking about everything from improving my diet to dealing with childhood trauma.

These days, I battle ageing and take action every day to keep my stress in check.

On this page, I’ll share with you everything I’ve learned about eliminating issues that harm my ability to recall critical information.

And everything I do as someone who writes, blogs and podcasts for a living. As a memory expert, I absolutely have to make sure that whatever is behind my forgetfulness is quickly and thoroughly handled.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to effectively eliminate the gremlins causing you to forget too.

Ready?

Let’s dive in, starting with this handy infographic I created to list all of the major issues that could be causing your memory to operate in less than spectacular ways.

7 Causes Of Forgetting And How To Eliminate Them Quickly

As we go through this list of, it’s useful to quickly define exactly what forgetting is.

Sure, it’s obvious, but let’s look at forgetfulness in all of its dimensions.

Forgetting specifically speaks to any situation in which:

• Information that was once stored in the brain because inaccessible
• Memories can be lost temporarily or permanently
• Some forgetting is normal and a healthy part of your cognitive functioning
• Excessive forgetting indicates issues that could be neurological in nature or indicate a health problem

With this nuanced definition of forgetting under our belt, let’s look at the most common causes behind why we sometimes struggle or fail to remember a variety of information types.

One: The Decay Theory Of Forgetting

Sounds brutal, right?

Yes, but “decay” is the right word. As you’ll see, my personal experience with deliberately testing it proves the case.

According to scientific work conducted back in the 1950s, time is the number one factor behind why our memories fade.

But the term itself goes back to Edward Thorndike‘s work in a 1914 book called The Psychology of Learning. He was influenced by Hermann Ebbinghaus’ “forgetting curve.”

You’ve probably felt what it’s like for memories to fade, or “slip.” That’s what the forgetting curve described: how long it takes for something learned to slide beyond your ability to recall it.

To beat the forgetting curve, you just need to use spaced repetition.

The difference between the decay theory of forgetting and Ebbinghaus’ curve is that the forgetting curve assumes you’re still trying to recall the information during regular intervals.

Decay theory, on the other hand, describes the amount of time it takes for information to exit your memory after a period or not accessing it.

This explanation basically matches a phrase that we use all the time: “Use it or lose it.”

Although that phrase doesn’t sound all that scientific, there are principles of deliberate practice and spaced repetition that help ensure we do continue using information.

Personally, I’ve experimented with the decay theory by deliberately not reciting the Song Celestial. This set of Sanskrit phrases took a few weeks to memorize.

After three months of not reciting them, I found that I could still recite the first 10. But beyond that, the word “decay” definitely applied.

After the first ten, the rest of the phrases had crumbled. Sure, I could get back some of the words in some of the phrases, but there was literally “decay” that had eaten into them.

It was an interesting experiment, but the tragedy is that I would need to memorize them again if I wanted to be able to either speak them aloud or review them mentally.

Thankfully, I have maintained several other long-form pieces in Sanskrit that I do main. 

Two: Interferences Make You Forget

You’ve probably experienced interference many times. It happens a lot during arguments, for example. Someone establishes a point that you want to raise later, only to have it disappear from your mind.

Less dramatically, imagine the following scenario:

Someone introduces themselves and before you can commit their name to memory, they tell you something else that completely knocks it from your mind.

This happens not only because of interference, but because short-term memory only has a few seconds to encode the memory. If it doesn’t stay in working memory so that the information can enter long-term memory, it will typically be gone for good.

Another aspect of interference involves competition between similar memories. In the memory improvement world, we sometimes call this The Ugly Sister Effect or “ghosting.”

As a key explanation for why you keep forgetting things, it’s highly recommended to use memory techniques to handle the issue.

Three: Retrieval Failure

If you’ve ever felt like information you wanted to remember was on the tip of your tongue but you couldn’t quite get it, the failure of that attempt is called retrieval failure.

The relationship between recall and retrieval is a big topic. But you can easily improve the connections in your memory by working on a variety of memory skills.

The exact mnemonic strategies you use to combat retrieval failure should be dictated by your specific learning goals, not just how memory works. This point is important because sometimes people choose the wrong approach when combatting this particular cause of forgetting.

It’s also normal for failure to happen once in awhile. I’m on podcasts quite a bit and recently struggled to remember a certain Sanskrit phrase I normally know well when discussing language learning with Luke Ranieri. If it happens to you, don’t beat yourself up about it, but use reflective thinking instead to get to the bottom of how you can improve.

Four: Motivated Forgetting

As strange as it sounds, sometimes people either forget on purpose, or work very hard at it.

Scientists don’t yet fully understand this type of forgetting. Nonetheless, this study suggests that people can and do impair their ability to retain certain types of information.

Another word for this kind of forgetting is “repression,” not to be mistaken with the kind that Freud meant.

If you’re interested in diving deep into this form of forgetting, I suggest the psychoanalytical works of Robert Langs.

One of this theories was that patients often challenge the psychoanalyst in order to avoid doing the healing work of introspection. But they will unconsciously ask to be guided.

In his book, Psychotherapy: A Basic Text, he talks about how a patient “forgot” to put the right decimal amount on a cheque for the therapeutic fee. Langs interpreted this as a communication to the doctor and created basic “boundary” rules for helping patients recognized their motivated forgetting and the issues underlying them.

Although many have been critical of Langs’ theories, I’ve personally found them useful.

One thing you can watch for yourself and in others are similar lapses in memory that may encode deeper meanings. I often catch myself “forgetting” to do things, and journal about why that might be happening. It’s been incredibly helpful for increasing my productivity and facing fewer consequences from unnecessary lapses.

Five: Ageing And Forgetting

As I age, I definitely notice that I don’t remember things as well as when I was younger.

Ironically, memory athletes like James Gerwing exist. He won a memory competition after retiring in his sixties.

I also remember both Tony Buzan and Harry Lorayne fondly – as memory experts, they were incredibly sharp in their 70s and 80s.

Ideally, I’ll also be that sharp. But in order to achieve that, I’ll need to continually exercise my memory.

That’s no problem at all. I absolutely love doing so by learning languages and memorizing speeches, like my TEDx Talk.

In order to combat ageing holistically, however, lots of socialization is also needed. That and solid sleep for memory and taking care to eat foods that improve memory.

Six: Not Paying Attention

This is a big one.

As Harry Lorayne often pointed out, there’s no point in using memory techniques if you’re not going to practice focused attention.

How to focus better so that information gets encoded into your memory in the first place?

One of the best ways is spend a bit of time each day with one of several concentration meditations.

You can also bring a level of intention to various situations.

For example, when I read books for research purposes, I set an intention to “hunt” for the main points. This attention strategy is tremendously useful for creating focus throughout my study sessions.

Seven: Unaddressed Stress And Trauma

I mentioned my TEDx Talk above. It’s a snippet from my book The Victorious Mind.

In this book, I share how I wanted to stop forgetting once and for all and used something called the Memory Palace technique to help address trauma I experienced while younger.

As a result of applying this technique, much of anxiety has disappeared. It might sound fantastic, but I learned about the idea from a research study that demonstrates just how useful the method of loci (a.k.a. Memory Palace technique). As Tim Dalgleish and his fellow researchers found, people who use this ancient memory technique experienced relief from depression.

Why exactly trauma and stress harm memory isn’t well known. In fact, sometimes stress can cause us to remember more than we’d like.

Either way, the point is that anxiety and memory go together. Working on one will help resolve issues with the other.

The Ultimate Way To Remove Your Causes Of Forgetting

There are more issues we could discuss, such as substance abuse, various medical conditions and situations like simply disliking school.

But if you’re keep to just get on with your learning life, here’s what I suggest.

I’ve put together a free course that teaches you the Memory Palace technique that helped finally stop forgetting. Sign up here:

It will help you through four free videos and three worksheets.

In full transparency, this course will also challenge you and your memory.

The notion of challenge presents another hidden cause of forgetting:

Many of us fail to take on challenges.

That’s what this course will help you do:

Give your memory a good workout through simple and fun steps.

It’s just that they’re not too simple. And that’s important because scientists have fully evidenced the active recall activities you’ll go through on the journey to remembering more.

So, what do you say?

Ready to remove forgetting and start relying on your memory?

Make it happen!