The Link Between Anxiety & Memory Loss

What’s the Connection Between Anxiety & Memory Loss?

Anxiety disorders are mental health disorders categorized by persistent worry, anxiety, and overwhelm, and they can take up a lot of mental energy. Because anxiety disorders use so much mental energy, they often also inhibit our memory from working properly by making it difficult to retain and recall information.

Common symptoms of anxiety-related memory loss include:

• Forgetting where you parked your car
• Trouble remembering why you went into another room or what you need at the store
• Repeating yourself in conversations because you can’t remember if you’ve said it or not
• Forgetting important dates, such as a birthday or anniversary
• Problems with the order of operations to complete daily essential tasks, such as driving or cooking
• Misplacing things like your keys, wallet, or phone
• Trouble recalling important details, such as directions or landmarks to someone’s house
• Making mistakes on tasks that you know well

Panic Attacks & Memory Loss

People who experience panic attacks often notice an impact on their memory, particularly right before and during a panic attack. Panic attacks happen when a person experiences excessive fear or anxiety, triggering physical reactions that override the brain’s rational and normal processing.

The reason people with panic attacks experience memory loss more consistently is because of the body’s stress hormone: cortisol. Cortisol inhibits the brain’s ability to recall information because its job is to keep you focused on the present moment to survive. Due to the intensity of the fear in a panic attack, the body creates even more cortisol than someone experiencing an anxiety disorder.

How Can Anxiety Cause Memory Loss?

Anxiety symptoms, including constant fear, uncontrollable worry, and sleep disturbances, can all impact memory significantly. Managing anxiety symptoms drains mental energy, leaving little behind to store memories properly. As a result of this mental drain, having an anxiety disorder can impact both long- and short-term memory.

Our long-term memory is created by consolidating information over a longer period of time. When we expend mental energy through anxiety and avoiding stressors related to long-term memories, our brain may struggle to organize and metabolize information. Additionally, anxiety may work to block the retrieval of stored information. Anxiety also heavily impacts our short-term (or working memory) because it causes distracting mental multitasking that makes it temporarily difficult to hold many pieces of information.

Some ways in which anxiety can lead to memory loss include:

Increased Cortisol Levels

Cortisol is the stress hormone responsible for our fight-flight-freeze survival mode. When your body and brain register danger, your body produces cortisol and adrenaline,  activating your body to respond to the threat. While this is great for responding to threats occasionally, people with anxiety tend to have sustained elevated levels of cortisol – inhibiting the ability to recall memories because your brain is more focused on surviving.^{1, 2}

Lack of Sleep

Unfortunately, lack of sleep and anxiety go hand-in-hand because anxiety can make it challenging to get to sleep, stay asleep, and get quality sleep. Not only does a lack of sleep affect mental health, but it can also lead to memory loss. When you sleep, your brain works on consolidating your memories from the day, particularly when it comes to procedural memories related to skills and tasks and declarative memories related to recalling facts.³ Sleep and anxiety have a bidirectional relationship (they impact each other), which means both impact your memory.

Distracted Thinking

Anxiety is a consuming and powerful distractor that usually doesn’t leave mental space for much outside of anxious thoughts and worries. By spending half your mental energy on getting through the day and the other half on playing through anxious thoughts, your brain isn’t left with much energy to consolidate memories. This not only disrupts your ability to take in and recall details and procedures but also to consolidate your memories that are responsible for the outline of who you are and who you want to be outside of your anxiety.

Memory Repression/Avoidance

If a person has anxious or traumatic memories, it’s natural for the brain to repress and avoid thinking about them as protection from continuing to experience emotional pain. While you may not forget the experience entirely, avoiding thinking about this can blur the details because it’s blocking your short-term and long-term memory from consolidating that memory.⁴ If you’ve struggled with generalized anxiety disorder for any significant portion of your life, your brain may be working hard to block memories throughout that entire period.

Disruption of Working Memory

Your working memory, or short-term memory, helps you remember information while actively using it. Working memory is crucial to doing tasks without mistakes, completing assignments, problem-solving, multitasking, and staying focused throughout the task.

Working memory is heavily impacted and disrupted by worry and anxiety.⁵ This is because all the mental resources that your working memory needs to perform well (spatial awareness, verbal comprehension, executive functioning, etc.) are consumed by the things you’re worried about and are anxiously perseverating on.⁶

Other Causes of Memory Loss

While anxiety can heavily impact memory loss, there are also other mental health concerns that could contribute to memory loss. Depression, bipolar disorder, general emotional distress, and trauma can also cause memory loss. Some mental health disorders can impact your memory and cortisol levels similarly to anxiety, and some mental health disorders can have an element of dissociation involved that inhibits memory storage and retrieval.

Memory loss could also result from a physical condition, such as tumors, blood clots, thyroid, kidney, or liver disorders, medication side effects, and lack of proper nutrition.⁷ While it is critical to make sure you’re managing your stress levels and anxiety, it’s also important to make sure you tend to other issues that may be contributing to memory loss, as it could indicate a more pervasive problem.

Some conditions that may cause memory loss include:

• Childhood trauma
• Brain tumors
• Regular substance use
• Dissociative mental health disorders: bipolar, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder
• Head injuries
• Stroke
• Medication side effects
• Alzheimer’s disease or dementia

How to Cope With Memory Loss & Anxiety

The first thing to consider when coping with memory loss and anxiety is to tune into your current self-care strategies and be honest with yourself about where you might have gaps that need to be filled. If you believe your memory loss is anxiety related, using a combination of physical self-care and anxiety/stress management tools will likely give you the most noticeable benefits.

Eight ways to cope with memory loss and anxiety include:

1. Practice Mindfulness

Staying present in the current moment will not only help you become more aware of your anxiety triggers, but it will also help you to deal with feeling overwhelmed and anxious, helping to mitigate any memory loss associated with anxiety. There are many ways to begin incorporating mindfulness, including mindfulness for beginners, specific mindfulness for anxiety, and through mantras for anxiety.

2. Learn Relaxation Techniques

The next most important thing to do in calming your anxiety is to signal to your brain and body that you’re safe enough not to have to rely on anxiety. This can be done through relaxation techniques, such as meditation for anxiety, paced breathing, grounding exercises that help you be present, deep sighing and singing, and kind, gentle touch with a trusted person.

3. Improve Your Sleep

Since anxiety and sleep impact each other, and both can impact memory loss, improving sleep can help improve anxiety and memory loss. There are many ways to improve your sleep, including creating a bedtime routine, improving your sleeping environment, and managing nighttime stimuli. This will improve not only your cognitive functioning but your overall physical health as well.

4. Challenge & Change Your Thinking Patterns

Noticing, challenging, and changing your thinking patterns is an anxiety-focused process that manages worry and overwhelm by changing how your brain processes information over time. The more often you practice this, the easier it will get to pause your anxiety.

Some helpful questions to ask yourself to begin this process are:

• What belief is informing this anxious thought?
• Is it undeniably true?
• How is it helping me? How is it hindering me?
• Could I replace this with something more neutral, helping, or true?

5. Start Journaling

Anxiety often feels mindless or automatic, so it can be incredibly hard to be more mindful, notice and challenge your thinking patterns, and to even recognize when your stress levels could benefit from relaxation techniques. Writing things down can not only help you to remember them, but it can also help you to see patterns and get to know yourself and your anxiety better. If you don’t know where to start, journal prompts for anxiety can help get you started.

6. Get Physically Active

Moving your body can help you to manage anxiety in a multitude of ways – it diverts your attention from your worries and onto the activity you’re doing, releases feel-good endorphins, reduces muscle tension, and helps to process stress and cortisol out of your body. There is also some research that suggests that physical activity directly improves your working memory’s functioning, so adding in physical activity could address both concerns.^{8, 9}

7. Properly fuel your brain

Your body runs all kinds of processes all day, every day (even when you’re sleeping), so making sure it has the proper nutrition to fuel these processes is key for both managing your anxiety and for improving your memory. Eating a balanced diet, regularly eating throughout the day, managing your caffeine and alcohol intake, properly hydrating, being mindful of your sugar intake, and ensuring that you’re getting all of your essential vitamins and minerals are all things that can majorly impact your anxiety – and by extension, your memory’s performance.

8. Work your brain in new ways

Although your brain gets plenty of daily work, exercising your brain by using it in new ways can help improve your memory and cognitive functioning. Visualization, playing card or board games, completing puzzles – including jigsaw, sudoku, and crossword puzzles, learning a new skill or language, and engaging in sports are all good options that have been shown to affect your brain functioning and memory positively.^{10, 11, 12}

When to Seek Professional Help

If you notice that your anxiety and memory loss are inhibiting your functioning in multiple areas of your life (family, work, school, self-care, etc.), or if it’s severely impacting you in one area, it may be time to consider professional help. If you believe your memory loss is anxiety based, you can consider therapy, medications, or a combination. Memory loss based on physical concerns should be addressed with your primary care doctor.

Therapy

Therapy can help people deal with symptoms of memory loss and anxiety by working to manage symptoms and by working through the underlying cause of the anxiety. There are many options for anxiety therapy that can accommodate a variety of personal preferences and underlying causes. If anxiety is causing or impacting your memory, therapy can be a good option to help mitigate memory loss.

Therapeutic interventions for anxiety include:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): CBT for anxiety focuses on identifying and changing anxious thinking patterns that perpetuate anxiety.
• Exposure Therapy: Exposure therapy focuses on facing fears by gradually increasing exposure to stressful stimuli to “rewire” your brain not to react so severely.
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): ACT helps tackle anxiety by helping a person to identify their values and live their life according to those values instead of living according to anxiety.
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): EMDR helps people to reprocess traumatic memories by stimulating the brain in new ways.

Medication

Sometimes improving your self-care and working with a therapist is not enough to fully manage your anxiety, particularly if you’re struggling with a neurochemical imbalance. It is often helpful to add medications for anxiety to your treatment plan to help you gain traction and see results. Medication is often prescribed by a psychiatrist, general medical doctor, or ARNP, and there are options for online psychiatrists as well.

Commonly prescribed medications for anxiety include:

• Benzodiazepines: Benxodiazepines, which include Xanax, induce feelings of calm by increasing the neurotransmitter GABA in the brain.
• Antidepressants: Antidepressants include SSRIs and SNRIs. SSRIs work to increase serotonin levels, while SNRIs work to increase both serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain.

In My Experience

In my experience, working with patients that struggle with anxiety, memory loss, and difficulties with recollection is common. It’s important to remember that anxiety doesn’t come out of nowhere – it develops as a way for people to try to keep themselves safe. Seeking treatment can be a powerful tool to help you feel safe in new ways to live a life that’s authentic to you and recall all the essential things you need to function! While treatment can take time, most patients do see and feel relief in treatment with consistent and honest effort. It’s important to remember that some anxiety is unavoidable, but you can learn to manage and tolerate the necessary anxiety in life.