I’ve been diagnosed by my former therapist but I feel things are getting worse these days.
I mean, I have my vape in my hand, and one second later it’s nowhere to be found. Maybe it’s in the bedroom where I swear I haven’t been in the last 5 hours. Maybe in a bathroom cabinet. Maybe on the table but I wouldn’t tell because my fuckin brain is incapable to discern any object in the middle of clutter.
Is there a strategy to remember where I’ve put something I was holding? It’s gotten to the point that I’m getting preemptively mad when something I’m looking for is not where it’s supposed to be because I know I’ll have to turn the flat upside down just to find it, just to lose it again a few minutes later and/or do the same song and dance for the next thing I need.
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I just lost the fork I was stirring pasta with. I’m eating it with a different fork now. I didn’t leave the room, I don’t have a fucking clue where fork #1 went
The best thing I did for myself is to make a place for all important things like my keys, watch, medicine, moisturiser etc. if I catch myself putting it down somewhere that isn’t the right place then I make the effort to put it in the right spot. For example: my keys, they have a hook by my door and one pocket they live in. They are never anywhere but those two places or in my hand and if I ever go to put them down and think to myself “Ill remember to move them later” I say to myself “of course you won’t remember, move them now”.
It’s helped massively and now I’m used to it it’s not hard to do. Of course I don’t always catch myself and do lose stuff but it happens less now.
Also trying to keep on top of clutter on sides, that way it’s easier to spot the thing that I’ve put down. Don’t get me wrong I have piles and piles of clutter that I will about once a year go through and have a clear out but I keep that stuff on shelves etc, not somewhere I would put down my phone for example
Ok the trick seems to be able to realize I’ve absentmindedly put something down to do something else and catch myself before I forget. I’m gonna try and consciously paying attention to it.
no
The best way to combat this is everything has a spot. It doesn’t matter how inconvenient it feels, everything has a spot. The spot can move over time but it still has a spot. It does t matter how messy or unorganized it is, it still has a spot.
I suffer from this a lot, but drilling it into myself that everything has a spot has been the best way to fight it.Start small with important things, like your keys and your phone, and create a contextual place for them. In the home they are always in the same place. The location should be convenient a table or a shelf is great. The important part is that you never set them down anywhere else.
When you are out, they are on your person but always in the same place. Never set your phone or keys down while you are outside of your home. They are in your hand or in your pocket. There are no other places to put them.
My phone is always either in my pocket, on the arm of my big chair, or on my desk on or next to the charger. I try to never put it down anywhere else. My phone is almost never lost. My keys are similar. They are either in my hand, in a keyhole, or in my pocket. I never put them anywhere else and I refuse to put them down anywhere but my pocket.
Get in the habit of refusing to put important things down unless you can put them away properly and they will get harder to lose track of. Once those habits are strong, slowly expand to more things having a specific place in your world and you will find that things go missing less often.
how amenable are you to meditation
I have no idea. Why? To control anger?
The problem you are experiencing is likely a direct result of not being present. You are effectively absent, elsewhere in your thoughts as you mindlessly sabotage your thirty-seconds-from-now-self by leaving your pen beside the other thing you “just needed to check really quick”. Consider the times when you have gotten home but struggled to remember how.
Mindfulness is basically the opposite: as you are doing dishes, try to think only about doing the dishes; when you are going upstairs to get something, think about going up the stairs, not what you’re going to say to someone you expect to talk to later. This might seem inefficient, but in my experience, our perpetual ‘multitasking’ is false economy at best. First, we can only focus on one task at a time, so it means we’re constantly fucking up or forgetting parts of everything we do, all of the time.
Sometimes splitting our attention like this is acceptable, but it shouldn’t be our default pattern and it really shouldn’t be our only pattern. As someone who also spends a lot of time looking for things I just had thirty seconds ago, our efficiency baseline is probably not something we need to protect. :)
Meditation is like going to the gym, for mindfulness. If you can spend fifteen minutes with no objectives beyond attempting to notice what you are thinking about and how you are feeling (ideally without labelling or judging as good or bad), it will become a bit easier to stay in the moment throughout the day when you aren’t meditating. As with going to the gym, it’s easy for mediation to take on a life of its own, but this definitely isn’t necessary. Consider someone who works a very physical job - they may not need to spend a lot of time at the gym. Likewise, if you are able to practice mindfulness throughout the day and feel you do reasonably well with being present through even challenging situations, you may not need to prioritize dedicated meditation time as much.
Hasn’t vaping been recently associated with memory loss? I know it might be hard, but maybe cut back on that and see if it improves. If it doesn’t it might be environmental like mold, sleep disturbances (like apnea), carbon monoxide, etc. I’d start by changing things in your environment one by one and see if it helps.
Id like to see the study ;)
The problem with my vape is not memory loss, I have a reasonably good memory, it’s that it’s too big and heavy to be comfortably carried in my pocket like my phone, so I have to carry it by hand from place to place and when I get distracted, that’s when things disappear.
