I was diagnosed with adhd as a young child, and still very often forget stuff. My short term memory can be terrible and I often immediately lose a thought or forget an idea after just a couple of seconds.
However, I’m often able to recall an idea by going back to what I was doing, which is something I never hear other people with adhd talk about. Sometimes all it takes is going back to the visual that triggered the thought or reading back a couple of sentences. This usually doesn’t take longer than ~10 seconds. Other times I have to retrace my thought process, which can occasionally take up to a minute… If it takes any longer, then the thought is likely to be lost forever and I always feel terrible when it happens. At times I randomly remember something days later, even though it had felt like the thought was truly lost forever.
Is this common among folks with adhd? I only ever hear people talking about forgetting, and never about remembering.
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Absolutely. I often find that re-tracing my steps makes the thought come back. It makes me wonder if the same set of stimuli would make me have the same thought even eg. a month later
I can’t remember the specific examples (surprising nobody), but I have had at least a couple occasions where I found traces of something I’d done that showed me I did actually react that exact same way some while previously and forgot about it entirely. In one case, a friend stopped mid conversation to say, “Wait. Haven’t we had this exact conversation before?,” and I while it wasn’t as concrete as finding my own evidence, I was pretty sure he was right.
It’s almost like a coping mechanism, even if I don’t do it intentionally. My life is a book, but at any given moment I might not know what happened on the last page or three. So I have to just figure it out and act how I would act even when I’m clueless.
Haha yes. It’s sad how predictable this implies we are.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one! I feel like what you’re describing has kind of happened to me before under certain circumstances. I can’t seem to recall a specific example, though :(
So say im scrolling through my gallery, and a specific sequence of pictures makes me have a thought, which I try to remember, but soon forget. If I go back and look at those pictures again soon enough, they usually re-trigger the forgotten thought.
That’s exactly how it goes for me! You’ve made me wonder if I’m actually remembering a thought or if my brain somehow just reconstructs a thought that has a similar vibe. I guess there really is no way to find out. I don’t even know what I’m talking about at this point lol.
I’d say the thought is still there but my brain has just lost its ‘connection’ to it. And the stimuli somehow start building that connection again