Can You Have Memory Loss Due To Stress?

Remember the movie 50 first dates, where the protagonist had an unusual memory issue? She could not remember anything for more than a day, and her next day began with an erased memory. These are not fantasies or something that the director comes up with just to make the plot interesting. The fact is that these kind of issues exist. Of course, we are here not going to talk of such major memory issues, but something that normally everyone of us faces.

Imagine you had to remember something important on a day like paying the fee, or paying out a bill and you forget to do so. Doesn’t that happen to you all the time? Some days you forget meeting someone you had promised on meeting. There are days when you simply forget to perform the basic tasks like drinking water, having food etc.

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They are all basic memory loss issues and should be treated in that way. You will find that memory loss has its own way of getting into antiques. There are a lot of reasons for memory loss. Here you need to understand which particular reason paves a major road for the problem related to memory loss.

Stress Affects Memory
For a long time people have been reasoning effects of stress. A lot of you have always wondered if memory loss can be counted as a probably effect of stress. Well it is true that stress can cause memory loss. You will see that the high levels of stress, will make you forget even the small affairs of life. For example when you continue to perform an important activity without giving your body a chance to relax, you are actually tendering your body towards stress. This will give birth to memory loss issues. Your memory has three versions associated with it that the stress can affect. Let’s take a look at how stress affects each of these memory areas.

Memory a Long While
Your Long Term Memory tends to help remember things for a long period. You possess an unlimited storage capacity in here. When you are under heavy stress, your long term memory tends to betray you. You will observe that while you are able to remember things about this stressful situation that you are going over, you are just unable to remember anything else. Your other portion that needs to remember things will forget every bit about them in stress. Reconsolidation of your memory becomes impossible during the stress or sometimes even after it has ended. The blame lays on cortisol the hormone that generates stress in body.

Declares the Memory
Your explicit memory is something that you would use whenever you want to remember certain events or things. You would feel the need to use this memory. You would find that when stress hormones are released in this part of the memory, your emotional hormones like hippocampus and amygdale will also get released in the process. Hence when you are emotionally high while experiencing high levels of stress, your memory gets impaired. Anxiety levels increase and you forget even those things that you need to remember.

Consciously Unaware
This is the primary memory task that you set to work when you initialize your brain process. This portion remembers all the emotional behavior, is known to verbalize whatever you feel, and is known to condition your brain. When stress affects even the primal portion of the memory tends to get affected in the process. You will eventually realize that the tasks you were conditioned to do don’t get performed due to stress effects on the conscious or implicit memory.