Do you ever find yourself struggling to recall what brought you to a certain room, why you’re putting your shoes on, or where you left your car keys?
How about opening your mouth in a job interview, only to realize you can’t remember a single answer or example? Or racing to meet a deadline, then going blank when your boss asks for last week’s sales figures?
Call them blackouts, mental blanks, or what you will, we’ve all experienced those moments where our memory fails us completely. Where your brain feels like it’s been completely wiped clean, and you’re left wondering what happened to all of that information.
These memory losses can be highly frustrating, and they happen to the best of us. But…why?
More often than not, it comes back around to stress. I’ll explain how that works in today’s article, and show you how to cope with mental blackouts.
How Stress Causes Forgetfulness
You may have heard that a little anxiety is good for performance, and in fact, there’s plenty of science to back this up.
Studies have shown that a certain amount of anxious arousal can wake us up, improve our concentration, and even make us more performance-oriented. Anyone who has sat an exam can relate to this!
It’s once this arousal exceeds a certain threshold, however, that we start to experience the negative side of it—tension, pressure, or stress. Our adrenal glands begin to respond differently, releasing a much higher volume of the stress hormone norepinephrine (or noradrenaline) when our bodies perceive that a stressful event has occurred.
Norepinephrine is exactly what causes us to experience an increased heart rate, racing pulse, and negative, irritable mood—many of the symptoms that I’ve covered in my deck of Stress Coaching Cards.
It also interferes with our logical thinking capabilities, because (you guessed it) too much of it can lead to mental blackouts.
What Happens During A Mental Blackout?
While the answer feels like “nothing at all,” the answer is a little more complex. With too much norepinephrine in our systems, our ability to retrieve long-term memories is compromised. Try as we might to access information, we’re simply unable to get to it.
To put it another way, “the road is closed” when it comes to those interview answers you rehearsed!
There’s nothing productive about drawing mental blanks, and it can feel pretty embarrassing to be lost for words mid-conversation. To help you deal with the stress that causes these blackouts in the first place, I created the Experiencing memory loss Stress Coaching Card.
3 Tips For Dealing With Stress-Related Blackouts
You can often take a few approaches to manage certain stress symptoms—dealing with the stress that causes them, and/or managing the symptom. Here, you’ll find both types, so that you can tackle the problem from multiple angles!
1. Go To Your Happy Place
This tip works well if you find yourself mid-blackout. Say you’re locked out of your car or lost for answers mid-exam and need to respond immediately!
Take a deep breath and calm yourself down. When you’re a little more relaxed, try the following.
- Acceptance is the first step. The most important thing in this moment is to realize that we all get overloaded at times. While we humans can theoretically store an infinite amount of information, we’re not programmed to access everything, all the time, instantly. And guess what—you’re human!
- Visualize. When you’re ready, try to imagine a future where everything is going well. You’ve found your key and are driving to that appointment on schedule, or you’re calmly giving an impressive answer to that essay question. Picture everything working out wonderfully, while you’re calmly sailing through it. Keep that thought in your mind, and enjoy it.
You may find that calming yourself down is just what was needed to unblock that road and retrieve that lost memory.
2. Tense Up
It might sound counterintuitive, but this tip is the polar opposite of the last: try tensing up every muscle you can think of all at once.
If you’re alone, stiffen as many muscles as you can from head to toe; if you’re not, tense all the muscles you can without making it too visible.
This tip works because a brief (note: limited!) amount of bodily tension actually causes us to relax entirely. When we are physically at ease, it’s much easier to come back to the present moment and think a little more clearly once again.
For that reason, this tip works very well if you notice your tension levels rising before a specific event.
3. Say It Out Loud
For most of us, blacking out in social situations is a little more stressful than losing our mental thread in private. If you’re stuck for words halfway through a conversation (like an interview!), try simply saying so out loud:
- “I’ve forgotten what I was going to say next.”
- “I’ve lost my point.”
- “I’ve gone blank for a moment.”
You’d be surprised how common mental blanks are—for everyone—and your conversation partners will probably be able to relate. You’ll also win yourself some time to calm down with a deep, relaxing breath.
Tip: If this doesn’t help you pick up your thoughts, try repeating the last thing you said (e.g. “At my last accounting job…” or “I calculated the sales figures on Wednesday…”) If you’ve lost that, too, try asking whoever you were talking to.
This (or they) can help you pick up where you left off, and hopefully, the road ahead will reappear.
Good luck!
