In this episode I want to explain to you what working memory is, why it is often overloaded and not working well for you, and then give you five tips on how you can support this very important cognitive skill to help you craft the life of your dreams.

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Feeling overwhelmed?

So let’s set the scene. This episode is going to be really helpful for you if you are someone who has a lot on your plate. Have you ever felt overwhelmed, with too much going on in your head? Or you just can’t think straight with all the things you have to remember? You might have colleagues emailing you, kids asking you questions, the TV on in the background, your phone is dinging, all while you’re trying to write a grocery list so that you don’t forget anything for the weeks’ dinners. When there is a lot going on in your mind and in your environment like this, your working memory is overloaded. Working memory is all the active stuff that we have in our minds at any one time. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about what working memory is, and why it’s often overloaded, so that we can see how to best support your brain and reduce stress.

What is Working Memory?

Now I want to emphasise that working memory is different to memory (even though they both have the word memory), and memory is all the information and events we have that are properly stored in our minds, and can recall, but we aren’t necessarily thinking about them right now. So, I have a memories of all the houses that I’ve ever lived in, but these are not always in the forefront of my mind, so they’re not in working memory. Whereas if one of my kids comes up and asks what’s for dinner, that is what is in my working memory at that time.

Working memory includes all the things you’re taking in from the outside world, and all the things you’re thinking about, so it really is a catch-all for everything that is going on for you at any given moment. It’s really your active conscious thoughts.

Working Memory is Extremely Limited and Temporary

The most important thing that you need to know about working memory is that it’s extremely limited. We can only hold a few things in our minds at any given time. Once we hit the limit, things start to fall out of our mind, we have problems concentrating, and even feel forgetful. When you have a busy lifestyle, or lots of demands on your time and energy, you are trying to hold too many things in your mind at once, and you might even start to believe that there is something wrong with you, but it’s really just that your limited working memory is full, and this is normal!

Your working memory is also temporary, so if you start to think about something else, the old information will either be stored in your memory or knowledge stores, or it’ll be forgotten. A good example of this is if you are being told someone’s name for the first time, and then you start to talk about something else, the person’s name will either be stored and remembered later, or you will forget it.

A Little Science…

You might know that I love to get into the science of this stuff, so let me give to you a few scientific tidbits that will help you understand working memory a little more. The most famous model of working memory is by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, and in 1974 they published their model of working memory which is still the fundamental model that we use today, even though there are other models out there. Alan Baddeley has published a very large body of work on working memory, and in 1992 he defined working memory as the temporary storage and manipulation of information necessary for cognitive (or thinking) tasks. In Baddeley’s model, working memory is mainly thought of as a storage area. Now, theories of working memory have been further developed since then, and now a lot of researchers think about working memory as more of a process – a process of activating information that’s in rest of the brain, this is information that we already know and have stored. But the best way to really understand working memory for yourself is that it’s like a small whiteboard that holds everything that you’re currently thinking about and taking in from the outside world. When this whiteboard is full, you start to feel overwhelmed and stressed, but when it’s clear, researchers believe that this frees up mental space to solve problems, be creative, and innovate. So you can see how important this cognitive function is, and how important it is to support it. I’ll put references to some of the scientific papers on working memory in the show notes if you want to find out more.

There is some really interesting research that explains that having a full working memory can actually affect your thinking. There is a well-known finding from 1966 called the Sternberg effect. The Sternberg effect (Sternberg, 1966) demonstrates that if you are given a number of things to hold in your working memory, and then asked to respond to a question about that information, then the more things you have in your working memory the slower you are at responding to the question. Just think about that for a second – the more stuff you have in your mind, the slower you are to respond to questions about that stuff. This shows you that a full working memory can make you look a bit confused, so do yourself a favour and try to really keep that mental space clear.

We take in information in two main ways, verbal (which is word-based information) and visual (which is image or location based information). And so you actually have a verbal working memory, which holds all the words, and a visual working memory, which holds all the images. So if we can think of information as either verbal or visual, then this can help us simplify what’s going on in our environment, because verbal information is all lumped together in one whiteboard – if you’re reading and trying to listen to something else with words, then it will all just interfere with each other, because remember the working memory is limited. And we know from scientific research that when you’re trying to read or take in verbal information, your ability to remember it later decreases if someone is talking? So be very careful with too much word-based input, and I’ll touch on this again when I talk about the tips to support your working memory.

Tips to Support Your Working Memory

So the key things I want you to remember about working memory are that it is both very limited in size, and temporary – this means that it’s not exactly something that you can heavily rely on. So, how do we get around this limitation of our mind? I want to give you five very practical tips on how to support your working memory and use it to your advantage, so that you can carry out tasks more efficiently, and importantly feel less stressed.

Tip 1: Write Things Down

So the first thing, which I find to be the most effect strategy, is to write things down. Now, this might seem obvious, but not everyone does it, and when we do write things down, we often do it on scrap pieces of paper that end up getting lost, so I want to take you through a really effective strategy that will help empty your working memory so the space can be freed up.

You’ll want to create a master list of everything that is on your mind. Choose ONE PLACE to put all this information, and write everything down. It doesn’t matter if it’s digital or on paper, just choose one place that works for you. Put down everything that you need to remember about work, about home, about the family and school and everything that you want to do for yourself. Put down any thoughts or ideas as well that have been on your mind. It’s a brain dump, and just free write all the things. You can go back and reorder it if you like, so that it’s separated into different categories, which will make it easier to refer to. But just make sure that it’s all out of your mind. Now, importantly you’re not going to use this as a massive to-do list, because that gets even more overwhelming, but this is a great place to start to help you feel less stressed. Once you’ve done this brain dump and relieved that pressure, then you’ll be better equipped to decide what you actually want to put on your calendar for that day or week. And this might only be one or two things. Think about your capacity for what you can do, schedule the important things, and then rest easy in the knowledge that everything else is written down for later so it won’t be forgotten.

Tip 2: Pause to Remember

Tip number 2 is another tip about writing things down. Take two minutes in the middle of the day, and at the end of the day to write down something you might have forgotten. Now this might sound weird because you might be thinking “how can I write something down if I’ve forgotten it?” But stay with me and let me explain. Get your phone or a notepad, open your space where you write things down, and then mentally go through the day and think about what you did. This will jog your memory and those things that you forgot to do will often pop into your mind. Then write them down! This is helpful if you are someone who is on the phone a lot, or chatting to people in person, and you find that people are telling you things that you need to remember but you can’t or don’t write down straight away. In any given day you might have had a call from school about returning a form, you were told that you need to pick up milk on the way home, and that your sister needs you to send her a link to something. When these types of things happen, we often think to ourselves ‘oh I need to write that down’ or ‘Ill get to that later’ and later never comes. What’s happening here is that the information went into your working memory, that temporary storage area, and then it got replaced by some new piece of information and was not stored properly. It’s in your brain, but its not going to be remembered at the appropriate time, and that’s why you miss things. So make a habit to pause for 2 mins at the same time in your routine everyday, it might be after lunch, it might be as you end your workday, and purposely go over the days events in your mind and jot down anything you need to remember. This is a really easy task that you can incorporate into your day.

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Tip 3: Limits

Tip number 3 is to limit the amount of information that is going into your mind at any one time. What do I mean by this – in my house, there are times when I’m trying to cook dinner which has multiple steps to it, and I have kids asking me questions, the TV is on and my brain is taking in what’s being said, I’m keeping an ear out for the baby monitor in case my baby wakes up, I’m watching the time because we have to leave for Scouts at the right time, and then my fiance comes in and wants to talk to me about something. This is a recipe for disaster – I’m probably going to be slow to respond to questions, I feel stressed, and I end up burning the dinner. This is because my working memory is completely full and I’m not able to process all that information at once. So, this is where you have to put some boundaries in (Easier said than done). Maybe you make a rule that at dinner time, the kids play computer games with the sound turned down instead of watching TV, or maybe they play a board game in their bedroom. Maybe you ask your partner to help with dinner and you leave important conversation until you’re all sitting around the dinner table. The point here is to only have one or two things going on at once. Sometimes these types of situations are unavoidable, so in the example I gave, you might choose to turn off the stove while the kids are talking to you, or give yourself some more time to do things so you don’t feel rushed, and then bring a lot of compassion to yourself if you are having trouble concentrating – it’s not you, it’s that the environment is filling up your working memory and placing too many demands on your brain.

Another types of situation where you might need to limit information going into your mind is when you are trying to work when you are listening to music or there are people talking. So this comes back to what I said about verbal information interfering with other verbal information. If you’re trying to read a report or write a blog post, it’s impossible for your brain to do a good job of this while it can hear other verbal information, like music with words or people talking. So again try and limit these situations by working in a quiet area, or listening to instrumental music where there are no words to interfere with something that you’re trying to read or write, or get some noise-cancelling headphones.

Tip 4: Repeat Information Out Loud

Tip number 4 is to repeat information out loud. You might have heard this tip when you’re trying to improve remembering people’s names. Repeating information is how you keep it in your working memory for longer, and then it becomes more likely that you will remember it later on. So, if someone asks you a question and you are taking some time to think about the answer, try and repeat the question out loud so you don’t forget it. If a colleague or a family member is telling you something, then try repeating it out loud if you can’t write it down straight away.

Tip 5: Journaling

Tip number five is to try journaling. Journaling is where you write down your thoughts and often reflect on them or elaborate on them in some way, either with or without a helpful prompt. Researchers believe that journaling benefits you by offloading your thoughts and therefore releasing some of that pressure of having lots of ideas in your working memory. I believe that the best time to journal is in the evening before you got to bed, because then you are doing that cognitive offloading and emptying your mind so you aren’t overthinking when you are trying to sleep. Write down all your thoughts onto paper, either by free writing, or using prompts, and I have a journaling prompts workbook in the online shop if you are interested in using that. And then your mind will feel much clearer and you can move forward thinking about one thing at a time.

Those are my best tips for you, but you don’t need to do all these – try each one and see what works for you and what you can incorporate into your daily routine.

There tips are here to keep your working memory really clear, so that you can reduce your overwhelm, feel less stressed, and go through your day getting the stuff done that you want to get done with more ease.

Please jump on over to my Instagram page and tell me which tip was most helpful for you!

I’m going to finish with my favourite quote by Mary Oliver “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.

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Want to join me in crafting the life of your dreams? Join my signature time management course TIMEWISE where you’ll learn how to move from busy and burnt out to feeling productive and at ease.

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Relevant research articles:

Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556-559.

D’Esposito, M., & Postle, B. R. (2015). The cognitive neuroscience of working memory. Annual review of psychology, 66(1), 115-142.

Klabes, J., Babilon, S., Zandi, B., & Khanh, T. Q. (2021). The sternberg paradigm: Correcting encoding latencies in visual and auditory test designs. Vision, 5(2), 21.

Nückles, M., Roelle, J., Glogger-Frey, I., Waldeyer, J., & Renkl, A. (2020). The self-regulation-view in writing-to-learn: Using journal writing to optimize cognitive load in self-regulated learning. Educational Psychology Review, 32(4), 1089-1126.

Sternberg, S. (1966). High-speed scanning in human memory. Science, 153(3736), 652-654.