A few Tuesdays back I drove to the senior centre on Elm Street and could not, for the life of me, remember the word “lanyard.” I stood in the parking lot holding mine, that green cord on a clip, and called it “the neck string” to the volunteer at the desk. She did not blink. It came to me in the car on the way home, as it always does, after I had stopped reaching for it.
How to keep your memory steadyA plain video on why memory gets patchy after sixty.
That kind of slip is not the fog I want to talk about, though. Fog is different. A 2023 review article described it as a fluctuating state of feeling mentally dulled, the kind that gets in the way of actually using your thinking in daily life. Not a lost word. A dimmed morning.
The brown bag under the sink
When someone tells me their head feels stuffed with wool, the first place I look is not their brain. It is the brown paper bag. Every bottle, every box, the drugstore shelf things too. I am not claiming they are the cause. A bottle is simpler to swap than a habit. Bring the whole bag to the pharmacist at the grocery store counter, the one where they still know your name. If the fog lifts after a change, you have your answer, and it cost you a conversation.
The woman who stopped sleeping
A thing that went wrong: a man at the centre, sharp as anything, started losing whole afternoons. He would read the same page four times. His daughter was quietly making plans. It turned out he had started a new medicine and doubled an old one by accident, because two doctors had each prescribed without knowing about the other. It cost him three months of thinking something was terribly wrong, and it cost his daughter a Greyhound trip she did not need to take. What fixed it was a list on one sheet of paper and a phone call. I keep my own list taped inside a cupboard door, because memory trouble after sixty so often starts in the medicine cabinet, not the mind.
Sleep and the six-week rule
If a friend came to me with this, my advice would be close to what I said to her: “Before you worry about your brain, write down what the fog actually does for one week.” When it comes, when it goes, what you slept, what you took. Then change one thing. Only one. Give it six weeks. Altering several factors simultaneously leaves you unable to tell which one made the difference, and you’ll end up back in my kitchen before long. ordinary forgetting at sixty has a shape to it, and so does the other kind, and you cannot see a shape from inside one bad day. And if sleep is the thread that keeps showing up in your notes, pull on it. Sleep and memory in older adults travel together more than most people expect.
Now that this is on the table, go watch the full video and see it walked through from start to finish.
The woman who said it was just age
A fair pushback I hear, and half accept: “Diane, I am sixty-seven, my mother was the same, maybe this is just my brain now.” There is something in it. Some slowing is ordinary, and fighting it wastes good years. But I push back on the shrug. “Just age” is a door people close on themselves. Fog that fluctuates deserves a look. Fog that arrives overnight deserves a phone call.
Paper or phone, and I have tried both
People ask me whether to track all this on paper or on the phone. I have done both. The phone is quick and it beeps at you, which some people love. But I watched my sister spend ten minutes hunting for the app she was meant to be noting her lapses in, and the irony was not lost on either of us. I came back to paper: a small notebook, a calendar by the telephone, a pill organiser I fill on Sunday mornings. Paper sits where you left it. It does not update itself into hiding. Whatever you will actually keep using is the right one, and for most of the people I see, that is the one with a spiral binding.
A short exchange from last month, nearly word for word. A woman leaned on the counter and said, “I feel like I am thinking through porridge. Should I be scared?” I said, “Not scared. Curious. What did you start, stop, or lose in the last three months?” She thought. “My dog died, and I stopped walking, and I started taking something to sleep.” I said, “There is your list. Take it to your doctor, or sit with the pharmacist here, and start with the sleeping.” She came back in seven weeks looking like herself. Not always that tidy. But more often than you would think.
If any of this sounds like your mornings, go watch the video now while it is fresh, and then make your own one-page list.
One more thing before I go, and it has nothing to do with fog: the lanyard. I found three more in the hall drawer that same week, none of them mine. My husband swears he has never owned one. Somebody is losing lanyards all over this house, and for once, it is not me.