How can I remember things and be more conscious when I wake up?

February 28, 2023 7:33 PM

This is perhaps an unanswerable question. When I go to bed, I think about the things I planned during the day and all the things I must do the next day. I set my alarm and go to sleep. I wake up. I do not remember the things I planned the day before. I don't even remember not remembering sometimes. I just go back to sleep. Ah!!! Oh, no!

If I scheduled a one-off appointment for something early in the morning, I may just forget about it. And if I forget about it, I may decide to fall back asleep. Agh!!!

When I was a little kid, I remember waking up and immediately thinking about whatever was going to happen that day. It may be natural for this to fade with age.

My smartphone is out of the room at night; so labeling an alarm with something like, "DON'T FORGET: [BLAHBLAH] IS TODAY" isn't an option. Additionally, I've had alarms labeled with the task I know I'm supposed to remember before, and that didn't work. I don't think I read them. I had an alarm app where I had to take a photo of something before the alarm would go off and/or do a math problem and outsmarted that as well. Over the past couple of months, I've put sticky notes on my alarm and had the same problem. It's like trying to crack a rock by throwing eggs at it. Futile.

I suspect that I'm not as conscious when I wake up as I should be. I sleep just fine--I think. (???) I don't notice abnormal fatigue during the day. And when I'm fully awake, I want to do the things that I have planned. Important things feel important when I am awake. I'm a motivated person once awake! I swear!

Again, maybe this has no answer, and I apologize profusely if that is the case. It's just been bothering me so much. I can't be the only person with this problem. If anyone's solved it before, it's the good folk here.

posted by elzpwetd to Health & Fitness (19 answers total)

When you say "I go to bed"... is that before you lie down? While you are lying down? Certain stages of sleep have impaired memory, so depending on where your brain is at the time of the thought, it could affect recall.
posted by falsedmitri at 7:44 PM on February 28, 2023

If you need to be awake for a particular thing, set an alarm.

If an alarm doesn't create a sense of urgency in you, designate an unusual item as a totem. This could be a stuffed animal you sleep with, this could be an object d'art to set on your bedside table... Importantly whatever you choose needs to be A. obvious/noticeable and B. never EVER in your bedroom except on days when you have an important morning task.

You can leave yourself a note. A pad of paper by your bed that lists the tasks you have upcoming could work. Or if you need something extremely slap in your face obvious, buy a pack of tattoo pens* and write the word HEY on your arm in big block letters.

*Washable but won't transfer onto your sheets/face while you sleep.
posted by phunniemee at 7:47 PM on February 28, 2023

You're aging. That's all that's happening.

And the solution people have come up with for this problem is to leave themselves notes using pen and paper.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:53 PM on February 28, 2023

I agree with writing stuff down. Before you lie down, write tomorrow's agenda on a piece of paper, tape it to the bathroom mirror or some other place where you _must_ see it. In the past, I have used the coffee maker but other places might work better for you.
posted by TimHare at 8:36 PM on February 28, 2023

It sounds like you're going back to sleep because you need more sleep. Can you go to bed earlier so you get enough sleep?
posted by aniola at 8:46 PM on February 28, 2023

If you always need an alarm to wake you up and even the alarm doesn't really wake you up, I think you're probably not getting enough sleep. I would try going to bed an hour earlier and see if that helps. If not, keep adding an hour until you find that you often wake up on your own around the time the alarm would go off.
posted by Redstart at 8:46 PM on February 28, 2023

My solution when I was young and very sleep deprived in college was to put the alarm across the room so I had to actually get out of bed and flail my way across the room to turn it off. That action was generally enough to wake me up such that I could remember where I was going (or read a note, if you wanted to leave yourself one).

I will say that in my middle age, even when I get quite enough sleep and feel alert when I wake up, I will still forget things in the morning that I was thinking of the night before due to some disconnect with sleep. I put stuff I need to take with me to work _physically on top of_ my bag, and leave notes as needed.
posted by LadyOscar at 8:59 PM on February 28, 2023

This is one of the few things I actually use a smart speaker for. You can set an alarm verbally that will give an alarm sound and a verbal cue. "Vigilant, get ready for physical therapist visit" or whatever.
posted by Vigilant at 10:56 PM on February 28, 2023

Alarmy for the iphone is the single worst fucking app I have ever had for alarms and the reason I am now mostly punctual. I have tried all the alarm apps, and Alarmy is vile and effective. You can pay for the labels to be read aloud, and I have used that to remind me of certain appointments.

I keep this sticky note polar bear next to my bed with pens and have woken up to random notes on my wall. If you are tidy, you may prefer a cute notepad or simply a tiny whiteboard with a pen on a string.

Mostly, I sleep with my work bag by my bed, and a yellow bullet journal in it, then in the mornings, write out a new neat list that the older list that has scribbled notes on it. It's something to get done over morning coffee, not something to do while I swear at my alarm clock and beg for more sleep.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:38 PM on February 28, 2023

Honestly, I think you need a routine. Alarm clock = get up, make coffee, read to-do list.
Every single day, no snooze button, no excuses.
If your alarm/waking up is sometimes important and sometimes isn't, you end up making judgement calls about it half a sleep, at a time when you really shouldn't be making judgement calls about anything.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:44 PM on February 28, 2023

Try using a light alarm that simulates sunrise.
posted by knapah at 1:29 AM on March 1, 2023

If I can stay awake for the first five minutes after the alarm goes off (it's probably less than that, but let's say five minutes), my conscious brain kicks in and I can figure out what the day holds and what I need to do about that. Some days, that's a big "if". My current solution is twofold:

1. SAD lamp on the bedside table. I turn it on when the alarm goes off. If you set your alarm for a specific time (instead of having it wake you according to where you are in your sleep cycle), it would be easy to set the lamp to come on automatically at the same time. I can sleep in a room with normal lighting on, but sunshine a foot from my face is a different thing entirely.

2. Something to engage my brain while I wait for the cobwebs to clear. For me this is Wordle. If you don't want screens in the bedroom, that's not going to work for you, but perhaps something else might - a crossword, a su doku, something like that.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:23 AM on March 1, 2023

Get an Echo Dot and have Alexa remind you

She's very nice
posted by Jacqueline at 2:41 AM on March 1, 2023

All the things you have mentioned trying are things where you are alone. Does conversation with a person wake you up further and get your plans to show up in your consciousness?

There are services where you can pay to get a wake-up call, from a human, at a particular time, to make sure you wake up. Maybe you could also include in the instructions "tell me to look at the note on my bedside table" or "talk with me for 5 minutes till I get up and remember what I want to do today".
posted by brainwane at 2:46 AM on March 1, 2023

Lots of good suggestions here. Question: do you take anything to help you sleep before bed, or any supplements before bedtime? I’ve found certain supplements, including magnesium, make me particularly mindless first thing on rising.

It might be worth talking to your doctor about a sleep study. You said you think you sleep well — sleep apnea can have effects on cognition. The study would help you at least eliminate that possibility.
posted by Silvery Fish at 3:51 AM on March 1, 2023

Is the problem perhaps that you think about and plan all the things you need to do tomorrow while you are falling asleep, and in the past that resulted in thinking about them as you woke up, only now your lying-in-the-dark planning session is not resulting in memory.

A lot of people can "sleep on it" and wake up with clear thoughts about an issue, and sometimes even have brilliant insights, because during sleep their unconscious mind has been working on the subject. Did you get into the habit of doing this? If you used to do this and it isn't working now, it's worth mentioning that it doesn't work if you lie down, review the issues for five or ten minutes, and then lie awake or semi-awake for another forty minutes having thoughts on completely different subjects. If the last thing you think about is just random and isn't being thought about with a mental tag about it being important it will not be retained and neither will stuff you thought about during the day. When you sleep on a thought it has to be the last thoughts you have before deep and not interrupted sleep.

The other part of this is that you have to actually wake up rather than being three quarters asleep when you hit snooze on an alarm. Hitting snooze on the alarm or getting up to pee twice in the night can result in a period of dozy semi consciousness that changes the subject your brain was working on. The important thoughts are lost while you are partially awake. So when you wake up to go pee, or turn off the alarm clock that is when you need to rehearse your important agenda. The stagger down the hall in the dark in your bathrobe needs to be done while mentally chanting to yourself, "Dentist in the morning, leave house for nine thirty, must, must must wake up at seven. At seven." Every time you hit the snooze button you need to have some thoughts, "But I am still getting up in time to be leave the house at nine thirty, must, must, must get up in time to leave the house at nine-thirty. Must leave on time." If you don't run this track while you are semi-awake, you are giving your brain permission to forget it, and it probably will.

So I am with the other people replying. Get more sleep by going to bed earlier. Get a better quality of sleep, if you can. Make it impossible to press snooze on the alarm without seeing a piece of paper that reminds you that you have important things to do. And make checking the piece of paper part of your daily routine, linked to something you have to do and reliably do every morning within two minutes of getting out of bed.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:06 AM on March 1, 2023

I don't think this is a memory problem, it's a your alarm is not waking you up problem. In other words, it's not your brain malfunctioning, it's your brain functioning beautifully and adapting to keep you asleep longer so that you get all the sleep you need. A way to think about this: your brain at bedtime is fully functional; your brain when the alarm goes off is asleep. The part that reacts to the alarm and hits the snooze button is nothing but a brain stem. That part will react to wake you up if it encounters wake-up stimuli like the sun coming up or evident danger or a lot of light or noise that won't stop or being jostled. It will not recognize sticky note warnings left by the higher-order primate brain of the previous evening as a reason to stop sleeping. This is because it's a lizard and doesn't know from human concerns. Is there a bear or a fire? No? False alarm! Back to sleep!

Thus you need to a. make sure you're getting enough sleep so that when it's time to wake up you're ready to wake up and b. make the alarm more effective. My brother used to set his clock radio to the Baptist station, crank it up loud, and put it across the room so that the insufferable gloopy praise music would rocket him out of bed in a paroxysm of morning rage from which it was impossible to emerge drowsy. Perhaps there's a less painful way to do it, but whatever you do, it has to galvanize you, which your current set-up is not doing; your current set-up isn't even waking you up.
posted by Don Pepino at 7:19 AM on March 1, 2023

Like one time? My mom and I were fresh off an insanely long flight to Hawaii from Florida with lots of long breaks to cool our heels in various airports along the journey, so we were crazy jetlagged. We fell asleep in our fleasy room on the twelfth floor of the budget 1950s hotel we'd picked out dreaming of the fun we'd have the next day. Hours later there was an annoying sound. I slept on. Mom slept on. The annoying sound continued. We incorporated the annoying sound in our dreams. But it was a really loud sound. We slept on. The sound continued. I dreamed, multiple times, that I was pushing a snooze alarm. This was ineffective. The sound continued. I woke up a little. "Oh, it's like a fire alarm or something, okay." I went back to sleep. The sound continued. I woke up again. "Fucking fire alarm, still?!? Why won't they shut it off, for Christ's sake?" I went back to sleep. It took at least three sleep-wake-sleep cycles to clock that the place might be on fire and we might be about to die for us to get out of bed and stumble down the stairs to join the other grumpy tourists in the lobby. I can't remember what it was, but it was some people misbehaving, maybe cooking on a hibachi or something? It was something outrageous like that. The hotel did not burn down. Nobody died or was injured and eventually we all went back to our rooms and went to sleep again. But anyway, if the fire alarm in an about-to-be-condemned hotel doesn't wake up the sleeping human brain, no sticky note has a chance.
posted by Don Pepino at 7:34 AM on March 1, 2023

I, too, have slept through a fire alarm. Not in recently, mind you. :^)

I was then and am now getting 8-9 hours of sleep a night. I may just be a very heavy sleeper? But a sleep study would probably do me good.
posted by elzpwetd at 12:41 PM on March 1, 2023