Smartphones can be bad for your memory

Two news reports caught my attention recently and have indirectly put new life into this process of remembering every day that passes.

One said that giving attention to screens, particularly multiple screens – or "media multi-tasking" (such as scrolling through your phone while watching television) – is bad for the memory.

Another said that a large percentage of people check their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up and the majority within the first hour.

I had fallen into this habit, partly because time differences might mean a request for me to take freelance work arrives in the early morning and waiting until usual working hours would be too late to secure the contract.

But I've gone beyond checking for such emails to routinely checking through social media and news websites, bank account apps, etc. and then starting the cycle again.

At the same time, my ability to recall the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day has been failing me. I keep running through the current year, not least so I have some sense of the passage of time during the coronavirus lockdown and restrictions. 

I have also been refreshing past years, but this now takes so long it can be months before I revisit images to refresh them. And I know that I can run into difficulties if I delay for a month. The harder it is, the longer it takes and the more demotivated I've been to return to the process.

More distant years, such as 2012 and 2013 have been easier to review, but more recent years have been refreshed over a shorter time period and I could scan through several weeks with little clue of the images I had selected for each day. 

When I did find something to orientate me, I'd use that to try to guess at surrounding images to trigger a memory, with little success.

Then a few days ago it struck me that this was not how it used to work. I remembered the tags and they opened up the day to me and reminded me of the surrounding tags. When I had fewer days to remember and called up the images more frequently, I could often remember remembering them the last time around. Sometimes I'd have introduced a stronger connection between consecutive days to help me with the recall.

So, I decided to go back to a meditation routine I used to do morning and night, descending a mental staircase to a special place where I was totally relaxed and could then let my thoughts wander. I got into this meditative state and then returned to my mental calendar - hosting it in a particular place in this special place I was visualising. Where there were blanks, I visualised polishing the square on my mental calendar to reveal the image.

And it has been working.

I've coupled this with ditching the smartphone scanning in the morning - other than a quick check for work requests - and using my first half hour in bed after waking to engage in this review. I have the target of completing at least two months of historic images per morning (in addition to refreshing the current year during the day and when I am going to sleep).

Images are not only coming back to me, I'm suddenly remembering images that I had lost for other years and am jumping across the calendar pages to run over those days.

So I'm optimistic that I can get back into this routine and it will hopefully become easier as the images are reinforced once more.

Keeping away from my phone for this half hour and filling my mind with the richness that comes from recalling past days, with all the thoughts and reflections they trigger, can only be for the good.