We walk into a room and forget why we came. We spend several minutes looking for the phone that has been lying next to us the whole time. We reread a paragraph and cannot remember a single word. Anxiety sets in: it feels as though this did not happen before. Is our memory really getting worse?
Such lapses also happen to young, healthy people. However, a new study shows that the feeling of having an unreliable memory does not always indicate a decline in cognitive abilities themselves. Sometimes it is more closely related to how well we sleep and to our emotional state.
When Complaints and Test Results Do Not Match
On September 5, 2026, BMC Psychology published a study by Márta Volosin, Fanni Mercédesz Kovács, and Eszter Csábi from the Universities of Szeged and Semmelweis in Hungary. The authors set out to find what lies behind young people’s everyday complaints about memory, attention, and absent-mindedness.
The study involved 125 young adults with an average age of 21. They answered questions about cognitive lapses, sleep quality, emotional state, and well-being, and they also completed neuropsychological tasks that assessed memory and executive functions — the abilities to maintain a goal, control attention, and switch between tasks.
The result was unexpected. Participants who reported forgetfulness and absent-mindedness more often did not perform worse on objective cognitive tasks. However, the number of such complaints was associated with poorer self-rated sleep quality and more pronounced depressive symptoms.
In other words, the feeling that “my memory has become worse” did not reflect a measured decline in memory in this sample. It was much more closely related to how the participants slept and how they felt emotionally.
An Everyday Lapse Is Not Imaginary
It is easy to draw the wrong conclusion from this result: if the tests are normal, then we must have imagined everything. But a forgotten password, a missed appointment, or lost keys are perfectly real. The question is not whether the lapse happened, but what exactly it means. Objective cognitive ability and our subjective sense of how reliable it is are not the same thing!
In a laboratory task, we are given clear instructions, a limited amount of information, and a specific goal. In everyday life, we may be replying to messages, thinking about work, rushing, worrying about a conversation, and trying to remember where we put the documents — all at the same time. Even a good memory does not operate independently of attention, fatigue, and emotional load.
Moreover, we do not judge our memory using strict statistics. We rarely count all the times we successfully remembered a name, locked the door, kept a promise, or arrived at a meeting on time. Successful remembering feels natural and attracts almost no attention. An error, by contrast, is irritating, frightening, and memorable. That is why a few especially unpleasant episodes can create the general impression: “I forget everything all the time,” even though most everyday tasks are still being handled normally.
How Emotional State Changes the Way We See Our Abilities
When we are struggling, not only our mood changes, but also the way we evaluate what is happening. Mistakes become more noticeable, while confidence in our own abilities weakens. Ordinary absent-mindedness may no longer feel like a random slip, but like evidence that something is wrong.
In psychology, the ability to judge how well our own memory, attention, and thinking are working is called metacognition. It helps us understand what we know, what we do not remember, and how much we can trust our own judgment. But this inner assessment is not an impartial measuring instrument. It is influenced by expectations, anxiety, mood, and previous experience.
If we are already afraid that we have become absent-minded, the next forgotten detail can easily confirm that belief. Cases that contradict it attract much less attention. Gradually, a gap can emerge: cognitive abilities may remain the same, while trust in them declines.
The study authors suggest that young people’s complaints may reflect concern about their own abilities more strongly than actual deterioration. However, that does not mean such concern is insignificant. A persistent feeling that one’s memory is unreliable can itself create tension and interfere with studying, work, and everyday confidence.
Why Sleep Matters Here
The link with sleep quality is not surprising either. After a restless night, it is harder to stay focused, resist distractions, and keep the current task in mind. Sometimes the problem we call poor memory arises earlier — at the moment information is being encoded.
If we put our keys on a shelf while reading a message and thinking about an unpleasant conversation, the information about the keys may simply not have received enough attention. Later this feels like forgetting, although a stable memory may never have formed in the first place.
There is another possibility: poor sleep affects how we feel and intensifies the sense of mental fatigue. In that case, we do not necessarily perform a task worse, but it requires more effort and is experienced as evidence of declining ability.
It is important, however, that the study assessed subjective sleep quality. It shows an association between perceived sleep problems and cognitive complaints, but it does not establish the precise physiological cause of those complaints.
What the Study Does Not Prove
The study was correlational. Therefore, it cannot show that sleep disturbances or depressive symptoms necessarily cause the feeling that memory has worsened.
Different directions of the relationship are possible. Poor sleep and low mood may increase absent-mindedness and self-doubt. Persistent worry about mistakes, in turn, may worsen sleep and mood. Finally, both may be influenced by a third factor at the same time — for example, prolonged stress or overload.
The study also does not allow us to conclude that memory complaints in young people are always unfounded. It involved a relatively small group of healthy young adults, and laboratory tasks do not reproduce the full complexity of everyday life. They may have failed to detect more subtle difficulties that appear only under fatigue, time pressure, or heavy distraction.
The findings cannot automatically be generalized to older people, patients with neurological disorders, or people whose memory changes appeared suddenly and are clearly worsening. Self-ratings of sleep and depressive symptoms are also not equivalent to a medical diagnosis.
Memory Complaints Are Not Only About Memory
The main value of the study is not that it tells us to distrust our own experience. Rather, it helps us interpret it more broadly. When memory starts to feel unreliable, it may be useful to look beyond individual mistakes. Perhaps sleep quality has changed, fatigue has accumulated, concentration has become harder, or confidence in ourselves has declined. Sometimes a complaint about memory is the language our overall state uses to signal overload.
That is not a reason to ignore persistent changes or difficulties that interfere with everyday life. But neither does every forgotten detail necessarily indicate a decline in cognitive abilities.
Memory really can fail us. Yet our sense of how often and how seriously that happens is shaped by more than memory itself. It also reflects how we sleep, what we feel, and how much we trust our own mind. Sometimes what needs attention is not the ability to remember itself, but the state in which it has become difficult to rely on it.