I asked ADHDers what their biggest challenges were.

Working Memory came out on top.

What is it and why does it matter?

Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information in your brain - for example remembering the beginning of a sentence by the time you get to the end of it, or remembering a phone number. Or, put simply, it's the information you're currently aware of in your brain, in any given moment.

Here's an example of why working memory is important. Understanding this paragraph requires you to hold the meaning of all the words in your head, as well as the actual words themselves. You also need to link the concepts from this sentence with the previous sentence, and put them in the context of your prior knowledge. Easy right? If you have a processing delay, an audio processing disorder, or an issue with working memory, then it's not so easy.

This can lead to academic problems, for example in maths where you have to manipulate numbers, but also in other areas of life. Following a string of verbal instructions can be difficult, because you remember the first, and maybe the last, but not what came in the middle. It can also cause problems with conversations. Following the thread of the conversation, keeping in your head what the other person is saying, remembering the context, and figuring out what you're going to say next uses up a lot of processing power. If you can't hold all those things in your working memory at once, then having a conversation can be exhausting.

What can we do about it?

• First of all, stop lying to yourself! We all do it, we tell ourselves that we'll remember it, but here's the fact - we won't. Write it down or make an audio note in your phone. You're not going to remember it without doing that!

• In some cases, medication can help. By reducing distractibility, you may be able to hold information in your working memory for longer, or increasing its capacity, but that's not an option for everyone.

• Ask for written and/or visual instructions rather than verbal. Visual information is not only easier to process for many people, it's also something you can look back at for reference if you forget what you' doing (eg. the cooking instructions on the back of a packet - how many times do you look back at them? I know I'm constantly picking up the packet and checking, even for something basic).

• Focus on one task at a time. I know this one is particularly difficult for us, but if you get distracted while doing something and drift off to do something else, chances are that you'll forget the first task. Acknowledge the distraction, write it down if you really need to get back to it later (or even better, tell your smart device to remind you about it), but let it go and carry on with what you're doing.

• There's evidence that working memory training can help to improve the efficiency of working memory, but it seems that capacity (how many items or chunks of information you can hold in your working memory) may be fixed.

• Mnemonic strategies, such as creating associations between words and events or facts (the house number is 367, that's one more day than is in a leap year), or using the Method of Loci (you have a mental picture of a house, and you associate the things you need to remember with items in the house) can help as well, but these are more focused on creating long term memories than keeping things in your working memory.

• Visualisation - this one doesn't work for me because of aphantasia (I don't see mental pictures or images) but if it works for you, creating mental images of the things you need to remember might be useful.

• Chunking is another great strategy. Grouping information together increases the capacity of your working memory because each chunk is counted as a piece of information, rather than each individual word or number. This is why we remember phone numbers in groups of 3 numbers, and it's easy to remember song lyrics, because we chunks the words into lines, and it's easier to remember 3 lines of a song than 15 individual words.

Like most things in this world, much of the study on memory has focused on white, neurotypical males, so not all advice is going to work for everybody. Also, all of our brains are different so something that works for you might not work for someone else with ADHD. Also, something that works one day, might not work another day because of other executive functioning factors. If you've already used a lot of mental energy that day, your working memory may be at a lower capacity than normal.

Have more questions? Get in touch and we can have a chat.

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