As the product of a northeastern prep school, I am used to being under a certain level of stress. Not only did my education instill in me a hard-working, perfectionist mentality but my own personality is such that if I was not busy, running from school to newspaper meetings to sports practice to dance practice, I was bored. Even now that I am in college, I am involved in a number of organizations and enjoy keeping busy while pursuing my passions. By now, I am used to managing my life in this way; however, when the stress has become too much in the past, I experienced a psychological disorder known as panic disorder.

It wasn’t until sometime in high school that I realized these periods of intense anxiety weren’t normal. For me, it usually was triggered by excessive anxiety about current environmental stimuli or something I feared would occur in the future. For example, my type-A personality type caused me to develop a minor phobia of sicknesses, especially debilitating illness that could set me back in school or prevent me from attending important extracurricular activities or social events about which I was excited.

When I’m especially anxious (especially during stressful life periods, such as college application time), an innocuous rumble in my gut could trigger anxiety. As my sympathetic nervous system kicked in, I would feel physically ill and my heart would race. Sometimes I’d go from feeling cold one moment to really hot the next. I often would feel a desire to leave areas where I was surrounded by others and I preferred being outside in the fresh air, where I could better calm down and control my stress.

After having my first recognized panic attack, I did found it can create a vicious cycle. If I’m nervous, my fear of my nerves triggering another attack further increases my anxiety. Luckily, my attacks are not regular occurrences and have not disrupted my life. However, they are still scary experiences when they do occur and I feel for those who have more disruptive psychological issues that regularly disrupt their lives.

Ask my 89-year-old Nana about a cruise she took with my late grandfather 50 years ago and she can recount every detail. However, if I visit her in the assisted living facility where she lives, she will not remember I was there about five minutes after I leave. My Nana has dementia. It’s sad to see this type of memory loss occur to someone you love. It began a few years ago when she suffered a series of strokes that severely impaired her short-term memory.

Her long-term memory, the encoding and retrieval of older information, remains in fine form. Long-term memory essentially has an unlimited capacity and estimates of its storage range from 1000 billion to 1,000,000 billion bits of information. This type of memory store contains both procedural (implicit) and declarative (explicit) memories. Declarative memories include semantic and episodic memories. Semantic memories include facts you know or have learned at one point in your life while episodic memories are comprised of  events that have happened to you. My Nana’s dementia has not affected either of these types of memories, but her short-term or working memory was severely damaged.

According to alz.org, the hippocampus, the neural center in the limbic system that processes explicit memories, is the first to go in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. This is why the forgetting phenomena occurs and patients like my Nana are unable to retrieve information due to poor encoding, rehearsal, storage or retrieval. Because of encoding failures, such patients can not move memories from short term memory, which has a span of about 20-30 seconds, to long-term memory, where it has staying power, according to The Simplicity of Dementia by Huub Buijssen. This book coins this problem “disturbed encoding.” Furthermore, it asserts this phenomena even causes some patients to forget they are forgetful.