Quick summary: Forgetfulness, blanking under questioning, and freezing during exams are frequently symptoms of an overloaded mind rather than signs of carelessness or low effort, with depression, anxiety and reduced cognitive flexibility all shown to disrupt memory, attention and the ability to adapt to unexpected situations. This has direct implications for how parents, teachers and clinicians interpret these behaviours, since treating them as character flaws risks adding shame on top of an existing mental health burden and can discourage people from seeking support. For mental health practice and policy, the findings support building more patience and screening for underlying anxiety or depressive symptoms into schools and care settings, rather than defaulting to correction or discipline when someone forgets, hesitates or struggles to respond.
A friend forgets your birthday. It stings more than it probably should, and you find yourself turning it over: were you not important enough to remember? Then it happens again, the day after you’d specifically asked for support with something that mattered to you. That second forgetting lands harder, because now it feels less like an accident and more like a pattern.
Something similar plays out in other places too. A parent asks a child what they learned at school that day, and the child can barely piece together an answer. The parent gets frustrated, points out the child was sitting right there in the classroom, and asks whether they were even paying attention. Or picture an exam hall, where a maths question asks the student to “solve this using any method,” except only one method was ever taught in class. The student panics slightly, isn’t sure which approach is safe to use, and raises a hand to ask. The teacher, a little impatient, tells them to just get on with it using what they were shown.
None of these three situations look related on the surface. A forgotten birthday, a blank stare in a classroom, a frozen hand in an exam. But underneath them sits a similar mechanism, and it’s rarely the one people assume.
It usually isn’t carelessness
The instinct is to read all of this as a lack of care, effort, or attention. That’s often the wrong read. In many cases, what’s actually happening is a mind that’s carrying more than it can comfortably hold.
Take depression and memory. Studies on people with depression have repeatedly found measurable problems with memory, attention, and decision-making, and these problems don’t necessarily clear up once the depressive episode itself has lifted. So the friend who forgot your birthday, and then forgot again the next day, might not be someone who cares less about you. Their mind may still be working through something, even if from the outside it looks like they’ve moved on.
This matters because we tend to use memory as a stand in for how much someone cares. If they cared, surely they’d remember. But the research doesn’t support that link nearly as cleanly as we assume. Attention, planning, and processing speed can all take a hit during and after a depressive episode, which means the forgetting is often a symptom rather than a statement about you.
Anxiety takes up space
The classroom scene works a bit differently, but it comes from a related place. When a child is anxious, part of their mental capacity is already occupied by that anxiety, running quietly in the background even while they’re supposedly listening to a lesson. Research on anxiety and working memory backs this up: worry competes for the same mental resources that are needed to take in and store new information.
So when that child can’t answer what they learned in class, it’s rarely because they weren’t listening. It’s more likely that the fear of being called on, or of getting something wrong in front of classmates, was already using up the space where the lesson should have landed.
Working memory is sometimes compared to a small desk. There’s only so much room on it before things start falling off. For an anxious child, worry has usually claimed a chunk of that desk before the school day even starts, which leaves less room for anything else to stay in place.
Why students freeze under pressure
The frozen hand in the exam hall points to something researchers call cognitive flexibility, essentially how easily someone can switch approaches when a situation doesn’t go the way they expected. A large review pulling together data from over 8,000 people across dozens of studies found that anxiety specifically makes this kind of shifting harder.
That helps explain why a student can breeze through practice questions at home and then completely freeze the moment an exam question deviates even slightly from the format they rehearsed. It isn’t stubbornness, and it isn’t poor preparation. It’s closer to a nervous system caught off guard, unable to quickly let go of the familiar method and adapt to what’s actually being asked.
A different way to respond
These three situations don’t share a diagnosis. What they share is a case for pausing before reacting. Asking “Is everything OK?” costs very little compared to a sharp comment, and it tends to open things up rather than shut them down.
This isn’t only about how we treat other people either. Plenty of us have been the friend who forgot, the child who blanked, or the student who froze, and spent time afterwards wondering what was wrong with us when the honest answer is probably nothing. None of this is an excuse for every mistake, but knowing the mechanics behind these moments can make it easier to respond with patience instead of shame, both towards others and towards ourselves.
Misbah Saleem is a long-time Komodo dragon enthusiast from northern Myanmar. He speaks Vietnamese with a hint of a Ukrainian accent.
