It’s a strange thing to realise you can barely remember a decade of your own life: not because anything traumatic happened, but despite a decade full of things worth remembering: travel, house moves, job changes. Nothing dramatic. Just a strange blankness where the detail should be.

The explanation isn’t memory loss in the clinical sense. It’s closer to what happens to a newborn when the world becomes too intense to process: the system shuts down, not out of malfunction but as a protective response. Adults do something similar, except the shutdown isn’t sleep: it’s a kind of open-eyed absence. You keep functioning, keep showing up, but you’re not fully present to it.

The underlying mechanism is straightforward: when something is troubling you and goes unaddressed, your body keeps sending signals asking you to act on it. Ignore those signals long enough and parts of your system quietly switch off in self-defence: present in body, absent in experience. Over months or years, that adds up to exactly the kind of blank stretch that feels like memory loss but is really an absence of having been there at all.

Three steps help prevent it: build a genuine daily awareness of your body, rather than treating it as background noise; notice the signals it sends (aches, disrupted sleep, a mind that won’t settle) as information rather than annoyances; and, critically, trace each signal back to what’s actually causing it and address that directly, rather than pushing through.

None of this requires perfect self-awareness overnight. It requires treating physical signals as data worth investigating rather than static to tune out: a habit that, over time, keeps you present for the life you’re actually living instead of quietly checked out of it.