Title: How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
Headings: How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
Stress and Memory
Improve Your Memory Under Stress

Content: Stress can inhibit the way we form and retrieve memories and can affect how our memory works. Fortunately, there is good news here to balance out the bad. Here is what research tells us about the effects of stress on memory. Stress and Memory
Stress can affect how memories are formed. When stressed, people have a more difficult time creating short-term memories and turning those short-term memories into long-term memories, meaning that it is more difficult to learn when stressed. Stress can affect the type of memories we form as well. If we are stressed during an event, we may have more difficulty accurately remembering the details of the event later, as the stress we felt colors our perceptions as well as our ability to recall what we perceived at the time. This is part of why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable—people can be absolutely sure they saw something a certain way, but this doesn't mean that they are correct. Memories can also change after they are formed. In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, we color it with our present experience of it, like when we take something off a shelf and then put it back, leaving fingerprints from having handled it again.