Why Did I Come In Here? What Your Forgetful Moment Is Really Means

TL;DR: Walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there may have less to do with the doorway than with how much your mind was already carrying. Nicole Hollar, behavior change keynote speaker and integrative life coach, looks at how overloaded attention can make everyday forgetfulness more likely—and why greater presence may start with giving your brain less to juggle, not more memory tricks.

You're standing in the kitchen. You know you walked in here for a reason. You just stood in the living room fully intending to do this one specific thing, and now that you've arrived, the thing is gone. So, you stand there, mildly annoyed at your own brain, and either wait for it to come back or walk back to where you started so you can "reset."

Most people assume this means something is wrong with their memory. It usually doesn't. In 2011, University of Notre Dame researcher Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues found that crossing a doorway can create an “event boundary” in the mind, a kind of mental filing moment where the brain closes out the last scene and opens a new one. Cross the threshold, and whatever you were holding onto can become harder to retrieve. A 2021 study led by researchers at Bond University in Australia added an interesting wrinkle: the effect was far less consistent under ordinary conditions but became more apparent when researchers loaded people's working memory with a second task. The doorway isn't the problem. The doorway just exposes how much you were already carrying.

That differentiation matters more than the party-trick version of this story. If forgetting were only about walking through doorways, the fix would be simple: stop building doorways. Problem solved. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is your attention was already stretched across six things before you stood up, and the doorway was simply the moment it ran out of room to hold a seventh.

The room isn't the distraction. You are.

People love to blame the environment. The phone buzzed. The kid interrupted. The coworker stopped by. All true, and also beside the point. In my book “Feeling Stuck?” I talk about distraction the same way I talk about most behavior: you can outsource the blame to what's around you, or you can look at what you were doing with your attention before the interruption ever showed up. The average person spends a startling amount of time each day inside a social feed, a group chat, or some other input stream, and then acts surprised when their brain can't hold onto "go get the scissors" for the eleven seconds it takes to walk down the hall.

This is the part I'd push back on if I were sitting across from you. It's not that you have a bad memory. It's that you're rarely doing one thing. You're doing the task, plus replaying a conversation from this morning, plus half-drafting a text you haven't sent, plus keeping an ear out for the dog. Your brain takes in something like two million bits of information a second and can consciously process a tiny fraction of that. Every one of those background threads is competing for the same narrow lane. Something has to lose. Usually, it's the thing you just decided to go do.

Presence is a skill, not a personality trait

In the 6-5-10 Model™, Presence and Focus are two separate components on purpose. Focus is about deciding where your attention goes. Presence is about actually being where you put it. You can be focused on the right priority and still not be present, because your mind keeps drafting the next task while you're supposedly doing this one. Forgetting why you walked into the kitchen is a small, low-rent version of a much bigger pattern: sitting in a meeting while mentally writing an email, listening to your kid while thinking about tomorrow's schedule, nodding at your spouse while you're somewhere else entirely.

None of that makes you a bad partner, parent, or employee. It makes you a person who is running too many open tabs. But it's worth noticing what the small version reveals about the big one, because the kitchen isn't costing you anything except a walk back to the living room. A distracted conversation costs you the relationship information you needed and didn't catch. A distracted meeting costs you the decision you agreed to without fully hearing.

What helps

You can't out-discipline an overloaded system. Telling yourself to "just focus" while carrying six open loops is like telling a browser with forty tabs open to load faster. The fix isn't effort. It's reducing what's open.

A few things that move the needle, rather than sounding good and doing nothing:

• Name the task out loud before you move, even if you feel ridiculous doing it, because saying "I'm going to the kitchen for the scissors" forces the thought into a form your brain can hold past the threshold.
• Close loops instead of letting them idle. If something's nagging at you, write it down for two seconds so your brain can stop rehearsing it.
• Notice when you're doing three things that feel like one thing. Scrolling while half-listening isn't multitasking. It's two half-efforts, and neither one gets your full attention.

None of this requires a retreat, a new app, or a personality overhaul. It requires being honest about how much you're asking your brain to hold at once, and choosing to carry less of it at a time. That's not a productivity hack. That's just paying attention to your attention.

Listen to the discussion about this topic on The OWN IT Podcast

Questions for Reflection

1. When was the last time you forgot something mid-task, and what were you holding onto in the moments before it happened?
2. Where in your day do you tell yourself you're focused on one thing, when you're really managing two or three at once?
3. What's one open loop you're carrying right now that has nothing to do with what's in front of you, and what would it take to close it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the "doorway effect" a real psychological phenomenon?

Yes. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame first documented it in the mid-2000s, and later work out of Bond University found it's strongest when someone's working memory is already under load. Walking through a doorway isn't magic. It's a natural break point where the mind closes one mental "episode" and opens another, and anything you were holding loosely can get left behind.

Does forgetting things like this mean I have a memory problem?

Not necessarily. Occasional forgetfulness tied to distraction or mental overload is common and usually reflects attention, not memory capacity. If forgetfulness is frequent, worsening, or affecting daily functioning in ways that concern you, that's a conversation for a doctor, not a blog post.

What's the difference between focus and presence?

Focus is choosing where your attention should go. Presence is being there once you've made that choice. You can be focused on the right thing and still not be present with it, because your mind keeps drifting to the next task, the last conversation, or the thing you forgot to answer. Both matter, and they're not the same skill.