The brain easily forgets a password for an email or a PIN card, but at the same time it often flatly refuses to forget unpleasant memories that are of absolutely no use. The brain clearly experiences a subtle pleasure in reminding us of unpleasant events and making us return to them again and again. Most of all, he likes to torment us with such memories in the evenings, before going to bed, and in the mornings, when we are just starting to wake up. Why does the brain forget necessary information and store unnecessary information?
The main task of the brain is our safety. The brain collects all our troubles, problems, griefs and disappointments - in order to recognize and avoid them in advance in the future.
The brain loves its collection of troubles very much and stores it carefully. And... he never shows it to us. The brain stores the vast majority of memories about unpleasant and painful events outside of our access, in the passive part of long-term memory.
And there is only a very small part of negative memories that the brain allows itself to bother us with. These are the memories that the brain cannot transfer for storage because in each of them there is some kind of inconsistency, some kind of contradiction that the brain cannot resolve.
What are memories made of?
A memory is not a one-dimensional thought or idea.
It is the sum of impressions from specific events in your past. You remember not a point in time, but many sensory details. For example, if you try to remember a pleasant day spent at the beach as a child, more than just the image of a river will come to mind. You will remember how warm the sand was, the smell of the wind and the taste of the ice cream you bought at the kiosk across the street.
Any of these sensations can become a trigger. When you buy an ice cream that tastes similar to the one from your childhood, you will be transported back to a hot day on a river beach.
Thus, memories are inseparable from context.
Low self-esteem: run after me
Low self-esteem leads to the fact that you love when people run after you, because it gives you the feeling that you are needed, desired and valuable.
A person with healthy self-esteem does not need people to run after him. He does not have a lack of attention, love and care, which he is trying to compensate for through an inadequate amount of attention from a new boyfriend. He is able to give this care, attention and love to himself.
Therefore, when so much attention begins to pour on his head, he perceives it not as an opportunity to satisfy his inadequate emotional needs, but as an unnecessary excess.
At first, excessive attention may touch him, but very soon it will bore him. It begins to choke him.
On the other hand, a person with low self-esteem needs just this. And this makes such a person more susceptible to various manipulative tactics.
How to manage memories?
Context is the most important factor for anyone who wants to learn how to manage their memories. After all, with its help you can consolidate a memory. The wider and brighter the context, the more strongly we remember the event.
Let's go back to the memory of a hot day at the beach. It is advisable that you remember details, settings, emotions and feelings. Then the context will be formed.
If you remember the easy flow of river water, the warm sand of the coast, the hot asphalt of the path next to your umbrella and the creamy taste of ice cream, the memory of this day will remain very vivid and full for many years. The broader the context, the more varied the experience. This is what we recall when we remember a hot day spent in childhood.
So if we know how to use context to create a memory, can we find a way to erase our memories?
Automate familiar actions
Try to accustom yourself to automaticity in performing current tasks and responsibilities. Then you won't have to remember them and will complete them when needed. For example, get into the habit of paying your household bills online. Or enter all the birthdays into your smartphone so that it reminds you of them at least a week before the event. Plan a week in advance for dinners with friends, clothes, necessary housework, etc. The more clearly everything is planned, the less stress you will have to feel.
How can you erase memories?
A forgetting strategy may be to allow yourself to forget certain details of an event in order to destroy the memory completely.
To test this assumption, scientists conducted a study in which two groups of people took part. They had to learn words from two separate lists while simultaneously looking at photographs of different landscapes to create context for the memory.
One group was told to approach the task very carefully: memorize the first list of words and only then move on to the second. Subjects from the second group were asked to first learn words and then forget them. Then the volunteers had to repeat what they remembered.
The brain activity of the experiment participants was studied using functional MRI. It turned out that the subjects who forgot the learned words had a much lower level of activity in the part of the brain that is responsible for processing images. This group of participants simply let the words and images slip from their minds.
When the brain tries to remember words, facts, images, it is constantly working to create context. When the brain tries to forget something, it initially rejects the context and abstracts itself from it. Therefore, memories are created with difficulty and do not last long.
If we return to the example with the beach, we can say this: in order to forget this day, you would have to specifically try to forget the taste of ice cream and the hot sand under your feet.
On purpose or unintentionally?
“Closer-further” can occur both consciously and intentionally, and unconsciously. In this post, I am writing only about the first, deliberate option, in which a person specifically uses manipulative tactics to tie you to himself, while perfectly understanding what he is doing and why.
If you want to know what to do if you are caught in a never-ending cycle of getting closer and further away in a long-term relationship with someone who seems to be behaving this way unconsciously, then leave a comment on this post.
If I see that the post “gets” the public, then I will definitely make a second part, where I will talk about the “closer-further” cycle in long-term relationships, and what to do there.
Is it possible to delete a memory completely?
Does this method always work 100%? Of course not. It’s impossible to say that scientists have discovered a magical way to forget, like in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” We know too little about the brain and memory and do not know how to erase memories.
Forgetting is very useful. We can use it to help us cope with a traumatic experience or painful event. Forgetting is necessary to clear the brain of unnecessary information.
In the experiment, participants remembered and forgot simple things: words and pictures. A real memory consists of dozens of details and sensory impressions, so erasing it is not so easy. But this research is the first step in the beginning of a very intriguing and alluring path.
It looks like we can figure out how to forget unpleasant and unnecessary things. More importantly, we will learn to remember happy days and moments for the rest of our lives.
Why do housewives break dishes?
How to forget a person who offended you or caused you pain? Generally speaking, it is better not to forget such a person. The brain will try to retain such memories in order to recognize a similar situation in advance and prevent it from happening again.
But it is possible and necessary to make such a memory less painful. First of all, for this you need to clearly and clearly understand what mistake you made in your relationship with this person? What exactly was the cause of your problem? What can you do next time to prevent the situation from happening again? This will help the brain finish analyzing the situation and send the memory of it to long-term memory.
And the next step is to free the memory of the offender from the emotional charge.
One of the easiest ways to forget an offender and at the same time relieve stress was invented by our grandmothers - breaking dishes. You take a plate, mentally draw the face of the offender on it, name it with a name you hate and - with all your might, hit the wall! You can also use a hammer. The main thing is that children and small animals do not get caught in the hail of shrapnel.
By the way, in Japan, where they started fighting stress earlier than in Europe and achieved some success, there is a chain of cafes where you can break dishes. They say that quarreling married couples often come there, have dinner, break dishes and make up. So don't be shy - go for it.
If it helps, very good. If not, then to consolidate the effect, you can use the following simple and effective method.
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Play eraser
You feel that a lot of emotional junk has accumulated in your memory:
- snippets of dialogue;
- words of a tired song;
- the image of a rude cashier.
Play eraser. Imagine all this drawn in a school notebook. Go over it with an elastic band - methodically, carefully, until there are holes. An imaginary eraser will work well with annoying little memories.
Content:
Step 1. What to do when the world collapses?
- What you definitely should NOT do in the heat of the moment
- How to survive the pain of parting with a loved one?
- How can talking to a friend help?
Step 2. Feelings that prevent you from moving on.
- 5 stages of accepting change (Kübler-Ross model)
- Feeling of loss. Technique “Writing about the past”
- Feeling guilty for causing a breakup
- A feeling of resentment that he did not appreciate, did not understand, and left.
- Technology for identifying beliefs in 4 steps
Step 3. How to start a new life from scratch?
- 60 days of silence and peace
- How to behave when meeting your ex?
- Why skydive or scuba dive?
- Why you shouldn't plunge into dates and new novels
- Questions that will help you draw conclusions for the future
Check me out on Instagram. All the latest and most useful information is there, the link will open in a new window
Exercise "Mariana Trench"
If we are talking about something more serious than a failed interview or a sarcastic comment on the Internet, then it is better to turn to the Mariana Trench exercise.
“Pack” your memory into a capsule (in the form of a letter, photograph, video file, collage of images) and send it to a depth of 10994 meters. Each time the memory tries to return, imagine:
- sea water gradually seeps into the capsule;
- the container is covered with shells;
- the capsule is covered with bottom sand -
and... the memory will physically cease to exist.
Suppression
This method is considered specifically as a psychotherapeutic one, i.e. thanks to him, it becomes possible to forget what has a traumatic effect on the psyche. Often some memories of negative events bother people and come to mind more and more often because of their vivid emotional coloring. A person begins to react sharply to this, to be afraid of these memories, and they become stronger. To eliminate these and other various obsessive thoughts, two exercises are usually used.
1
"Burning Letter"
Write down on a piece of paper all the memories that make you feel negative emotions. Describe them in full detail. Then take this sheet, crumple it and place it in a pre-prepared fireproof container. Set fire to the crumpled sheet. Watch the flame. And while the leaf burns, imagine how all the memories that bother you burn with it, and then turn into ashes. As soon as the paper completely burns out, scatter the ashes to the wind, throwing them, for example, out the window.
The essence of this exercise is that it not only helps you get rid of unnecessary memories, but also becomes their master. It is by having the opportunity to manage his memories that a person can get rid of them. This may even be unpleasant to some extent, but the result is worth it, because a person no longer needs to defend himself from annoying thoughts or suppress them, because he can simply describe them and burn them. And fire, as we know, has always been the best psychotherapist for people: looking at it, people were cleansed of what was psychologically pressing on them, “threw a heavy burden off their shoulders.” If a person has a vivid imagination, he is able to almost literally imagine how his troubles and misfortunes burn together with the paper, freeing his memory from a heavy burden.
2
"TV"
Sit in a comfortable chair or sofa and take a comfortable body position. Try to project your negative experiences in detail onto a large television screen created in your imagination. After that, pick up the same imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Watch it as a silent movie. Then gradually make the image blurry and dull. Imagine that it becomes less and less bright and disappears completely.
The most important thing in this exercise is not to rush. There is no need to try to complete the entire exercise in a couple of minutes. On the contrary, you need to visualize the process in as much detail as possible. For example, you can imagine how, after the picture disappears, you turn off the TV, unplug the power cord, pick up the TV, bring it to the window and throw it away.
You can also get creative with the film itself: change the plot from drama to comedy. Model the continuation of the situation in a comical version, put a funny melody or a stupid song on the image, imagine that the role is played not by you, but by one of the comedians. Become the director of your memories - this way you can manage and control them. If you don't need them, throw them out of your “video library”.
Even if “Burning Letter” and “TV” do not completely rid you of memories, you will no longer be afraid of them in any case. And if you are not afraid of them, then they will probably become indifferent to you. And what is indifferent to a person rarely disturbs his memory.
