Thought I would share an insight that I find helpful:
- Negative thoughts and feelings, and anxiety involve memory processes.
- Some memory processes are mutually exclusive, so when we remember a powerful negative states, we tend to do so at the price of forgetting positive states.
- In other words, we don’t feel good because we temporarily forget how to feel good.
- This is not careless forgetting. Our brains are designed to suppress memories that represent opposite states.
- But by treating these negative feelings as a memory challenge, we can learn to regulate our emotional state.
Leaving it to each individual to determine how to practice this type of recall with their own approach.
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Do you have a hint on your approach?
I can think of creating different memory palaces that have encoded past experiences like ‘feeling grateful’ or ‘blissfulness’ or ‘gratitude’. Having a routine to recall these to not forget them perhaps when we start to feel we are getting some anxiety… what are your thoughts on this?
If useful could be a handy tool. But I haven’t tried it yet.
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What is being forgotten is not the intellectual information, but we are forgetting is how to tell ourselves a positive story and how to feel the positive feeling.
I have found that it is easier to start with mild to medium intensity negative feelings—trying to recall the positive feelings and noticing how the principle of mutual exclusion causes the negative feelings to recede.
Our minds have a natural tendency to resist deliberate efforts to remember opposing feelings, but this opposition seems to me to get easier with practice. At first it feels “wrong”, but to me it is as if the mind relaxes a bit as it gets used to doing it.
I can only tell you what seems to work for me, but everyone is unique and this seems very experiential, which is why I think each person should try to work out their own process.
Hope this is of some help.
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I remember seeing something interesting when I was researching acting methods. I remember hearing a tip that was to remember moments to try to activate a specific emotion to help with training, but I simply don’t have any memory that relives a feeling just by remembering it, but two years ago, I did some things that brought me deep sadness and anger, and that moment was the only one I could remember and resurrect that same feeling. Several weeks later, I was trying to relive that feeling and it was still as strong as I felt the day I experienced it. If I tried really hard, I could bring tears to my eyes. Everything was great, I was going to try to use that to try acting, but from one day to the next I couldn’t feel anything reliving that moment. Now I’m reliving that same day to try to intensify the feelings I had that day, and also trying to simulate that deep sadness and anger with my imagination, it didn’t work, I have no idea how in less than 6 months I managed to lose such a gem. And now, even when I’m looking, I can’t find any memory that makes me feel any emotion just by reliving that specific moment, and that sucks, I can’t even relive very positive feelings
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Per my layman’s understanding of neuroscience, every time we recall a memory, we subtly alter it. I wonder if that is what happened with the emotional memory you were once able to conjure up.
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