Memories

Memories: Creating Fabulous Memories

Here in the UK, we have what we describe as a long weekend. Monday is a public holiday, we call it a bank holiday. During this extra leisure time, you might be spending time with friends and family. I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time, and the question I ask you is how can you ensure that the wonderful time translates into wonderful memories?

Professor Hood, in his book The Self Illusion, suggests that most of us expect our memories to be stored like recordings on a DVD …however he suggests that thinking of them as being more like a compost heap might be more accurate. If you’ve ever looked in a composter you’ll know that some things disintegrate immediately, and there tends to be just the occasional item that doesn’t decompose. Our memories have this tendency to decompose.

That may not be a cheery thought – BUT there is a way to inoculate our memories from this inevitable decay. The way to do this is to give your experiences and then the subsequent memory energy. You might wonder how you give an experience and memory “energy” … essentially it’s really easy, and probably something that you already do to some extent. To give an experience energy you talk about it, you share it, you re-live the experience.

Now this does come with a word of caution. ALL MEMORIES can be inoculated, not just the FUN ones. So if you give energy to negative events and experiences, those memories will be the memories that take longer to decompose.

So, my tip for you on this bank holiday weekend is to do something FUN, and then to share the experience. My personal experience is that if you’re not used to talking about positive experiences shortly after it happened – it can feel VERY odd.

Let me give you a quick example, the first time I tried this was a couple of years ago. I visited the National Gallery in London with my partner. We enjoyed the gallery and deliberately went out to dinner to talk about our experience. There was a little voice in my head that was screaming “you were there, we saw the same stuff, why are we talking about this?” My natural tendency is to look to the next thing, to the future. But this experience has shown me how powerful “giving energy” to positive events is.  I describe time perspectives (our past, present or future focus) more fully in a previous blog.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog, you may be interested in a previous blog on positive emotions.

REFERENCES:

HOOD, B. 2012. The Self Illusion, UK, Constable & Robinson Ltd.