WHY WE REMEMBER THE BAD MORE THAN THE GOOD

Research shows humans can’t help dwelling on the bad stuff. Why is that – and how can we deal with negative memories that keep coming back?

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You had great birthdays as a child, but there was one party where you fell out of a tree and broke your leg, so all the kids had to go home. Which birthday memory pops in your head most often and is clearer than the rest? Chances are the bad one.

At the end of a good, productive work day, a colleague points out a typo you made in a letter. Just the one. When your partner asks how the day was, you say it was awful. The entire day is overshadowed by the one thing that upset you.

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?
Researchers have shown that bad memories are more vivid than good ones. It might be due to the interaction between emotions and memories. The stronger the emotions linked to a memory, the more detail we’ll recall.

It goes way back to early human days when, say, a hunter would remember a lion attack better than the thrill of discovering a new food supply. The bad thing brought emotion (fear and shock) and made the memory stick harder. It was necessary for survival: paying attention to threats could save your life next time.

Psychologists call this negative bias. It is our tendency not just to remember the bad more easily, but also to dwell on them. That can be upsetting or disturbing, but it can also influence your reactions and decisions.

Psychologist John Cacioppo showed pictures of positive, neutral and negative things to participants while checking the electrical activity in the brain. Negative images produced a much stronger response every time.

WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS?
The negativity bias can mess with relationships since you might always expect the worst from others – especially in long, close relationships.

When making decisions, two Nobel Prize-winning researchers discovered, people consistently place greater weight on the negative parts of an event than the positive ones.

We focus on the negative when forming impressions of others. Studies have shown that when given both “good” and “bad” adjectives to describe someone's character, participants give greater weight to the bad words when forming a first impression.

HOW DOES MEMORY WORK?
Proteins stimulate the brains cells to grow and form new connections, which is how memory is stored. The more we think about a memory or replay it in our heads, the stronger the connections become.

Experts used to think the older the memory, the more fixed it is. Now they know memory can change each time we recall it. Then it goes back to the memory bank stronger and clearer than before.

CAN WE FIGHT THIS?
Here are some suggestions from psychotherapist Amy Morin and a few other specialists.

Recognise your triggers. Is it a sound, a place, an experience? Figure it out and you can decide how to respond. Avoiding triggers is one option. Or it might become easier to deal with the memories when you know why they are resurfacing. Tell yourself the memory came back now because something reminded you of it.

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Stop negative self-talk
Pay attention to the kind of thoughts that run through your mind. After an event, you might be thinking “I shouldn’t have done that.” This negative self-talk shapes how you think about yourself and others. Stop those thoughts whenever they begin. Instead of fixating on past mistakes that cannot be fixed, think about what you have learned and how you might apply that in future.

Reframe the situation
How you talk to yourself about people and things plays a major role in how you interpret events. When you find yourself interpreting something negatively or focusing on the bad, look for ways to see it in a more positive light. You’re not ignoring threats, you’re refocusing so that you give fair and equal weight to good events.

Establish new patterns
Look for an uplifting activity to pull yourself out of negative thoughts. Telling yourself not to think about something could backfire — and cause you to think about it even more. Redirect your attention: do something you enjoy.

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Set aside time to think. Your brain needs a chance to process your daily life. Set aside 20 minutes each day to think, worry or reflect. When you start worrying or brooding outside that time, remind yourself: "I'll think about that later.”



Savour positive moments. Give extra attention to good things that happen. Negative things can be transferred and stored quickly in your long-term memory, but you have to make more of an effort to make those happy moments stick.

So when something great happens, replay it several times in your head and focus on how good it makes you feel. As the song goes: "You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative”.

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Sources: https://www.verywellmind.com, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com, https://www.psychologytoday.com, https://www.verywellmind.com