The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• We can become adept at making (and keeping) ourselves miserable

  • Today’s video has 7 tips for doing exactly that!

  • Of course, if you want to take those tips and do the opposite, then warning: doing so could result in joy instead!

• Memories are principally stored as sensory experiences

  • To boost a memory, we can pay more attention to (ideally) all 5 senses of an experience

  • To minimize a memory, we can do the opposite in a very rapid, active fashion

• Sometimes, there are dark places in our minds that we’d rather not go at all

  • We can make those memories a lot less likely to be accessed accidentally, by using the “missing step” technique discussed in today’s main feature

  • This is not a substitute for therapy, and especially in the case of PTSD, we recommend enlisting professional help and guidance.

• When it comes to supplements, sometimes cost is no guarantee of quality.

  • Ora combats this in three ways (see today's sponsor section for details!)

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

7 Ways to Maximize Misery!

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Prefer text? This video was adapted from Dr. Randy Paterson’s book “How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use”

⛔️ MAIN FEATURE

How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories

We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).

We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.

But what about the moments we’d rather forget?

First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.

One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.

Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”

That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.

For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…

Two Steps To Forgetting

The first step:

You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.

To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.

The second missing step:

This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.

To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.

Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.

So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.

The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.

Important reminder

The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.

If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Ora | Purer, Cleaner, Stronger: Supplements That Work!

It’s easy to have an expectation of “you get what you pay for”, but one of the biggest problems buying supplements is that sometimes cost is no guarantee of quality.

In other words, you can pay too much and still get something that was made in someone’s shed and contains many impurities, or was manufactured in a way that completely defeats the purpose and robs the supplement of any effectiveness.

Ora combats this in three ways:

• Having high quality (and transparent, verifiable!) sources

• Having rigorous testing of their products

  • (by 3rd party labs; you can see those test results on their website)

• Having a 60-day no-quibble money-back guarantee—if you’re not satisfied with the results, they’ll refund you in full

As for what they sell, they have a range of 28 products so far, for comprehensive all-around health.

Click here to check out Ora and start enjoying better daily cumulative results from your supplementation!

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Cumulative time spent in “vigorous” physical activity lowers mortality risk

• Better tests needed to identify Candida auris susceptibility

• Avatar therapy-linked emotions identified in treatment-resistant schizophrenia

• Radioactive iodine or surgery associated with increased survival in hyperthyroidism

• Study finds "robotic pill" can safely deliver injectable osteoporosis drug

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships - by Dr. Richard Schwartz

As self-therapy approaches go, the title here could be read two ways: as pop-psychology fluff, or a suggestion of something deeper. And, while written in a way to make it accessible to all, we're happy to report the content consists of serious therapeutic ideas, presented clearly.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a large, internationally recognized, and popular therapeutic approach. It's also an approach that lends itself quite well to self-therapy, as this book illustrates.

Dr. Schwartz kicks off by explaining not IFS, but the problem that it solves... We (most of us, anyway) have over the course of our lives tried to plug the gaps in our own unmet psychological needs. And, that can cause resentment, strain, and can even be taken out on others if we're not careful.

The real meat of the book, however, is in its illustrative explanations of how IFS works, and can be applied by an individual. The goal is to recognize all the parts that make us who we are, understand what they need in order to be at peace, and give them that. Spoiler: most what they will need is just being adequately heard, rather than locked in a box untended.

One of the benefits of using this book for self-therapy, of course, is that it requires a lot less vulnerability with a third party.

But, speaking of which, what of these intimate relationships the subtitle of the book referenced? Mostly the benefits to such come from a "put your own oxygen mask on first" angle... but the book does also cover discussions between intimate partners, and approaches to love, including what the author calls "courageous love".

Bottom line: this is a great book if you want to do some "spring-cleaning of the soul" and live a little more lightly as a result.

Click here to check out "You Are The One You've Been Waiting For" on Amazon today, and try out IFS for yourself!

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and peaceful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team