How to Decrease Your Stress By Improving Your Memories

Two Ways That Our Faulty Memories Increases Our Stress

Photo by Victoria Palacios on Unsplash

What’s bad about your life these days?

• Is a failed relationship tormenting you with regret?
• Is baggage from your childhood weighing you down?
• Are you miserable at work every day?

Here’s something to consider. It might not be as bad as you think. In fact, the chances are it’s not.

You couldn’t disagree more, I know.

You’re probably saying:

• “You have no idea how neglected I was by my parents.”
• “You have no idea what a narcissist my partner was.”
• “You have no idea how bad last week at work was.”

You’re right, I don’t. But guess what?

Neither do you.

At least not according to Nobel Peace Prize winning social scientist Daniel Kahneman and his concept called the Tyranny of the Remembering Self.

Kahneman’s idea, in a nutshell, is this.

The memory of our experiences is rarely an accurate portrayal of the actual experiences.

To flesh that idea out a bit requires a primer on something that Kahneman calls The Two Selves.

The Two Selves

In his research, Kahneman found that there is a polarity of mental processes at work when it comes to how we go about evaluating the quality of our experiences.

Kahneman calls them the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self.

1. The Experiencing Self

This is the part of our consciousness that actually has the experience in real time.

• We slog through adverse conditions on our job every day.
• We argue then make-up, rinse and repeat, over the course of that year-long relationship with a significant other.
• We feel the sting of the pain of neglect as we sit at home alone while our absentee parents chase their second childhood.

In real time, the experiencing self receives input from our immediate circumstances and makes any adjustments necessary for our survival.

This experiencing self, has a short shelf life, however, not unlike a vapor. It’s there for a moment, then fades into oblivion moments later.

When we move on to the next moment all we are left with is the memory of what we experienced.

This brings us to the remembering self.

2. The Remembering Self

This is the part of us that EVALUATES the quality of our experiences based on our memory of them.

Here’s an example of how that plays out.

• When we are faced with the prospects of entering a new relationship, we remember the pain of betrayal in our last one and decide whether or not to trust again.
• When we have children of our own, we remember the pain of our own neglect and possibly choose to run ourselves ragged by involving our kids in every extra-curricular activity imaginable.
• When Sunday afternoon arrives, we remember how terrible last week was at work and possibly go online and start filling out job applications.

If its true that experience isn’t the best teacher, evaluated experience is this type of live-and-learn mentality seems to be a sound strategy for improving our lives.

Except for one little caveat. That is, the quality of our memories is extremely unstable.

In fact, putting in bluntly, Kahneman says, “Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong.”

This is a really big problem because memories of our experiences are all we have to go on when making future life adjustments.

In other words, the quality of your life decisions moving forward can only be as good as the quality of how you remember them.

It, therefore, behooves us to pay special attention to shoring up the leaks in how we remember what really goes on in our lives.

Here are a few ways we can do that.

Two Ways to Improve the Memory of Your Experiences

1. Slow Down and Open Your Mind

First of all, if we really slow down and reflect with sincerity, we can improve the accuracy of our memory.

Often, the fact that we have already made up in our minds what an experience was like taints the validity of our memory.

If you’re going to get closer to truthfully recalling and evaluating your life, you must open up your mind to the possibility that you could be mistaken about your perception of certain life events.

To challenge this, discuss an experience that you share with someone else. What was their perspective on this experience? If it’s different than yours, be open to the possibility that you misremembered.

But to really level-up in our decision making, we must put the microscope on two specific places that our memories go off the rails. Kahneman points these out in what he calls the peak-end rule.

Let’s break these down one at a time.

2. Break the “peak-end rule”

Peak-End Rule says our memory puts much more weight on our most intense experiences (peak) and the ones that were most recent (end).

Peak

In other words, perhaps you have a job that is mostly okay, yet when it’s bad, its REALLY bad. In this case, when you evaluate the quality of your job, your remembering self will automatically pull up your MOST INTENSE experiences and discriminate in their favor.

Unsurprisingly, in the above case, you would conclude that your job is the absolute worst.

Now let’s look at the end part of the rule.

End

Hypothetically, let’s say you had a year-long relationship with someone and the relationship was mostly good over the course of the year. Now, let’s throw in a plot twist and imagine that the relationship ended with a nasty conflict.

When you calm down enough to evaluate the quality of this relationship, your remembering self will immediately recall the unfortunate way the relationship ended and attach more weight to that isolated sliver of time.

Once again, your final evaluation of the relationship will more than likely conclude that it was much worse than it actually was.

As convinced of these final evaluations though you may be, it is unlikely that either of your conclusions is reliable enough to build a legitimate evaluation upon. This is because, in both cases, your remembering self caused you to assign an inordinate weight to a small portion of your experience while largely ignoring the quality of the whole.

It could very well be that your job is just fine over the long haul. Only its those acute experiences that really sway you to buying into its downside.

Furthermore, in all actuality, you might have had a largely positive experience in your year-long relationship. Yet, the nasty way it ended became a red herring that threw you off the trail and has you possibly believing that you will never find true love.

In both cases, you’ve been tricked into ignoring the length of time that you spent in a satisfied state during your experiences.

And yes, Kahneman has a name for this phenomenon as well. He calls it duration neglect.

Put very simply, duration neglect happens when our memory ignores the quality of our experience over time.

Here’s an example of how I’ve noticed this play out in my own life.

Worst Job Ever?

As a teacher, I’ve had a few really tough weeks at school recently. Furthermore, one of my classes, in particular, is rife with behavior problems.

Leveraging its two secret weapons, peak-end rule, and duration neglect, my remembering self tried to convince me that my job is the absolute worst.

At Kahneman’s urging, however, I used effortful thinking to counteract these two mental fallacies.

Here’s how I did it.

First, I identified those peak and end negative experiences and totally owned them. Yes, my peak experiences were horrible. They hurt. And having a couple of poor endings to the week was not fun at all.

Second, and most importantly, I identified which variables that my remembering self wanted me to leave out and purposefully inserted them into the evaluation of my job.

They are as follows:

• I have three months off during the summer.
• I never have to travel for work.
• I get to talk about stories all day (something I love).
• I get to empower people all day (something else I love).
• I’m home before 5 p.m. every day.
• Because I teach English, I have a job that simultaneously improves my writing.
• MOST of my students are good, respectful kids.

Once I added these variables and recalculated quality of my job, you can imagine how it improved my perspective.

And an improved perspective led to an improved mood, which led to improved results, so on and so forth.

The final result is that I still have just as many intense negative experiences throughout the week, but because, in real time, I’m simultaneously figuring the positive experiences into the equation, my mood isn’t dragged into the tank as often.

And yes, I still have days and weeks that end with a thud, but I more quickly flush the negative experience because, once again, I’m simultaneously factoring in the volume of positive teaching moments and interactions throughout the week.

Overall, making this simple mental adjustment has reduced my stress level at work profoundly.

I believe it can do the same for you.

Try it.

What can it hurt?

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