You're walking around going about your business and suddenly you're thinking about the time in high school when you said stupid things.
It was a few years ago when you made a mistake.
You would like to die of shame.
Why do these negative memories come to mind? We feel embarrassed when the occasion is over.
There are two ways in which we remember our past.
There are two ways to go, one is voluntary and the other is compulsory. If you want to remember what you had for lunch, you have to remember what you did at work. During this process, we search for the memory in our minds.
There is a second way. These are memories that seem to pop into our heads and can be intrusive. This second type of memory comes from somewhere.
How memories are connected to each other is one of the answers. Our past experiences can be seen in the networks of cells in our brain.
Through the overlap of information in these representations, these neuron grow physical connections with each other.
Different beaches you've been to, restaurants you've eaten at, or times we have loved or argued with others are just some of the examples.
A memory can be activated by external stimuli from the environment or internal stimuli.
When the memories are activated, they are more likely to be remembered.
An example would be walking past a bakery smelling bread and having a thought of last weekend when you prepared a meal for a friend. When toast was burned, there was smoke in the house.
Sometimes the associations between memories aren't clear to us, and not all activation will lead to a conscious memory.
Emotions can be experienced when memories come to mind. Voluntary memories tend to be more positive than involuntarily. Positive and negative memories have different emotional tones.
Humans are more focused on avoiding bad outcomes, bad situations, and bad definitions of ourselves than on finding good ones. The pressing need for survival in the world is probably the reason for this.
We can feel sad, anxious, and even ashamed of ourselves.
A memory of embarrassment or shame might indicate to us that we have violated social norms, or that we have embarrassed ourselves.
We learn from our memories and emotional responses to manage future situations in a different way.
It's all good and we're able to remember our past without too much distress. Some people may be more likely to experience it than others.
There is one clue as to why. The tendency is to recall memories that are in line with our current moods.
If you're sad, you're more likely to remember memories of disappointment, loss, or shame.
Are you feeling sad about yourself? You are more likely to remember when you are scared or unsure.
In some mental health disorders, such as major depression, people more often recall memories that evoke negative feelings, the negative feelings are more powerful, and these feelings of shame or sadness are seen as facts about themselves. Feelings turn into facts.
Referring is one of the things that is more likely to happen in some mental health disorders. We think about negative experiences when we ruminate.
The function of rumination is to try and work out what happened and learn something to prevent it from happening again.
When we ruminate we become stuck in the past and experience negative emotions without much benefit.
It means that the memories in our neural networks are more likely to be recalled involuntarily.
There is good news and bad news. We can change our thoughts and feelings when we remember a memory.
In a process called reconsolidation, changes can be made so the next time that memory is recalled it is different to what it used to be.
We might remember a time when we were anxious about a test or a job interview that didn't go as well as we would have liked.
Reflecting, elaborating, and reframing that memory might involve remembering some aspects of it that did go well, integrating it with the idea that you stepped up to a challenge even though it was hard, and reminding yourself it's okay to feel anxious or disappointed.
Through this process of changing experiences in a way that is reasonable and self-compassionate, their prominence in our life and self-concept can be reduced.
One strategy for rumination is to notice when it is happening and try to shift attention to something that is absorbing and sensorial. You can short-circuit the rumination and get more value out of it.
We don't have to be stuck in the past because our brain will remind us of our experiences.
David John Hallford is a senior lecturer and clinical psychologist.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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