Member-only story
Don’t Let Your Brain Forget How Much This Experience Sucks
A case for an Anti-Gratitude Journal
I have a little white notebook that contains every negative thought I’ve had since quarantine started. I’ve dubbed it my Anti-Gratitude Journal. The pages are filled with coronavirus sadnesses big and small: “I am afraid my mom will die;” “I am so bored today and I hate my hair.”
The exercise helps me feel less anxious but, more importantly, it’s a bulwark against forgetting the pain of this moment. I harbor a fear that I will one day romanticize the long stretch of time spent with my husband, baby, and dogs. On Instagram, my life looks idyllic, and in many ways, we do have it pretty nice. But I don’t want to forget about the sleepless nights and chore-filled days, the loneliness and dread. I like my narratives to be accurate. And, unfortunately, accuracy is not our memory’s strongest suit.
“Chronic stress is, in general, not good for memory,” says Elizabeth Kensinger, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. “The parts of the brain that help us to lay down memories don’t fare well under sustained bombardment of stress hormones.”
However, she adds that we are able to retain certain pieces of information from prolonged negative experiences, including details that may help us in the future. “These details will probably differ from one person to the next,” she says. “But they may include details that triggered emotional reactions or that signaled the changing world.”
The purpose of emotions is to help us survive in future scenarios. Pain, both physical and emotional, teaches us. Your brain snags on details that might help you make future choices, explains Linda Levine, director of the Cognition and Emotion Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine.
“The meaning you make of an event is what leads you to feel emotions,” Levine says. “Later on, when you are remembering how you felt about something, those appraisals of the past event might have changed…
