6 reasons why it is good to forget

Forgetting, contrary to what many people believe, is not withdrawing from a psychological battlefield. having suffered many casualties, as if the natural thing was to retain all the information that one day seemed relevant. People evolve, and that means that our propensity to evoke certain types of memories or others it does too.

Next we will see exactly why it is good to forget and why it is not a betrayal of our past identity.

• Related article: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

why is it good to forget

Among the advantages that you will see below, some are emotional and some are rational. This is normal, since memory works in these two areas of our mind.

1. Helps us prioritize in our lives

Forgetting is literally a prioritization process. Except in cases where there is a neurological disease, what we remember best at a given moment is because, in one way or another, it has to do with something that matters to us.

Thus, forgetting certain memories "clears the track" for us when it comes to

choosing between possible options in a decision making. The fact of having forgotten a person allows us not to even worry about the way in which we should relate to them, for example. To understand it better, the human brain only allows us to consciously decide between options that really compete with each other, instead of wasting time discarding elements that are not going to solve us nothing.

• You may be interested in: "How human memory works (and how it tricks us)"

2. It's a coping mechanism

Much of the process of overcoming traumas and bad moments in general has to do with forgetting. This, however, doesn't mean we're kidding ourselves, as could be supposed from pessimism. The truth is that, whatever we do, we never have a panoramic vision of the facts, ours is always a local perspective. This can be happy at times, or sad at others, but neither of the two cases is better adjusted to reality for being sad or happy.

Our options, therefore, are to be able to opt for a more positive way of life or for another marked by unhappiness: in both, our vision of things will be biased. That is why forgetting negative aspects of the past is not a bad thing, quite the opposite. It allows us to occupy our minds in experiences that, if we have the ability to immerse ourselves in them, we will be able to direct our subjectivity towards something that helps us move forward.

• Related article: "Emotional memory: what is it and what is its biological basis?"

3. Forgetting makes us more creative

When we forget, we don't just "delete" information from our brain; what actually happens is that we transform it. In fact, each time this phenomenon occurs, part of the information that we had stored breaks up from the rest and joins other memories or ideas.

The result is that, although certain memories cease to exist as they did before, new ones appear that receive the influence of the previous ones. Thus our mental life is enriched and has more ingredients to work with, since it does not work from "hermetic" categories linked to specific memories linked only to a specific context.

4. helps us mature

This advantage of forgetting is closely related to the previous one, and also has to do with the emotional intelligence. Forgetting all the psychological pain that certain situations caused us in the past not only prevents us from feeling upset, but also helps us distance ourselves from this type of content and evaluate in a more rational way what happened to us and the conclusion we can draw from it.

To understand it better, we can take into account the way in which the death of a family member influences us. At first, stress and sadness make our whole reality change, but as that wound closes, what remains it is useful for us to learn and that we can apply it to the rest of our lives: that it is important to value moments together, that we are all human, etc That would not happen if our emotions linked to that experience were constantly blocking any form of reasoning.

5. It can be useful to remember better

As we have seen, memory is a selective process. That's why deleting (or rather "dissolving") memories helps us remember things more quickly. Because? Because it eliminates distractions or elements that may resemble that memory that we are really trying to recover.

For example, if we have read the names of two different people who have a similar last name, forget the one that has to do with the least relevant allows fewer errors to be made when retrieving information about the other.

6. Allows us to better adapt to new challenges

If our memory capacity allowed us to remember almost everything that happens to us, we would not be very agile when it comes to responding to novel problems. The reason is that our record of memories would be so extensive that our attention would be oriented to that mental file, to look for what is relevant in it, instead of making us concentrate on the problem in front of us.

The result would be that doubts would paralyze us in a way that would keep our responsiveness at bay. More information is not the same as knowing how to use it well, and for this reason, the more efficient we are at eliminating pieces of information, the better.