Good day, our dear readers! We, Irina and Igor, have prepared for you new article. In our age information technologies A person is bombarded with a huge flow of various, not always necessary, information. Add to this a bunch of fragmentary emotional memories that are not always positive, and you end up with a “mess” in your head.
In order for our brain to function fully and clearly, we, like computers, periodically need to clear space in our memory. But how can you learn to forget the unnecessary? Let's talk about this in our article today.
What is it for?
Remember, in student years, the mechanism of forgetting worked perfectly for everyone: as soon as you passed a subject, knowledge on it disappeared at the same moment. According to scientific research, we forget approximately 80% of all information that comes to us.
The fact is that if a person remembered every detail that happened to him in life, then we would not live to see ten years.
It's not just a matter of negative emotions and experiences that we would experience in our heads again and again, and the fact is that our memory, like that of machines, has a limited capacity. This is why it is important to be able to clear space for new information and impressions.
But old emotions are not so easy to get rid of. In this case, we recommend that you use one of the methods below, which will undoubtedly give positive results.
Cleansing Fire
For this technique, you will need a sheet of paper on which you should write down in detail what you want to forget. This can be difficult, especially if the memory is associated with some negative experience.
But don't worry, you will experience these feelings in last time. After you have fully described all the details of the memory, crumple the paper and set it on fire. Watch the fire, imagine that your memories are burning in this fire. Fire has a powerful cleansing energy, just let it take that memory away from you.
Stills from the film
If the fiery procedure does not suit you, then we suggest you use another method: turn the memory into stills from a film.
Play through the details of the action or emotions in your head, think about what kind of soundtrack you can put on at the moment. Afterwards, play with the plot, play it in reverse order in your head, change the actors, for example, replace yourself with Sylvester Stallone and imagine him in the same situation.
And then imagine that you are cutting these frames from the film with scissors, like excess material. They simply shouldn't be in your film.
Miracle Eraser
This method is good for small unnecessary memories: the words of an annoying song, the image of a neighbor who was rude to you, other useless snippets of dialogue that just don’t want to leave your memory.
Imagine all these situations drawn with a pencil in a school album, and then just go over them with an eraser several times and carefully, maybe even to the point of holes. This will help get rid of unpleasant images in your head.
"Mariana Trench"
Another practical exercise for getting rid of deep-seated negative memories is called the Mariana Trench. Such a depression actually exists in the Pacific Ocean, and today it is believed to be the deepest place in the world's oceans. Scientists estimate the depth in this place to be 10,994 meters.
What is the exercise? You need to visualize your memory: in the form of a written letter, photographs, video, collage, or something else.
Then mentally pack the memory into a capsule and imagine how you throw this capsule overboard the ship into that same Mariana Trench.
Imagine that water might get into the capsule and wash everything away, that one of the deep sea inhabitants will make a home in it, or that it will simply be covered with sand. This practice will help you get rid of even the deepest memories.
Notes
The last method is a little paradoxical, but its essence is that you need to write it down in order to forget something. Is in this amazing fact: By writing something down, we free ourselves from the obligation to remember it, because we wrote it down.
This method is suitable for small thoughts in the form of a planned shopping list, phone numbers, some planned tasks, or for something else not so important.
Learning to get rid of unnecessary things is an entire art, and Dominique Loro’s book can teach you this. “The art of living simply. How to get rid of unnecessary things and enrich your life" .
How do you get rid of unnecessary memories? Have you ever tried the methods described above? What was the result? Share your experience with us in the comments to the article. See you soon!
Best regards, Irina and Igor
Psychologists say that a person forgets 80% of what he heard in 24 hours, and 90% of the information received in two days. To forget the remaining 10%, we need only one week. It seems that the mechanism of forgetting is fine-tuned by our brain to perfection. But sometimes we still want to erase unpleasant memories from our lives!
You've probably already heard about ways to improve memory and various exercises for memorization. But when we need to not remember, but rather forget about something, other exercises will come to the rescue.
Techniques designed to make you forget necessary information, are called flying technicians (from the name of the ancient Greek river of oblivion Lethe, remember the expression “sink into oblivion”). Let's look at a few exercises that will help you forget unpleasant moments:
"TV"
Sit comfortably in your favorite chair or sofa. Imagine your negative experiences shown on a big TV screen. Take an imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Observe the picture, then make it fade and finally dissolve. Don’t rush to complete the exercise in a couple of minutes, imagine a lot of details.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on paper those memories or feelings that bother you unpleasantly. Then crumple this sheet and burn it in a special container. Imagine that all your negative emotions burn away along with the paper. This will help you gain control over the situation.
"Rag"
This method is suitable for forgetting not so much unpleasant as unnecessary things. Imagine these facts written on chalk school board. Take an imaginary wet washcloth in your hands and start wiping them off the board. Continue the exercise until new information no longer appears in place of the erased information and the board becomes clean.
"Recording"
Our brain considers it unnecessary to remember information that is written down and always at hand. Use this feature if you need to forget something unimportant. Write down your daily plans, make shopping lists, and write down phone numbers instead of keeping it all in your head at once.
Have a good, but selective, memory!
Memory is one of the most important, influencing his entire life. And many people take the problem of developing their memory skills very seriously. Fortunately, there are a huge number of opportunities today: various trainings, courses, seminars and other training programs. If a person has a need to improve his memory, he can easily find suitable materials. However, much less attention is paid to the problem of forgetting, although its importance is no less. After all, many of us often have a desire to get rid of some memories, feelings from the past, and simply free our memory from unnecessary information. This is exactly what we decided to talk about.
Among the many methods designed to improve memory, there are special methods designed for intentional forgetting. Their totality is called flying technology. The term itself has its roots in greek mythology, in which the well-known Lethe River was often mentioned (remember the common expression “sink into oblivion”). Lethe is the river of oblivion, which was located in the underground domain of Hades. Dead souls who entered his kingdom, having drunk water from Lethe, forever forgot that they had ever lived.
So what are the benefits of flying technology and what exactly is it used for? To begin with, it is worth saying that the property of human memory to forget is its integral component, because thanks to it, mnemonic processes are complete. And many Russian and foreign psychologists have talked and are talking about this. It is the ability to forget that helps a person erase from memory something that happened in the past, but has an impact on destructive influence on the psyche and personality in the present, as well as any currently irrelevant information. These are the two main reasons why it is recommended to master forgetting techniques.
There are two main flight methods: suppression and removal. Let's consider each of them separately.
Suppression
This method is considered specifically as a psychotherapeutic one, i.e. thanks to him, it becomes possible to forget what has a traumatic effect on the psyche. Often some memories of negative events bother people and come to mind more and more often because of their vivid emotional coloring. A person begins to react sharply to this, to be afraid of these memories, and they become stronger. To eliminate these and other various obsessive thoughts, two exercises are usually used.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on a piece of paper all the memories that make you feel negative emotions. Describe them in full detail. Then take this sheet, crumple it and place it in a pre-prepared fireproof container. Set fire to the crumpled sheet. Watch the flame. And while the leaf burns, imagine how all the memories that bother you burn with it, and then turn into ashes. As soon as the paper completely burns out, scatter the ashes to the wind, throwing them, for example, out the window.
The essence of this exercise is that it not only helps you get rid of unnecessary memories, but also becomes their master. It is by having the opportunity to manage his memories that a person can get rid of them. This may even be unpleasant to some extent, but the result is worth it, because a person no longer needs to defend himself from annoying thoughts or suppress them, because he can simply describe them and burn them. And fire, as we know, has always been the best psychotherapist for people: looking at it, people were cleansed of what was psychologically pressing on them, “threw a heavy burden off their shoulders.” If a person has a vivid imagination, he is able to almost literally imagine how his troubles and misfortunes burn together with the paper, freeing his memory from a heavy burden.
"TV"
Sit in comfortable armchair or on the sofa and take a comfortable body position. Try to project your negative experiences in detail onto a large television screen created in your imagination. After that, pick up the same imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Watch it as a silent movie. Then gradually make the image blurry and dull. Imagine that it becomes less and less bright and disappears completely.
The most important thing in this exercise is not to rush. There is no need to try to complete the entire exercise in a couple of minutes. On the contrary, you need the process to be as detailed as possible. For example, you can imagine how, after the picture disappears, you turn off the TV, unplug the power cord, pick up the TV, bring it to the window and throw it away.
You can also get creative with the film itself: change the plot from drama to comedy. Model the continuation of the situation in a comical version, put a funny melody or a stupid song on the image, imagine that the role is played not by you, but by one of the comedians. Become the director of your memories - this way you can manage and control them. If you don't need them, throw them out of your “video library”.
Even if “Burning Letter” and “TV” do not completely rid you of memories, you will no longer be afraid of them in any case. And if you are not afraid of them, then they will probably become indifferent to you. And what is indifferent to a person rarely disturbs his memory.
Removal
This is the second flying method. It is intended to a greater extent to remove from memory information that has lost its relevance and represents only mental and emotional garbage. Several exercises can be distinguished in the removal technique.
"Flight technical rag"
For example, your memory contains unnecessary images (words, people, pictures, data), which, although they do not have a negative effect, distract your attention and interfere with concentration, free flow of thoughts, etc. Imagine all this information figuratively reflected on a large chalk board. Then imagine taking a wet rag and erasing all those blocks of this information that you don’t need. In empty spaces, new images may form, related to the previous ones or associated with those nearby. Take the rag again and continue washing. Do this until nothing appears in the empty space. This technique is suitable if there is little information, because... you can divide the board into several sectors and clear each of them in turn.
"Images on Film"
There are cases when the amount of information is large and a simple “flying rag” may not work. Then you can transform this technique a little. Imagine that all the images being recreated are displayed on the same board, but only it is covered with an opaque film. Fill this entire film with unnecessary data, and then simply pull it off the board, immediately freeing up a large space on a new film stretched over the same board. The presented technique was used at one time by the outstanding Soviet and Russian journalist, professional mnemonist and owner of a phenomenal memory, Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky.
Recording
This is another technique that S.V. used. Shereshevsky. He said that he always found it funny that people write down everything they want to remember, because if a person writes it down, why should he remember it? He decided that if he wrote something down, then he did not need to remember it. This became one of the laws of forgetting developed by Shereshevsky, which he began to apply whenever he needed to forget something not particularly important: telephone numbers, people's names, etc. You can use this technique too. Just pay attention: than more people writes, the less he uses his memory, and the less he uses his memory, the less it is trained and the less he can remember. Therefore, the less he writes down, the more he will train his memory, and the more he will remember. And it turns out that the information being recorded is information that should not be imprinted in memory, which means it can be safely forgotten. A very good reception, although to many it seems somewhat paradoxical.
In conclusion, I would like to add that the more you practice forgetting unnecessary information, the faster you will master this skill. After some time, the need to use any techniques will disappear by itself, because... You can forget any information and erase memories only with the help of one volitional effort, by giving your brain the appropriate command.
Don't forget to leave a comment. We will also be interested to know which of the forgetting techniques discussed seems most effective to you.
I am 13 years old. 6 months ago I became interested in Korean culture. It all started very innocently: I was watching Korean TV series. Every day a new series and so on every day. And it got to the point where I started staying up at night to watch more and more. My health has deteriorated, and I can hardly remember my lessons.
Then the Internet was turned off for 2 months and I slowly forgot about all this. Of course, it happened that I looked up some information about all this on the phone, but it was completely different from what I experienced later. And so they turned on the Internet for us and I tried not to watch TV shows or any information. However, I came across a very popular K-pop group and that's when the madness really began. At first, I just listened to music and it was just good for me to hear and look at these guys. But then I began to feel that I depended on them. I liked one guy from this group and I liked his character, that is, I understood that this was just the image that the agency created for him, but I could not refuse to look at his photographs and videos with him. And it stuck in my soul that he was very important to me. dear person. But at the same time, I knew that I didn’t know him and he was just a guy who didn’t even know about my existence. Every day I looked for more and more information about him. And something started happening to me, I don’t know how to explain it: I began to hate this person, this happens when you love and hate at the same time. I thought more and more about this man, looked and was touched by his eyes, face, lips. Lately I note that my nerves are failing me more and more often. One day during class, the teacher yelled at one of my classmates and I started to panic: I felt like I was scared of something that wasn’t there, fear was eating me up from the inside and I couldn’t even eat. But then I somehow calmed down, but still the anxiety remained. In the evenings, I turn on the music of their band and quietly torture myself, thinking about this guy. Sometimes a mania of persecution begins, often just panic - fear of something. And then you want to throw yourself off the roof, just so as not to think about this group and that guy. Even just thinking about him makes me hate both him and myself. It’s like drugs that you want to quit, but you can’t give up: you want to listen to their songs, watch them for hours. I try, but I can’t forget all this myself. Sometimes I think I wish I had amnesia - memory loss, so that I could forget about it and never know that all this exists. I think it's fan love, probably, and maybe I'm just escaping reality by watching Korean TV series and groups whose image was created to make money from people like me. I don’t know what to do: how to forget all this and how to start life from scratch - without them....
Psychologist's answer:
Hello, Alina!
Let's look at your question from both sides. When I was your age, we were fans of Shatunov, their concerts were held with a soundtrack, no one especially danced, but we listened and roared. Were fans. And now it’s funny to remember, but this is youth and everyone goes through it.
What a smart girl you are, you guessed that you were “hooked” on music. Unfortunately, not all music can be listened to on the Internet. The thing is that dishonest people began to upload music with the so-called “25 frame effect”, i.e. There are noises in music that we cannot hear and, alas, we do not know what is recorded along with these noises. I am sure that you have well-developed intuition and willpower. You yourself tried to refuse information (TV series, music). Your inner voice itself told you what you need to do: stop watching, listen. You are absolutely right - you liked the image of MCH, then your imagination completed the picture. Let's bring the guy's image down to earth. His managers know exactly what image girls like: the shape of lips, eyes, etc. plus photoshop - and here it is your ideal.... In our time is running strong imposition of Asian culture. Do you know that rolls and sushi were forced on us, but we liked them and began to devour them. Yes, Korean culture is interesting, everything is different there. Do you know that you can leave your bag on the street and it will remain there.
Hobbies are good, but without fanaticism and in moderation.
Let's do this, turn on your willpower and until July 1, there will be no Korean culture. Can you?
This is information for those who have made a decision. For those who already know exactly what they want. For those who have already experienced and tried everything, and realized that they want to know, how to quickly forget a person.
I offer you a very powerful practice based on using the recapitulation technique which he described in his books Carlos Castaneda.
At its core - this is a magical technique, but we will use it for our “human” purposes. To get yourself back stop again and again go back in time remembering the same moments, outdated relationships. When you made the decision: “That’s it! Enough!". But…. It doesn't turn out very well.
Trust me, this time everything will work out! You remove it energy connection to this person, you will stop endlessly returning to him with your thoughts, you will be able to enjoy life again and over time you will become open to new relationships.
Interacting with the outside world, a person invests his energy in any situation, event, relationship with people. And the more emotions were experienced, the more of his energy remained in specific situations of the past. It means that a huge part of our personal power does not belong to us. All deep feelings leave our energy in the world and people. We need more and more energy.
- a technique that allows you to take this energy, once captured everyday life, and use it for other purposes of your choice - to collect energy from the past, like valuable things that were once left behind.
With the help of recapitulation, we extract from a past event the emotional energy embedded in it. When the recapitulation is complete– the event becomes for you only a fact, a slide, a picture that does not cause any reactions. We know that the event happened and that’s it.
How to quickly forget a person. Recapitulation technique
Recapitulation is best done in a closed, small room. You need to choose a quiet, secluded place, where you can sit (magicians did recapitulation in special small caves, so you can choose a closet or a large box, or even a shower). The point is for the walls to “press” on your energy “cocoon”
1. To begin with, you must identify the person you want to work with. Need to make up a list of the most striking, “charged” situations associated with it, with these relationships. Take time to remember this. This is very important, you need both positively and negatively charged moments. Don't get stuck in them. It is important to remember them, you can write them down.
If you decide to work “big”, then you can work with other people who have left a mark on your life. But you need to start with the most emotionally charged one, because this relationship has taken most of your energy, and when you replenish it, you can make recapitulating other people more effective.
Simply writing a list changes you and helps you focus your attention on what is important right now.
2. Once you have written the list, find a place where “the walls press on the cocoon.” Sit back and get started.
3. Login calm meditative state using any method that suits you.
4. Start with the first situation. Remember the name of the person or the situation itself, concentrate not on the action itself or on the feelings that you experienced then, but start recreating the scene, visually representing everything as accurately as possible external elements events.
Remember the distant surroundings, the street or house in which the event took place. Then imagine how you enter the building, note every detail: wallpaper, paintings on the walls, floors, furniture, all sorts of little things and objects that our memory can restore. Do the same with appearance a person, his clothes, integrating everything into his idea. You need to monitor your senses in addition to your sight: remember what music was playing at that moment, what spirits were there that evening.
5. Once you have remembered all the details, let the event emerge and develop freely. Control your breathing to become more immersed in the memory.
6. Breathe deeply with your diaphragm, and let the head move slowly from side to side, from one treatment to another in a sweeping motion. Breathing is very significant, because exactly it releases energy from the past.
7. Start from the right shoulder. Eyes closed. While inhaling, turn your head to the left, moving your chin along your chest, and imagine that with the help of inhalation, all the feelings invested in the event are returning back (I am returning all my energy (inhaling)). Above left shoulder, after a short pause, begin to exhale, throwing away with it all unnecessary and alien feelings (I give you all your energy (exhaling)). Return your head to your right shoulder.
The sweeping breath helps release the energy left behind by bringing it back when you inhale. And it throws out energy that is alien to us when we exhale. With every breath, all the details of our memories become clearer. Use the sweeping breath throughout the recollection practice.
8. Continue turning your head, inhaling and exhaling, as many times as necessary. Finish only when all the details and feelings have been experienced. You'll know you're done when the scene becomes “empty” and free of emotion.
If you feel nausea, palpitations, cramps, or sweat while remembering, continue to move your head, but hold your breath for now and let the symptoms go away. This the sweeping movement will soften and unravel the appropriate threads of energy and allow us to overcome blocks to delve even deeper into the memory.
Work through all your acute situations in this way, remembering one after another. And releasing more and more energy.
If the relationship continued for a long time, then you may need more than one time to work through all the memories. But in any case, if you did everything correctly, then after the first time you will feel like a different person. Your mood will improve and you will have energy.
This kind of work is the best opportunity to turn back time. You will be able to separate vital energy from experience. The task is not easy, but it frees you from the trap of self-reflection, which deprives you of energy and throws you back to the starting position.