Urgh the recent travelling and sleep depravation are obviously taking their toll on me because the 4am start this morning to get to the airport left me so absent minded that I left the £50 I withdrew from the atm IN the cash machine. Doh!
Now I don’t know about you but when I do something so ridiculously stupid (and costly), I agonise over it for hours, replaying the event and beating myself up, sometimes so much so that I struggle to concentrate on anything else.
Fortunately there is a cool little exercise that can be used for memories that have unwanted emotional content, and here it goes…
Recall the memory and notice where you are in that situation. Usually for memories with strong emotional reaction, you may find that you recall it in first person, seeing it through your own eyes, experiencing it directly. Note the strength of the feelings.
Now, imagine that you are watching you having that experience on TV. Using the TV remote, rewind it and play it over again and note the strength of the feelings, they should have diminished.
If this isn’t enough to make the memory tolerable, turn the TV to black and white, or make the TV smaller, perhaps change the soundtrack to some silly music, and play the memory back at high speed, Benny Hill style.
This process effectively recodes your memory, disassociating yourself with the memory and hence the emotions recalled by it. You still retain the memory itself, it’s just the feelings that you don’t want that you lose. Very handy indeed.
Be careful not to use this on pleasant memories, it will suck the emotions out of those too. Similarly if you have memories that seem to have faded over time, note where you are in the memory, step back in to them and turn the colours and sound up, your mind will get the idea very quickly and reinstate the emotions that you once felt recalling that memory.
Give it a go, and have fun… now where did I put my cash card?
