How Much Would The Quality Of Your Life Skyrocket If You Could Remember More About Your Daily Life?
The days rush by, don’t they?
And it can be hard to remember what exactly happened. Forgetfulness about your own life is not only frustrating, but it’s downright painful.
At least … It should be.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
You get bothered by certain things and yet …
You Do Absolutely Nothing To Make Changes!
But what if I were to tell you that there’s one simple thing you can do to remember more about your life?
And what if I told you that this one thing is also fun and will even make you more productive too?
If that sounds interesting to you, then keep reading each and every word on this page. Why? Because the simple activity I want to share with you is the kind of game changer you simply cannot afford to ignore.
Do You Wake Or Sleep?
That’s what Keats asked himself back in May of 1819 when he wrote Ode to a Nightingale. Check it out. It’s well worth memorizing.
The cool thing about Keats is that he wrote letters. Lots of them.
No email.
No fax.
Heck, Keats didn’t even have a laser jet printer.
But he still wrote.
Every single freakin’ day.
And then he got tuberculosis and died.
But here’s the thing:
It’s Scientifically Proven That If You Write Every Day You Will Remember More About Your Life!
In other words, you not only remember more, but you feel like you have had more time on a daily basis in which to remember more.
Pretty cool, right?
Well, I don’t know if it’ll be cool for you or not, so …
You Absolutely Have To Try It!
Seriously, just do it. Here are 3.5 amazing ways to give writing about your daily life a try.
Journal When You Get Up Every Morning
You know how fitness freaks talk about keeping their running shoes beside their beds so they don’t forget to get fit first thing every morning?
You can do the same thing every morning with your journaling.
Seriously. Go out and buy the fattest journal you can find and the hugest pencil or pen. Plop those puppies on the floor where you normally place your feet when you get out of bed and just try ignoring them every morning.
When I’ve done this, I take the journal with me to the washroom. And yes, even as a man, I sit down for this even if I’m engaging only duty number one.
(Hey, if you can kill two birds with one wet stone, why not?)
For bonus points, write down any dreams you remember as well. This practice also expands your sense of time because dream journaling expands your awareness of how time passes while you sleep.
But even if you don’t go through all that training, here’s the thing:
If you just commit to writing down your dreams, you’ll be amazed by what will happen in your life.
And if you can’t remember any dreams, don’t worry. Write that down. It’s as simple as one sentence: “I didn’t remember any dreams.”
Believe it or not, that simple exercise will help you remember dreams, no matter how skeptical you might be.
But I know, I know. You might be thinking, “What If I’m not a morning person?”
No problemo.
Here’s …
The Amazing Secret Of Writing Magical “Remember More” Spells Before You Turn Into Pumpkin
I don’t know about you, but I have rules about when I go to bed that I try to keep, almost religiously. It helps me keep the blues away, burn more fat, build more muscle and, of course, remember more dreams.
And if you want to remember more about what happened during your day, put that plump journal square on your pillow. That way you won’t be able to ignore it come bed time.
Next, set a timer for five minutes (or even less) and write down everything you remember about your day.
Don’t Overthink This Activity!
Just write whatever comes to mind starting with breakfast.
And don’t judge yourself. Nothing you write is stupid or insignificant. That little voice in your mind that’s always trying to wreck everything will tell you the entire exercise is dumb, but put a gag on it.
Trust me. That jerk doesn’t have a clue what he, she (or it) is talking about.
For bonus points, put the journal where your feet hit the floor first thing in the morning and then write down your dreams when you get up.
And yes, you should even make note of it when you can’t remember any dreams at all. We know that even one simple sentence acknowledging that you can’t remember any dreams can (and most likely will) trigger dream recall.
If none of these suggestions appeal to you, try this technique on for size:
The Miraculous Memory Improving Wonders Of Having An Accountability Partner
Sarah Peterson from Unsettle.org is my accountability partner. We write each other 3-4 times a week, sometimes more. We do this exchange for two purposes:
1) To tell each other what we’ve been up to. This practice automatically helps us remember more of what we’ve been doing with our days.
2) To tell each other what we’re going to do next. Each simple report on what’s coming up for us in our businesses massively increases the chances that we’ll actually follow through.
And when you follow through, the effects are magical. Stuff gets done.
Pretty sweet, right?
You Bet It Is. Sweeter Than Candy Wrapped In Magnetic Memory Silver!
So here’s your homework:
Ask a friend who you know is keen on getting more out of life to be your accountability partner.
Don’t overthink this process. Just whip out an email to the first person that comes to mind.
And if you need a quick template to kick your butt into motion, here’s a template for you;
“Hey [insert name],
I was just listening to the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast and Anthony was talking about how having an accountability partner can help you remember more about our life and even be more productive on a daily basis.
I know that you’re trying to achieve [insert goal] and you know I’d love to [insert goal]. How would you feel about emailing each other every day or every couple of days to check in and see where we’re both at.
Let me know and I’ll send you his podcast with more info on how it works and we’ll get our accountability party started.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Pretty easy, right?
Well, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can get in contact with Sarah here and she’ll give you her side of the story and some cool free stuff that will make you even more productive too.
I never tell Sarah about any of the dreams I remember, but now that I’m putting this lesson in remembering more about your life together, maybe I should …
In any case …
Just make sure to ask permission before you start spilling the contents of your unconscious mind into your accountability emails. You don’t want to freak your partner out or distract from the matter at hand: remembering more about your daily activities and becoming more productive in a targeted manner.
And if all of these ideas still don’t appeal because you’re simply not into writing (but still want memory improvement), here’s …
How To Supercharge Your Memory By Keeping An Audio Or Video Journal
It’s pretty easy. Here’s what you do:
1. Get a device that records video and/or audio
2. Press record
3. Let it all out.
And to show you how it’s done, I’ve made made that quick example video for you on the day I wrote this post. Just scroll up to the top and watch it from beginning to end. I show you how to keep a journal and improve your memory in three ways by giving you an example of this third way.
No need to share these recordings like I’ve done on a YouTube channel or podcast, but heck, why not? You never know: It might go viral and you’ll wind being the next internet celebrity, win new friends and positively influence people.
Stranger things have happened.
So here’s the ultimate question:
Are you down with one of these daily journaling techniques?
If so, just get started. I guarantee that you’ll remember more about your life and, yes, be more productive.
And if all that weren’t enough, I invite you to learn how to improve your memory even more by claiming this free Memory Improvement Kit. It’ll show you how to create and use a Memory Palace so you can learn, memorize and recall anything in a way that is simple, easy, elegant and fun.
How Would You Like A Quote That Will Change Your Life – And Your Memory – For The Better?
If the answer is yes, then pay attention to every word of this quote and my commentary on it.
But prepare yourself …
This quote may well contain the most important set of thoughts you will ever read.
“To young writers I give only two secrets that really exist… all the other hints of Rosetta Stones are jiggery-pokery. The two secrets are these:
First, the most important book you can ever read, not only to prepare you as a writer, but to prepare you for life, is not the Bible or some handbook on syntax. It is the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Holmes mysteries are nailed to the fixed point of logic and rational observation. They teach that ratiocination, and a denial of paralogia, go straight to the heart of Pasteur’s admonition that “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.
From Doyle’s stories an awakened intelligence can learn a system of rational behavior coupled with an ability to bring the process of deductive logic to bear on even the smallest measure of day-to-day existence. It works in life, and it works in art. We call it the writer’s eye. And that, melded to talent and composure, is what one can find in the work of every fine writer.
The second secret, what they never tell you, is that yes, anyone can become a writer…. The trick is not to become a writer, it is to stay a writer. Day after day, year after year, book after book. And for that, you must keep working, even when it seems beyond you. In the words-to-live-by of Thomas Carlyle, “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou has in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”
All that, and learn the accurate meaning of “viable,” do not pronounce it noo-kew-ler, understand the difference between “in a moment” and “momentarily,” and don’t say “hopefully” when you mean “it is to be hoped” or “one hopes.” Because, for one last quotation, as Molly Haskell has written: “language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.”
This quote comes from Harlan Ellison. It has got so much packed into it – and that’s not even to mention the quotes inside the quote.
Why Reading Properly Is The Ultimate Cure To Ignorance
Here’s a secret:
A lot of people read.
Except that they aren’t really reading.
What does it mean to read a book?
I talk about this in the podcast episode How To Memorize A Textbook. So if you haven’t checked it out, give it a listen.
In brief, it shoes you how to memorize the right parts of a book, not every page. A lot of people think they need to memorize an entire book, but it isn’t true.
There’s a circular question that’s been going round for thousands of years: Is it better to learn and memorize thousands of books to get a broad education? Or is it better to know just a few books better than most people ever will?
The Answer Is Pretty Simple!
The best book that you ever read, the most important book you can ever read is the book that you actually read.
Of course, it’s up to you which book you read. You don’t have to take Ellison’s advice that it must be Sherlock Holmes.
Ellison asks us to see a life lesson in Holmes: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
And that’s really what Holmes is all about. After all, using Memory Palaces or Mind Palaces is the ultimate preparation.
At the same time, it’s not really that Holmes has some super intellect or that he uses Memory Palaces or that he is more intelligent than anyone else. It’s just that he has a prepared mind.
And this leads us back to this idea of reading a thousand books or reading one book.
In it, I interviewed Alicia Crosby, the 10‑year-old who used Memory Palaces to memorize all of the Shakespeare plays in historical order by title.
Not the actual content of the plays, mind you, but the title of every play – which is still an extraordinary feat.
On the interview, we also heard from her father. Together, they were talking motorcycle rides and making Memory Palaces along the way. These Memory Palaces were filled with beautiful stations found along the way.
All done at speed.
And that’s a beautiful thing. But (and with respect to my speedreading friends) …
Reading At Speed Is Not Always The Best Way To Invite Information Into Your Mind!
During the interview, I told a story from Kafka.
In that story, a young man has to travel to a different city to get to work. Day in and day out, he takes the train.
Then one day he misses the train, so he has to take a bicycle.
When he gets to the town, he sees this old man who is sitting on a bench.
He says to the old man, “My, I have never noticed so much about this journey, but now that I’ve taken a bicycle, wow, this is amazing. I noticed so much detail. I became aware of so many things that were never evident to me before.”
The old man says, “Yeah, well just wait and see what you discover when you walk next time.”
There’s No Shame In Slowing Down
This story from Kafka is about slowing down. It is about actively noticing the world around you. And being prepared to do so.
This man on the bike – he wasn’t prepared at all. In fact, as he was constantly taking the train, life was passing him by. All the different details whizzed past so that he never had a chance to memorize anything because he was just not paying attention to anything.
But slowing things down by taking the bike, made so many details evident.
And for the kicker ending, as the old man suggests, walking makes the details of the world even more evident.
The World Becomes Eye-Catching When You Walk “Psychogeographically”
Psychogeography is the idea that you can walk to an airport, for example, get on a plane and then walk to your hotel.
According to self, your body will not know that you haven’t walked to New York.
For example, Self talks about flying from Heathrow in London to JFK in New York and how going by foot to the airport and then walking from the airport to his hotel tricked his body into thinking he walked the whole way.
Now, to the extent that Self’s procedure actually tricks your mind, I don’t know, but the term “psychogeography” certainly is an appropriate because when you walk, you can notice more things.
And the more things you notice, the more things you can notice. Just like with learning, the more you can learn, the more you can learn because you have more of a basis upon which to ground more learning.
Fantastic, right?
Good.
Then Just Do It
And then take another look at the Thomas Carlyle quote Harlan Ellison gives us.
In it, Carlyle is saying, “Produce! Produce!”
Do something.
Do it.
And whatever you have before you to do, do it with your entire mind, and with your entire body. Do it with your entire soul. Get in there and do it.
Do it in a way that is whole and complete, in a way that has a beginning and a middle and an end.
Why?
Because as Carlyle says, “the Night cometh,” and nobody can work in the night.
What is night in this quote?
Night Is Death
Look, most of us work with half our butt hanging out of our pants.
We’re not fully involved in our work.
We are half involved in it.
We’re a quarter involved in it.
Maybe we’re even just 10 percent involved in it (or less).
That’s no good.
Worse …
It’s No Way To Live!
And so that’s why being prepared with memory techniques and Memory Palaces is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
Why?
Because you are able to focus on information in a completely different way, at a much deeper level, at a 100 percent level.
Don’t you think that’s much better than passively trying to get information into your memory?
Or do you prefer hoping or praying or wishing on a cloud that what you need to learn will osmosisize itself into your brain?
Here’s The Ugly Truth …
It ain’t gonna happen!
Or at least, it’s not going to happen in any way that is nearly as miraculous, magical and almost as instantaneously as when you use memory techniques.
And When You’ve Got The Right Memory Techniques Working For You …
You can do things with your whole might like Carlyle advises.
You can do every completely when you’re using memory techniques because of the very nature of this learning practice changes the information.
As Wayne Dyer often quotes, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
And it’s true.
When you look at a foreign language word and use memory techniques, it looks completely different than when you don’t use them.
Why?
Because when you don’t use memory techniques, you take the word as a whole.
But when you use something like the Magnetic Memory Method, you breaking the word apart.
You start thinking creatively. For example, what happens if I attach this part of the word to Al Pacino?
What about if I attach this other part of the word to Homer Simpson?
And what if I have them doing something together to help me remember the meaning of the word?
Doing This Makes Learning Tastier Than Candy!
The learning process becomes like liquorish in a candy store. You just can’t help but suck on every last jawbreaker and you don’t want to chew it and you don’t want to swallow it because it tastes so good and you want to hold that wonderful taste of knowledge in your mouth much longer.
So you hold it in your mind much longer.
You become interested in the information in a completely different way.
The information becomes part of the theatre in your mind.
The information becomes a character.
The information becomes real.
But You Have To Give It 100% Of Your Attention
Not 25% percent of your attention.
Not scribbles on an index card attention.
Not passive spaced repetition software attention.
You’ve Got To Give It The Attention Of Your Entire Soul
And more than that, your whole mind, your whole imagination, your whole being.
So get out there.
Get prepared with a dedicated memory strategy and at least one solid Memory Palace and never forget:
Go on. Admit it. Life would be easier if you could read the mind of your friends and lovers. And you could be rich overnight by divining the insights of the best stock pickers alive.
But the reality is that psychic powers do not exist. Or at least, there’s no meaningful evidence to suggest that they do.
Yet the question is, why do so many people believe in psychic powers? Why are tarot readings and crystal divinations and all kinds of claptrap so attractive to so many people.
Perhaps some of the answer to these questions involves working memory. So in this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, let’s talk about how.
What is working memory?
Working memory is the system that is responsible for holding and processing new and already stored information – for a short time.
Having working memory is important for reasoning, comprehension, learning and memory updating.
As a term, working memory is generally used synonymously with short term memory. Yet, the two concepts are distinct and should be distinguished from one another.
Whereas working memory is a theoretical framework that refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information, short-term memory refers to the short-term storage of information, and does not entail the manipulation or organization of material held in memory.
Given these facts about working memory, it seems clear that it plays a roll in why people believe the psychics and their readings.
Here’s why …
First off, psychics overwhelm their clients with questions. By asking them to access so much about their past, it can be difficult, if not impossible to remember the questions the psychic asked.
As a result, the person sitting for the psychic reading will only remember the hits and not the misses. “Hits,” just to define this term, is the word used to describe any time a psychic gets something right. “Misses” refers to any time the psychic gets something wrong.
As we’ll see, talented psychics use language as a tool for increasing the recall of hits and obliterating our memory of the misses.
Magicians know how to use this effect as well. For example, they use what is commonly called misdirection. But in reality, they use …
Focused Attention
By using focused attention, you are not misdirected but rather directed to pay attention on the wrong things. The audience then remembers only the big moves the magician makes, and should they have spotted the small moves in which the dirty work is done, the cognitive overload of the big moves erases the memory of anything else.
In fact, the most rewarding compliment a magician can hear is, “but he didn’t do anything.” In these cases, the big moves have been so natural or ordinary that they have no meaning for working memory to grasp onto.
But “misdirection” isn’t the best word for this technique. A better term would be focused attention. To “misdirect” is to draw attention away from something. But sleight of hand works best when concentration is so focused on innocent movements that it cannot pay attention to the dirty ones.
Psychics use the exact same process, but in this case, instead of calling it sleight of hand, we should call it …
Sleight Of Mouth
Psychics often hide their moves by asking questions that for most people will generate “yes” answers.
Drawing from Ian Rowland’s excellent The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, here are some of those questions. Follow along and think about how many of these questions would generate a yes from you.
Have you recently come across some old photographs, some in albums, some that still need to be properly arranged?
Have you recently thrown out some medical supplies that had gone out of date or expired?
Have you recently thrown out or donated some old books, toys or clothing?
Is there a note on your fridge or by the phone that is no longer relevant but you haven’t yet thrown away?
Are there any stuck drawers or drawers that don’t slide properly in your home?
Do you have keys that you cannot remember what locks they belong to?
Do you own a broken watch or clock you’ve been meaning to get fixed?
Have you ever had an accident or near-accident involving water?
Is the number 2 in your address or does someone significant in your life have the number 2?
Do you have a scar on your elbow or knee?
Is there a blue car or truck parked across the street from your home or work?
Do you carry photos of a loved one in your wallet or purse?
Is there a set of earrings that you’ve lost one half of? (For a man, the psychic can ask the same question about the jewelry collection of a girlfriend or wife.)
And so on.
Chances are that you probably answers yes to a significant number of these questions. All of them rely on accessing your long term temporal memory and often your spatial memory.
Whether you say yes or no, the psychic will quickly overload your short term working memory by saying “yes and” or “no but,” a tactic identified by the great magician and mentalist Kenton Knepper.
To illustrate how this works …
Imagine the following psychic reading …
Psychic: Have you or someone in you family recently experienced an illness?
Client: Yes …
Psychic: Yes and they needed to take some medicine for that?
Client: No …
Psychic: No, but they did eventually get well on their own.
By stringing together a long series of questions linked by “yes and” plus “no but” statements, the psychic creates the illusion of always being right. In reality, the psychic is right about general aspects of life that almost certainly must be true.
They can heighten this effect by gauging the age of the client. For example, if the client is young, the psychic might not ask them about illness in the family. But the older the client is, the more likely they or a family member has experienced an illness.
By asking questions that cause the client to access the general past and then helping the client link their answers to “yes and”/”no but” statements, the psychic completely overloads and distorts the client’s working memory.
The client will not only think that the psychic knew an overwhelming amount of info about them. The client will distort the experience and remember things that never happened during the psychic reading.
Magicians also create this distortion effect. I’ve seen it many times. For example, years later people will ask me to repeat magic tricks I once performed for them. But the trick they describe bears little resemblance to the trick I actually performed. Due to the powers of focused attention and the words I used during the trick, working memory becomes the enemy of reality and long term memory is tricked into remembering miracles better than even the best magicians are capable of creating.
Psychics do not have super powers.
Rather, they are masters of memory (just not in the way we would normally use that term). Psychics overwhelm working memory by distorting the present with leading questions and tricky language that creates paths toward their desired results.
They use our memory against us to exploit our desire for certainty in life and create false impressions that encourage us to take out our wallets again and again for more of the same.
How to Defeat Psychics At Their Own Game
The way to test a psychic is to use the very same tools against them and overwhelm their working memory.
For example, if a psychic gets a hit, you can answer with “yes and” or “no but.” Like this:
Psychic: Have you experienced an accident involving water, either in the recent past or when you were younger?
Client: No, but I did fall off my bike and scarred my knee in the center of the city with no water around. Didn’t you know that?
Or:
Psychic: Am I sensing it right that you or someone close to you had the number 1 or 3 in you address?
You: Yes, we both do, and I also have 4 and 6 in my postal code as does everyone in my neighborhood. Why don’t you know that?
By using the “yes and” and “no but” principle to your advantage, you will overload the psychics own working memory with tracking their own errors. They will start to seem like a bad lawyer who can’t track any of the details going on in the courtroom and soon lose the case.
And so, now you know how your working memory can be used against you and how you can use working memory against them in your defense. So get out there and have a blast and see how you can’t extend your new knowledge to other areas of life where advertisements, politicians and teachers are also using working memory against you to distort your perceptions and even control entire aspects of your life.
How To Use Your Emotions To Memorize More Instead Of Letting Them Take Over Your Life And Make A Big Fat Mess Of Everything
You’re an emotional person, aren’t you?
Those uncontrollable feelings well up from time to time, perhaps even taking over the show. In other words, emotions replace the you that you know with someone quite different.
At least, that’s one way of looking at it. Emotions are different versions of ourselves. The self that becomes overwhelmed by laughter is different than the self who drowns in sorrow and misery.
But then eventually you find your way back. You become you once again.
The Only Problem Is That You Don’t Become You!
Strong emotional states change you, and I’ll bet you remember at least a couple of times that you’ve been changed so strongly by an emotional state that you’ve had no means of going back. You’re as chemically changed as toast is to bread.
The question is, to what extent is this change due to memory? Has the experience of emotion changed you as such, or does it impact your memory so much that you literally remember to be a different person.
Certainly, post traumatic stress disorder provides some examples of people affected by memories so strongly that constant recall of the traumatic event causes that new version of the person to hold fast.
But that state does have to be renewed. Even if the person feels that the memories are coming back of their own accord, they must at some level be participating in the reconstruction.
And such events don’t mean that trauma has improved memory in that instant so much so that the person remembers everything in sparkling detail. Traumatic memory in no way ensures accuracy and it can also lead to the repression of memory.
The Return Of The Repressed
Repression and suppression of memory is really intense because it is essentially an attempt to obliterate memories from the mind. But as Sigmund Freud made himself famous for saying, what we repress returns, usually in the form of a monster.
Post-Freud, we have some interesting research about the suppression of memory. For example, test subjects asked to repress feelings of disgust while watching a horror movie remembered far less about the story and with much less accuracy than those not asked to repress their feelings.
And plane crash survivors who remain calm have been said to remember more than people overwhelmed by hysterics.
I’ve experienced this memory effect myself following a near miss trying to land in Toronto. I was going there from New York to sit for a field exam when the plane suddenly pulled up and circled over the city. We late learned that another plane had still been on the runway ahead of us, and thank goodness the pilot pulled us out of there in time enough to avoid a fiery collision.
Although I didn’t go crazy in terms of screaming or crying out, my inner life went nuts, something that affected my memory for days and days after. While sitting for the exam, for the first time I felt a real disruption in accessing my Memory Palaces and mnemonics. All the more so because one person on the committee was in the warpath and doing her best to see me fail.
But luckily, I had relaxation on my side and calmed myself. I reminded myself of the combined power of memory and relaxation and without suppressing or repressing the feelings of terror I remembered from the previous days’s adventure in the sky, I managed to handle that remembered stress and the current stress at the same time.
And this is interesting because I could have broken down into tears or hysterics in that examination room because I was so fragile. But according to some theories, memories and the emotions tied to them don’t force us to act in particular ways. But these emotional memories do influence our actions.
And that’s good news because with the exception of hungry lions and tigers and bears (like during that examination), most everything that influences us, we can influence back.
Control:
The One Advantage You Can Use When Your Emotions Get Really Crazy
Emotions and memories share one major characteristic: they are both highly manipulable.
Think of emotions and memory like blinking and breathing. Both blinking and breathing happen on autopilot. We don’t have to think about them in the least in order for them to happen.
But we can think about them and control them – at least for a while. You can choose to have a staring contest, you can keep you eyes closed even though you are not sleeping or you can flutter your eye lids at anyone you fancy. You can do this entirely at will.
Likewise, you can influence your breathing. You can hold your breath, cause yourself to gasp and deliberately sync inhalations with exhalations as you walk or jog.
And so it is with memory. You can deliberately call up memories of your childhood. You can say, “I want to think about grade one” and deliberately call up – or try to call up – the name of your teacher.
Along with this deliberate action, emotions might also arise. And it makes for a good memory exercise.
Try This Amazing Exercise
Want to experience memory improvement? Try this:
Think of every teacher you can remember and explore at least one emotion associated with them.
When I did this, I was amazed by how many teachers I can recall by name. From grades one to twelve, the names of only three teachers evade me, not counting substitute teachers, of course.
And for each teacher I can remember an emotion. In some cases, the emotions are similar: frustration at being told what to do. In other cases, it is fondness, or the feeling of being liked by the teacher. And in yet other cases, yes, I can remember even the emotion of lust, even at a young age.
It’s a fascinating exercise, one that will teach you much about the depth and breadth of your memory. Even if you bump up against limitations, that’s okay. Explore them. Feel the borders. Give them a gentle push without trying to force them to extend.
Massage the name out if the woodwork, so to speak, by seeing yourself in the classroom, bringing up all the nuances and details of the atmosphere. Bask in what you can recall and more is much more likely to come then if you give up in frustration.
And If You Come Up Totally Blank …
…give it a rest. Come back to it. Maybe something will percolate.
And if the memory of bad emotions come up, massage them too. Explore how you can use your imagination to eliminate their power. You can change their shape, remove their color, turn them into a funny cartoon. You can manipulate those feelings in any way you want.
And because the negative feelings you’ll drum up from high school are probably tame, you’ll get good practice manipulating the really dramatic emotions that life will throw at you later. Because the only thing we know emotional states is that they will come. We cannot predict what they will or why they’ll happen. But even so, we can be prepared for them.
So take notes and remember to do these exercises to help you develop emotional control, starting with remembering all the teachers you can and at least one emotion you associate with each.
Then manipulate that emotion. Practice working it out and not so much eliminating it or trying to force it out of memory, but transforming it the way you can turn bread into toast, in a way that it can never return to its original negative state.
Practice this and you’ll soon be able to work with any emotion that comes up in real time with ease. That will help you remember more because you’re not repressing the unpredictable but letting it be.
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How To Use Your Emotions To Memorize More Instead Of Letting Them Take Over Your Life And Make A Big Fat Mess Of Everything