3 Ways to Stop Letting Your Past Control Your Life

Why bad memories linger

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0:30This show today is dedicated to something that's actually kind of painful, a negative kind of experience that's sort of ongoing for a lot of people, and that's bad memories. That's painful experiences. That's regret. There's probably something that you do in your life, something that's making you avoid people, places, activities. You can't really avoid bad memories and regret by going someplace, not talking to somebody because they're going to keep haunting and haunting.

1:00You can change your perception. You can even rewrite some of these memories to take bitter old memories and make them not so bitter. So I want to tell you three ways to reconstruct your past that maintains the core knowledge, truth, and facts, but that shades it in a particular way, that it can help you learn and grow and become a happier person. Hey, friends.

1:32Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is your show about the science of love and happiness and how you can use it, how you can be a happiness teacher and join me in the movement of lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using the best that has been thought and said in science, philosophy, wisdom literatures, and everything else in between. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm delighted. I hope you're a subscriber to this podcast. If you've been watching this for a little while, if you're not, please do hit the subscribe button and the like button.

2:03That really helps the algorithm, but it also helps to get the show directly to you so you don't have to look at it. And if this is your first time, well, welcome. I'm glad you're here. Somebody probably recommended it to you, or who knows, maybe YouTube or Spotify recommended it to you. I hope you like it as much as the algorithm thought you might. This show today is dedicated to something that's actually kind of painful for a number of people, but it has the philosophy that we always bring to office hours, which is that hard things are actually opportunities, that struggle is actually an opportunity for us to learn and grow.

2:36We know that that is absolutely the case. I've talked again and again on this program about how important it is that we have negative emotions for our ability to assess threats and avoid these threats, how important it is for us to live through negative experiences and interactions that are negative with people, because that's how we learn and grow. The whole point is that we need an entrepreneurial mindset to our own lives. When everybody else says, ah, that's terrible, we should have the attitude of, you know, I think that's actually an opportunity

3:06for me to be a better person, for me to be a happier person. Well, today I want to talk about a negative kind of experience that's sort of ongoing for a lot of people, and that's baggage. That's bad memories. That's painful experiences. That's regret. If I do my job in this episode, I am going to convince you that there are tangible ways that you can rewrite your memories. You can actually take negative things that have happened to you and memories that you have that you don't like and maybe you're trying desperately to avoid and turn those into a source of growth,

3:39those into a source of happiness, and teach these ideas to other people as well. This is an incredible way for you to make your life more generative and much, much happier. Okay, we're not quite there yet. I do want to ask you a couple other favors before I go on to the episode. If you have anything to feedback on this episode or any other set of ideas, what do you wish I were talking about in the show, please do write to me at the email address is officehours.arthurbrooks.com or just put it in the comments below,

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4:41And it usually starts off with a couple of stupid jokes by me as well. So you can get that completely free by going to the website arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And if you want to think a little bit about getting together with other people in this community, maybe even doing a happiness retreat, you can find out where those are going on because we have a lot of in-person stuff going on in our world by going to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life. Or you can wake up

5:11to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore. But it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone?

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The futility of running away

6:03Let's move on now to the topic of today to talk about our toughest memories. There's probably something that you do in your life, something that's making you avoid people, places, activities. Some of you are really, really hesitant to go home. I know that. Why? Well, because you have bad memories of things that have actually happened there, and it's painful. The memories are painful, and going back to a physical location or being around specific people,

6:35it dredges up those memories. Maybe there's somebody you don't like to talk to, somebody from your past. A number comes up on your cell and you screen the call. Maybe somebody's number who you've actually blocked. And the reason has nothing to do with what you think is going to happen right now. It has everything to do with the fact that you don't want to be reminded of these negative experiences. I know a lot of people who won't drive on a particular street. If somebody lived there, or maybe you did, and it was a bad time in your life, they won't listen to a particular song because of the way that it reminds them of a particular time in their life.

7:06Another thing that I notice about a lot of people is that they're making big changes. And when I ask why they're making big changes, it's not always because they're so excited about new opportunities. They're making big changes because they're trying to get away from bad memories or a bad past or something that they really regret. They'll move cities. They'll just try to physically get away from bad memories. They'll change careers. They'll leave relationships. They'll quit jobs they don't like very much. I've made a lot of changes in my life, too. And in some of them, it originally was because I wanted

7:37to get away from it. You know, this is a phenomenon that you see throughout literature and throughout research. There's a very interesting passage from my favorite philosopher in my favorite essay by my favorite philosopher. That's Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous 1841 essay, Self-Reliance, where he talks about his own travels and how he's trying to get away from his past self all the time. It really has a lot of pathos in it. Let me quote from it a little bit. He says, At home, I dream that at Naples,

8:08I assume he means Naples, Italy and not Naples, Florida. This is written in 1841. I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. So I pack my trunk and embrace my friends and embark on the sea and at last I wake up in Naples and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical that I fled from. In other words, a lot of these activities of actually trying to make changes or avoiding particular things is kind of a an exercise in futility. The first thing that jumps out

8:39of Ralph Waldo Emerson's his steamer trunk or his suitcase when he gets to Naples is him. And the trouble with your memories is that you're actually carrying him around inside your head. You can't really avoid bad memories and regret by going someplace, not talking to somebody because they're going to keep haunting and haunting. You can't escape your past because it travels with you into the future. That's one of the characteristics of the amazing human brain. However, and this is the reason I'm recording this episode today because most people

9:10have some memories like that, you can change your perception. You can even rewrite some of these memories. You have more power than you think for the content that's rattling around in your hippocampus, your episodic memory to edit some of that, to make it better, to see it in a different way, to learn from it, to turn it from, not that it's not negative anymore, you're not going to lie to yourself, but it is something that can help you as opposed to chronically bothering you and even hurting you.

The neuroscience of mental time travel

9:41So how do you do it? Well, we're not quite there yet. I want to do a little bit of the science first and I really want to blow your mind right now because it turns out that the science of human memory is an unbelievable area of research. It's so great and it really starts off with this truth that human beings are the dominant species. Holosapiens dominate the planet in no small part because we have the ability to travel time. Now, we have this incredible prefrontal cortex, this super computer in the front of our heads and we have a brain that has two different

10:12hemispheres that does different things. You know, I've talked ad nauseum in the show about the fact that people who, technologists who think that they can replicate the human brain with a large language model or, you know, an AI chatbot, they'll never be able to do it. And the reason is because the two hemispheres do very different things. The left hemisphere of your brain is more like an agentic AI. It's the how-to and what based largely on inference. But the right part of the right hemisphere of your brain is more dedicated to the why, the intuition, the mystery, and the meaning and asking the big questions

10:44that an AI can't really ask because it's not designed that way. And in this way, the human brain is quite unique. And the prefrontal cortex of that brain, it gives us this unbelievable ability that no other animal that we're aware of can undertake to travel time. Now, I don't mean literally that you can go back in time and, you know, visit George Washington as he crosses the Delaware, go into the future in some sort of weird science fiction way. That's not what I'm talking about. But what you can do is you can go back and put yourself back in the past to understand the past through your memories,

11:14to learn lessons from that past and not make the same mistakes over and over again. As a matter of fact, that's one of the reasons that evolutionary biologists believe that we have ruminative sadness. Now, what does that mean? That that's your brain ruminating on really, really painful memories because that's your attempt to actually learn from them. And in so doing, learn lessons that you won't make mistakes, you won't repeat mistakes over and over and over again. But it takes work to do that. You have to understand what happened,

11:46what went wrong, and that rumination gives you sort of the deep knowledge of it. Now, that, of course, can be exaggerated and maladapted, which is one of the characteristics, that maladaptive, sad rumination. That's one of the characteristics of clinical depression. But the ability to ruminate is really an interesting thing. Many people believe, many neuroscientists believe it involves an activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that you also use when you're falling in love because you're ruminating on another person or that you're doing something incredibly creative, like a business plan

12:16or a poem or a symphony because you're ruminating on an idea that you can't get out of your head. So the whole idea with memory of ruminative memory going again and again and again and again is that you're learning from something and so that you can you can profit from it. I mean, your dog might make a lot of the same mistakes over and over again and you're unlikely to because your ability to travel into the past. You have the ability to travel into the future. Now, we do this all the time. That's called prospection. The average person, according to the research,

12:46and this is research based on fMRI studies where people are put in, you know, scanners and their brains are assessed as they're thinking about different things and, you know, in ordinary life, you spend about 30 to 50% of your time thinking about the future, which is amazing. That's great. It's also terrible in its way because you're missing your life now, aren't you? I'm thinking about the future. Building castles in the sky, you're not here now. This is one of the things that people do when they're on vacation. They take photos and they're taking photos because they want to capture the moment

13:18so that in the future they can enjoy this moment when it has become the past. So they're in the future, we're in the present, and when they get into the future, it becomes the past and they've never been in the present and they missed their vacation. Even worse, if you want to post those pictures to social media because what you're planning in the future is to make other people jealous of how much fun you're having now, but you're not because you're not there. So you see how complicated this is cognitively. It's unbelievable how the supercomputer actually works. The third time zone that we can get into, the third dimension that we can get into

13:48is the mindful present, you know, right now. And I want you to think about that for a minute too. We tend to marginalize that. We don't do that very often, but your most fulfilling experiences are right here now when you're looking into your soulmate's eyes and you're declaring your love. You're here now when you're having a deep conversation around dinner with friends. That's when you're there now. That's one of the reasons you should never have your phone even physically on the table while you're eating with somebody so you can be there naturally with that person. Those are the moments when you actually love,

14:18when you can love a person, when you can love your life. You can't love in the future. You can't love in the past. You can only love here and now. And that's a little kind of kind of philosophical around the horn and a little bit of the neuroscience as well about the three time zones that we exist in. And I want to talk more about the past, but there is an article that I'll put in if you're interested in what we're talking about here from Nature Reviews Neuroscience. What a great journal. This is from 2007, so it's almost 20 years old now, but it's called Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future,

14:49the Prospective Brain. And one of the points that this makes, besides just talking about, you know, the way that we're able to time travel is that neuroscientists have known for a couple of decades at this point that we retain memories of the past so that we can predict the future. This is how the time zones all relate to each other. I know I'm kind of bending your brains at this point and bending mine as well. We make future decisions based on past experiences, right? Remember when I said that we ruminate on past ideas so that we don't make

15:20the same mistake again and again and again? Well, we also use memories to construct a vision of the future. Here's a trivial example. Let's say that you're going to some friend's destination wedding in Ibiza in the Balearic Islands in Spain. You have never been to Ibiza and you think to yourself, well, that's going to be so fun. I'm going to take a few extra days and you start thinking about it, deciding if you're actually going to take the invitation or not. It's going to be expensive too. You have to take a few days off work. So should I go to Ibiza and lie on the beach

15:50and you envision what the experience is likely to be. Now, you've never been doing Ibiza. You can go online and look at pictures and people will do that. But fundamentally, the way that you're making that future, that decision about your future behavior is by thinking about all the times that you spend at different beaches that you actually went to. And so your memory will start dredging up episodic memories of time, you know, with your family in, I don't know, Panama Beach in Florida. Trust me, Ibiza's nicer than Panama Beach. Sorry if you're from Florida.

16:21You'll bring up past beaches. And it's interesting because that might be super wrong, right? That actually might be completely incorrect what you get. And I've done that a whole bunch of times. I remember when I first moved to Barcelona when I was in my mid-20s and my girlfriend at the time, now my wife of 35 years, she said, let's go to the beach. Let's go swimming at the beach outside Barcelona. And it was summertime and I'm like, no, I don't want to get hypothermia.

16:51Now, why was I thinking that? Because I was imagining swimming in the Mediterranean just like the beach vacations that I had taken as a child, which were all to Lincoln City, Oregon. The Oregon coast, man. I mean, if you, August, you can go out into the ocean on the Oregon coast and in Lincoln City. And if you don't get hypothermia in the first five minutes, then probably it's because you've gotten carried out to sea by a riptide and consumed by a great white shark. I mean, you're not doing that.

17:22And so that's what I was thinking in my head. I had, I had constructed a future in the Mediterranean based on the Pacific Ocean in the Pacific Northwest, which was actually quite wrong. And we went and I swam and my life was better because actually it was wrong. But that's how we assemble these ideas of the future

Memory reconstruction over retrieval

17:41based on this. How do we actually construct memories in the past when I'm thinking about Lincoln City or for that matter when I'm thinking about something really negative, when I'm thinking about something that actually happened? The way that I do that, and this is where the neuroscience gets really tricky, it's that it's not about retrieving that memory. You might think to yourself that like there's a little film, a little snippet of video someplace in your brain and you go get that out of the, you know, it's like out of the archive and you throw it into the projector and watch it again

18:11and again and again. But it turns out that's not right. What it's really about when you're dredging up memories, good or bad, is reconstruction, not retrieval. Every time you conjure up the past, there's a part of the parietal lobe in your brain that's called the angular gyrus. And what it does is it reconstructs every episodic memory, which is a whole bunch of different things. There's a whole bunch of different elements to it and they're stored in physically different locations. And so what your brain has to do every time you come up with a scene, like you tell a story

18:42or you remember a particular day, that's in a whole bunch of different locations and you put it together new every single time. So, for example, if somebody says, where were you on 9-11? Those of you who were born on September 11, 2001, I certainly was. I was in New York City. I saw the first plane hit the first tower. And so when people ask me about that or when I tell that story, I talk about, you know, this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then we were stuck in a traffic jam and then I got out looking down Fifth Avenue

19:13and at the two towers and I watched as both towers fell down and then I had to figure out how to get home. And I can kind of tell that story. But each part of that story and each sub-part of that story is actually being pulled out of the parietal lobe where the angular gyrus is actually pulling the pieces together and telling the story every single time. That's a biological marvel, but it's prone to error. As you can imagine, if you have to reassemble it, reassemble it, reconstruct it,

19:43reconstruct it every single time, there's an opportunity as time goes by for glitches to get into that algorithm. And that's one of the reasons that tons of research shows that the further away a very distinct memory is from you, the more likely you are to screw it up as you recount it, to get it actually wrong. And for you to believe absolutely photographically in something that absolutely did not happen.

False memories and the Challenger study

20:05Now, here's how the studies actually kind of work. This is a 1992 study. This is an article called Phantom Flashbulbs, False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger. That's the Challenger space shuttle. They exploded in 1986. You probably heard about it. I remember this as a young adult when one of the space shuttles that went up into space and blew up before it got into orbit is really, really traumatic because, you know, half the country was watching it and it exploded. It was horrible. And it was a big deal. It was a huge headline and everybody was talking

20:36about it in 1986. And again, everything I cite here is going into the show notes. So don't worry about writing that down. Just go to the show notes and you can click on it and get the article if you want. What researchers were doing, what they wanted to know was how did people actually remember it compared to what they had said had happened. And so right after the Challenger explosion, these researchers, they asked people to recount their experience right afterward when it was most faithfully recounted, a bunch of students who did that. And then 30 months later, all right,

21:06okay, so two and a half years later, they went through and recounted the experience again. So they followed the same people for two and a half years. That's one of the reasons they didn't publish the article for almost four years after the Challenger exploded. And in 93% of the cases, the counts were completely inconsistent with each other. And in every one of the cases, they said, no, that's the way it happened. And it wasn't the way that it happened. And they had evidence, videotaped evidence that the same people were telling different stories. Now, this is really interesting, right? That's one of the reasons that I can tell you

21:36what happened on 9-11. And it's probably the case that if I went back and saw my own recounting of it, had there been a videotape of me telling the story that what I'm telling today, I'm not trying to lie. I think it's accurate. But what was going on is the angular gyrus is reassembling the memories and getting glitches and getting, you know, leaving out little pieces of video and information is being added or information is being lost because of what I'm actually living through today. I'm inadvertently editing that.

22:08Now, one thing to keep in mind, you will see in popular culture a lot and in modern media and in journalism a lot where people will be telling about the crimes and terrible things that happened to them a long time in the past. And even in the court of law and our legal system will ask people to testify in congressional testimony or in legal testimony. People will be asked to testify to things that happened to them a long time ago, by memory, sometimes decades ago.

22:39When we see this, those of us in the behavioral science community, we always just slap our foreheads because we're like, you know, journalists are so credulous about these testimonies. Or when people write in books, exactly a conversation they had when they were children or something is that we're photographic. Or when in the therapy industrial complex in this country, professionals, counselors, social workers, psychologists, people in my line of work will ask young people to recount, to dredge up old memories

23:09so they can actually find some evidence of trauma in their past. Those of us who have studied memory, we say that's not, that's not credible. And it's not because people lie. It's because that's not, my friends, how memories work. Now, that's interesting enough, but that's actually really useful when you think about it because reconstructing memories based on current experience gives us an opportunity, but we're not quite there yet. The reason our memories change is because the reconstruction of the stories of our past,

23:40it's we do that in accordance with current narratives and current events and current needs. In other words, you contaminate your memories based on what you're thinking about right now. That's one of the things that we think about. And I'll give you an example of this. Let's say that you have an old friend, somebody you hung out with in college, and somebody you really, really, really liked, but it was a different time in your life. And let's say that your consciousness has been raised and you're a little bit ashamed about how you behaved when you were in college. And if there's nothing

24:10you're ashamed of that happened when you were in college, well, you've just edited your memories. Your angular gyrus is going to town here. And so what typically will happen when people have great memories, but troubled memories because you're not happy about the way that you behaved, you're sort of, you have regret or you have a sense of shame about great old times. And what that will do is that will torque the way that you think about the people that were in those memories.

24:41You'll start to think more negatively about the people that you wouldn't have had a negative thought about at all. Another example of this is that, you know, college students will come home from college weirdly convinced that they suffered all sorts of trauma because their parents are so horrible in their political views. This is one of the things that we find. Now, this is actually a form of predation by people who are counseling young people sometimes to say, oh, really? Tell me about your dad. Tell me about your mom. Tell me about their political views. And when they hear it, they'll say, boy, who hurt you?

25:12Who hurt you? And all that's doing is inducing people to negatively valence memories that would not have had a negative valence otherwise as the angular gyrus is reconstructing episodic memory in their post-adolescent brains. And it has nothing to do with post-adolescence. It has to do with brains more than anything else, which is one of the reasons that people will come back and say, I didn't realize how screwed up my family life was until I went to college. And the reason is because somebody who does not have your interests at heart

25:42was editing your memories by inducing you to think about a different way to dredge up these pictures and to valence them with a current way of thinking that they're trying to give to you. That's not great, but it's not even great when we do it to ourselves. Now, the shifting memories in a way, they're not entirely inaccurate because they're assembled from a pretty partial set of details. And the exact set that we remember changes every time as we dust the memory off. And by the way, your new politics might be right.

26:14You know, the new way that you live and your new morals, they might be right. But it can ruin perfectly good experiences and turn them into bitterness along the way. However, you can also use this tendency to take bitter old memories and make them not so bitter, to take terrible old memories and make them even kind of good. As you know from listening to this show, I've never been a super naturally happy person. That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to understand

26:44human happiness, not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically. And you can too. I don't do research. I do me-search. Well, and you-search. My time in academia has reinforced the lesson I continue to rely on today. Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through deliberate habits and discipline. I take my personal habits seriously. I need to. I have a morning routine. I've talked about it on this show. It involves prayer and exercise and healthy eating

27:16and a lot of coffee while taking it at the right time. But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that routine that helps me take charge of my day. I came across Magic Mind. Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the supplement space and most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience. But Magic Mind has ingredients that I like. Adaptogens, nootropics, such as lion's mane,

27:46ashwagandha, cognizine, L-theanine. These are clinically backed compounds with real research behind them. Magic Mind is a two-ounce shot that you take in the morning. You don't get jitters. There's no crash. It's just your brain working the way it's supposed to, calm, sustained, and focused. If the same cup of coffee every morning has started to feel more like a crutch than a ritual, or if you're just tired of it, it might be worth trying something that actually works with your neurobiology rather than against it.

28:16Right now, you can go to www.magicmind.com, that's all one word, and get 50% off your first order plus a 100-day money-back guarantee. So, you really have nothing to lose by trying it. You can also find Magic Mind in stores near you using the store locator at magicmind.com. It's interesting, in the studies on this that we see, I'll put one in that, there's a really nice paper in Social Cognition called Emotion and Memory Research, a grumpy overview that shows that when people are afraid,

28:47when you induce them to be fearful in laboratory settings, you show them scary movies, for example, and then you ask them to remember scenes from their own youth, they'll think about the threats from those times. They'll think of scary parts of those particular memories. But the same is true, also, when you make people really, really, really happy and when people are full of love and they're laughing a lot and you induce them to think about kind of negative things in their past, they'll find them really funny at the end of the day. And you know you've had this experience I promise you you've had this experience

29:19you need to think about this a little bit where you think about something awful that happened and you're with your friends and you're having a good time and you're telling the story and it's like for the very first time you recount the story and you're cracking up while you're telling the story, that's because you provided a positive valence to what had been a negative memory. You're filling in the gaps as you reconstruct it with positivity. Now, that's something you could do more of. You can choose to do that with things that are sources of regret or bitterness and you can do that in such a way that's very,

29:50very good for your life. It's the same memory. You're not getting it wrong. You're not putting on rose-colored glasses. You're simply looking at it in a different way where it becomes generative and it's not destructive. And when you do this, I'm going to talk to you about exactly how to do this, you're going to be able to drive down that old street that your old girlfriend lives on. You're going to be able to listen to that sad song that was playing all the time that you listened over and over again when your husband walked out or when your mother died.

30:20You get the point that I'm trying to make, right? This gives you power to use this.

Three ways to reconstruct the past

30:25Okay. So I want to tell you three ways to reconstruct your past that maintains the core knowledge, truth, and facts, but that shades it in a particular way that it can help you learn and grow and become a happier person. So that's my objective right here. I want you to do three things. Now to begin with, I want you to start keeping a database, which when I say database, I just mean have a journal of positive memories.

30:55Now why? Mood and memory exist in a feedback loop. Super cool research on this from the journal Octa Psychologica. Memories affect mood, evidence from covert experimental assignment to positive, neutral, and negative memory recall. And what the researchers have shown in this and other research and articles is that mood and memory exist in a feedback loop. That means bad memories lead to bad feelings, but those bad feelings, then they valence the memories and they actually will change key parts of the information in those memories.

31:27You start to focus on the parts of those memories that were the negative parts as opposed to the positive parts. And so in other words, the more your journal, your mental journal is on negative stuff, the worse you're going to feel, the worse that you feel, the worse that your memories are actually going to get. And this is a downward spiral, which is actually central to a lot of the experience to people who have clinical depression. This is what leads into the maladaptive, ruminative sadness, the activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's actually something

31:57that keeping more serotonin in the synapse, which SSRI drugs are supposed to do, that's what it's supposed to interrupt, among other things, as a matter of fact. But you can do that without the serotonin drugs, at least not entirely, using serotonin drugs, by actually keeping a database of positive memories, because that will clip the cycle and put you into an upward trajectory. See what I'm saying here, right? Conjure up happier memories and write them down. I actually keep a, I keep a file of happy memories

32:27that I actually like. I mentioned before the ocean, Lincoln City. Now, I come up with that an awful lot and I struggle with memory. I really do. I don't struggle remembering things. I have a really good memory. But I struggle with the valence, the positivity and negativity. I mean, nothing bad happened to me. I mean, I'm a very, very blessed guy, but I tend to tinge stuff with the negative in the past. As a child, most of my memories actually aren't negative. They're pretty neutral. But my most positive memories

32:59are all from this city in Oregon called Lincoln City. I love the place. I'm, I'm, I just, I used to go, I only went there for a week, a year as a kid. I go to the beach because my aunt, she worked at a, a hotel in Lincoln City called the Spanish Head Inn. She was a receptionist there. She actually lived in a trailer some miles down the road and I would go to my Aunt Marie's trailer and, and she'd work all day and I'd go to the beach and I would hunt for agates and I would surf. I mean, I would surf, right. Yeah. Get eaten by a shark. I would,

33:29I would fish off in the surf. I would fish off the rocks, you know, using mussels for bait and I caught my first few fish there. I just have such happy memories from that and such gratitude actually for those memories and so I have a, I have a bunch of those in my memory journal. Others as well, you know, things that I did with my dad that I really, really loved or my brother and memories of, you know, when the day each of my children was born, memory of my wedding day, memory of the first day I met my wife back in France in 1988.

34:00These are beautiful memories and the reason that I have this is because I want to cut the feedback loop that's fundamentally kind of negative. Those of you who watch this show, you know that, that I have very high negative affect, very high positive affect but very high negative affect as well. If you want more on that, go to my website and you can actually take a test on your relative levels of positive and negative affect. That's called the PANAS, P-A-N-A-S test. Link goes in the, in the show notes, of course, for those of you who are interested. I'm very high negative affect and so the result is I need these manual techniques.

34:31I keep a journal, I keep a database of positive memories and I look at it, I look at it frequently because I want to start the feedback loop, memory, feeling, memory, feeling and it's really good for getting me off the negative affect curve onto the positive affect curve. Okay, now, number two, technique number two. The valence, the positive valence in the memories that I like the best and tends to be most efficacious in the research is where there's a focus on gratitude, right? Now, I've talked about gratitude lists

35:02in the past and all the research on that, which has been, where McClellan's work on gratitude has been so fundamentally generative and useful and what he talks about is gratitude listing where you'll put together a gratitude list and like the five things you're most grateful for, write it down every Sunday night and then every day during the week, look at it for a couple minutes and you know, the data say that you'll be something like 12% happier after 10 weeks. It's unbelievable. On your gratitude list, list memories. So say two of the five things,

35:33list memories and so what you're doing is you're creating this positive bias to the memories and you're creating content for your positive memory journal by actually using your gratitude list in this particular way. So I'm grateful right now because, you know, what's going on in my life. I'm grateful right now because my team won. I'm grateful right now because I got an A on this exam. Right now, at this very moment, I'm grateful that I get to do this podcast, which I really love and that you're watching it. It makes me really happy. But I'm also grateful for Lincoln City, even though I was 11 at the time, right?

36:04I'm grateful for that my Aunt Marie loved me and she wanted to do that with me. And you get my point, right? And being grateful for something that actually happened in the past, that's a second technique that I strongly recommend and then reviewing it

Extracting wisdom from painful experiences

36:17again and again. Now, here's the third thing. And this is actually where we recognize that not all memories can be turned over and positive, okay? You can't reconstruct certain memories and make them okay. And I know probably you've been thinking about that all the way through this episode. You're like, yeah, Brooks, but, you know, I'm not going to turn that terrible car accident into a positive experience. I don't care how good I am at brainwashing myself or, you know, editing the memories. It's not going to get positive. I get that. I totally get that. And there are things like that in everybody's life.

36:48There's loss, there's death, there's fear, there's just terrible memories that people have. And there's more coming, man. I mean, there's more. I mean, life has a lot of pain in it. We have sadness and grief and anger and disgust and fear, and these things are going to leave some scars. There are traumas. I'm not of the school that we're all just completely, you know, bundles of pulsating trauma and that animates everything that we do, but we do have some traumas in it. I'm not suggesting that you try to reconstruct a past that expunges

37:18these things or turns them rosy into sources of joy. In some cases, that would be impossible because they're just too painful. They're just too terrible. I get that. Furthermore, some terrible memories can lead us to learning and progress that keep us from repeating mistakes, which is, you know, one of the reasons that we'll go back to bad memories and ruminate on those so we don't make mistakes. But therein lies a tremendous opportunity because we can methodically think overtly and purposively

37:49about how to take these really painful memories and focus on the learning and growth that they actually bring. So in other words, there are things that you think about that you don't like and they happened, right? And you're not pushing them away because, you know, you're an office hours listener. You're not somebody who's avoidant, right? You're going to deal with things, experiences, and memories in your life. The whole point is, how do you bracket these really bad memories? You say, that's a bad memory. Okay, it'll pass. Or you say, that's a bad memory. I don't like it.

38:20What am I learning from that? How is my life getting better as a result of that? How I'm actually practicing future scenarios where I don't make mistakes that I've made in the past or how am I growing as a person to have a perspective on how loss actually happens? Scholars have shown that when people reflect on difficult experiences with the explicit goal of finding meaning and improving themselves, what do they do? They give better advice to others. They make better decisions going forward. They solve problems more effectively and they're happier.

38:51I'll put an article on this in the show notes from developmental psychology called Hard-Earned Wisdom. Exploratory processing of difficult life experiences is positively associated with wisdom. That's the technique. Let me give you one specific way to do this because I don't want this to remain theoretical because it's so important and probably this is the most important thing we're talking about here as a matter of fact. I've mentioned it in the past but I'll mention it again. I have a technique that I teach my students. This is an assignment that I give my graduate students.

The failure journal method

39:20It's called the failure journal. Okay? Failure journal. And why do I call it that? Because we fail and our own failures are some of the bitterest sources of disappointment and negative memories for us. But you can put in your regrets and your disappointments whether they're your failures or not. Make this your negative experience journal. And here's how I recommend that you actually keep it. Now again, this is really counterintuitive advice. I realize it's like Brooks is telling you to write down all the horrible stuff

39:50and review it. Yeah, but here's how. Here's with a twist. When something happens that it's bad, right? Write it down. You can do it on your phone in a locked note or I actually recommend pencil and paper because it's cognitively more effective for your memory. Write down in just a line the thing that you're worried about or that you're angry about or that you're sad about. Write it down and leave two lines below the entry.

40:20Come back after three weeks and come back to it and write down what you learned from the experience in the interim because you did learn something. It might be that you got a horrible job evaluation and you thought your job was going really well. It's your first job out of college and you thought you were killing it and your boss calls you in and puts you on a performance improvement plan and you go home and you're really bummed and your friends are like, just forget it. The guy's a jerk. Don't forget it. Write it down. Write it down in your journal. Come back in three weeks and write down what did I learn from that experience?

40:51I'm not saying you liked it because you didn't like it. You still don't like it but you might write down I thought I was a better match for that job than it turns out I really am. Good information to know. You didn't learn that you're a hopeless loser but you learned that you might not be the right fit for that job. Okay. Then two months later you come back to the third line to the second blank line to the third line which is what benefit actually came from that which after two months might be I went on the job market and I think I'm coming close

41:21to a job that actually does better fit my skills. Now why do I say this? Because in so doing the recollection of something painful turns into something explicitly generative and I promise you that if you go through this exercise you're going to look forward to writing down a new entry after you know 10 or 11 of these entries you're going to start looking forward to it because you're going to look at the way that things have resulted in the past and how you specifically have converted the negative into the positive. You've taken your negative memories and turned them into positive sources of learning.

41:52This is a very specific way to do it and it works. It's been working for me for years. One last word. Let's go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson for a second. Go read Self-Reliance. I recommended it a bunch of times. Read anything from Ralph Waldo Emerson. This stuff's great. In the same essay Self-Reliance from 1841 he wrote about memory and about negative experiences and trying to escape himself. The intellect is vagabond. And here's what he meant by this. We try to distract ourselves

42:23from ourselves all the time and make big changes in our lifestyle and we avoid this and we avoid that but it never works. So what does he counsel? We should endow every moment with a cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation. That's what I'm talking about. Cultivate your whole life and endow every moment with a force of the growth and the generativity that actually comes from that. There's a reason that you're remembering everything and the reason for it is because you deserve

42:53to be happier and more successful as a person and you can make it so. The next time you want to make a positive change in your life don't limit your imagination to just what you hope might happen. Start with a backdrop of your own life positive and negative and see why it's making you restless in the first place. Maybe in the end you will go to Naples. Maybe in the end you will change jobs or partners but whether you go or stay you consciously are managing your past in a way that you yourself

43:24will be a very fine

Answering listener questions on career risk

43:25travel companion. Let's do a couple of questions and then we're done. Tanya Weaver writes in officehours at authorbrooks.com How can I present content from the meaning of your life? Thank you Tanya. She wants to she's talking about my last book The Meaning of Your Life. She wants to present it to elementary school kids so they can learn to lead a life of meaning. I don't recommend taking fourth graders and say read this book that would be that would be a little bit unreasonable I dare say. Each one of the chapters in The Meaning of Your Life actually finishes with questions. There's usually

43:56seven to nine questions to sort of test your knowledge but also just to introduce the topic when you're talking about it with somebody else. What I recommend is when you're talking to kids or anything else use those as conversation topics. You're probably going to want to translate them into the language that's most comfortable for your elementary age kids but they love discussions and they can go pretty deep as a matter of fact. I found that out with my own kids when we would have these dinner time conversations. So that's what I would actually recommend as opposed to trying to explain

44:27the neuroscience. Anonymous writes in also to the email account or the website. I love this because this is something in a lot of people's minds. How do I handle job extinction? I work in data AI which will likely make some of my employees and me redundant over the next few years. It's like you're building your own coffin. I know. Do I reskill? Do I go back? Do I back myself? How do I handle the uncertainty? These are all kind of the same because those three questions are all kind of the same

44:58questions. Start now in your exit plan. Never be surprised by something that you should have actually been able to see. Now we hate uncertainty to the extent that we avoid it by actually not confronting it. And this is very common. Uncertainty creates anxiety. Anxiety is unfocused fear. That's a minor stimulation of the amygdala in the limbic system which sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland which stimulates the adrenal glands to kick out a little bit of stress hormones.

45:28And that's unpleasant. Anxiety, especially based on uncertainty, is something that uncertainty is really a form of minor fear and we avoid fear because we're trying to avoid the unpleasantness of this actually. The way to solve this problem with your job, with your relationship, whatever it is, is to take the uncertainty and turn it into risk. And maybe it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, but uncertainty and risk are not the same thing. Risk is something where you confront the possibilities, you assign probabilities to them, and then you decide

45:59on a strategy for each one of the scenarios. That's what insurance companies do, by the way. You outsource turning uncertainty into actual risk such that if something catastrophic happens, they pay. That's our classic way. This is one of the reasons that we don't like risk when it doesn't keep us up at night, it doesn't make us unhappy. Uncertainty makes us positively unhappy, and that's, anonymous, what you're expressing. So start now on an exit plan. Turn that uncertainty into actual risk. That means you should be studying new skills and

46:29training for them proactively, should have a timeline on when you think job extinction might come, and when you think you're going to have one foot out the door, which should be before the job extinction actually exists so that you have the power. You should be thinking about your finances, what it should actually be, what do I need in this case, what do I need in this case. Again, this is probabilities that we're actually playing in scenario planning. Own it. No shock should come from any part of it, and when you own it, when you game it out, when you war game this thing, you write it down, worst

46:59case, best case, most likely case, probabilities, what will I do in each case, I promise you, your life is going to look entirely differently. You're going to be empowered, as a matter of fact, and that's what you should be. People will see it, and they'll say, what's your secret? And you'll say, I listen to Office Hours every week. All right, we're done. Please let me know your thoughts by writing in to the website, officehours at arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, leave a comment, negative, positive, we read them all, and we appreciate your taking the time to

47:30feedback on the show. Also, follow me on the social media platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, everything else, and order The Meaning of Your Life, my latest book, and share it with your 100 closest friends. We all need more meaning. Anyway, my source of meaning in no small part is being able to do this with you. I hope you find it meaningful as well, and I'll see you next week. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series

48:0012 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.