Do you sometimes wonder why we remember certain things and others not?
How was your day? Was it a good day? Or was it not so good?
The optimists will say it was not as good as tomorrow because tomorrow will always be better.
But here comes the tricky question:
Was today better than yesterday?
And if yesterday was not so good, how was your last month?
For those that had a bad day yesterday, the last month was quite ok. For the others, the previous month was also quite ok.
?? Does it mean we are all feeling equal about our lives?
Experience vs. Memory
We all experience daily ups and downs. The anger, the joy, and the bitterness. But our mind has a natural tendency to forget the negative emotions and, as such, the attached bad events.
Our remembered emotional curve gets smoothed out as we try to remember farther back.
Regression to the mean
Good days follow bad days. And the other way around. This pattern has an excellent explanation.
Regression to the mean. The remembered emotions are the mean.
The daily ups and downs are the deviations from that mean. Bad days will always follow a long series of good days.
Regression is challenging to understand, and our mind has another natural tendency:
It searches for causes everywhere.
Remember your last mishap. We try to analyze and search for a cause. We would be far better to accept the reversal and think that tomorrow will always be better,
even though today was not good.
Shifting the mean
Now I wonder what we can do to shift the mean. Is it even possible?
My takeaways from a quick google search :
- Improve sleep and meals
- Get active in the fresh air
- Creativity and self-determined success
- Meditation and reflection using a journal