Written by: Carmen Bracamonte
Spring cleaning your soul and mind from the inside out can payoff your conscious efforts to detoxify from negative emotions. But it's not that simple.
Jane Smith spends her days in Springfield, Illinois igniting stress in her life. Traumatized by an abusive alcoholic father and a drug-addict mother, Jane lived on the streets for most part of her childhood. A leap of luck helped Jane to strike temporary success at age 18. She got a job. Got married. Had a beautiful child too. She couldn’t explain why but her vivid memories of a traumatic childhood – daily overpowered her present for years. She stressed out over fear, suppressed anger and hurt. Divorced at age 25. Her unresolved emotional issues hindered her life taking a toll on her husband and child. Unfortunately, Jane is not alone. Our brain registers negative emotions faster and deeper than negative emotions, a psychological study shows.
Why Do We Stick To Negative Emotions?
Negative events may edge out positive ones in our memories, according to research by Rose Kensinger and others in the Current Directions in Psychological Science Journal (August 2009). "It really does matter whether [an event is] positive or negative in that most of the time, if not all of the time, negative events tend to be remembered in a more accurate fashion than positive events," Kensinger said.
While we might not remember more total details about a bad event we experience, "the details you remember about a negative event are more likely to be accurate," Kensinger explained. The details we are most likely to remember accurately are the things that directly cause our negative emotional reaction. So, for example, if you are mugged, you may remember the gun pointed at you with a high level of detail because it is what caused your fear, but you may completely forget details that are peripheral, such as the things around you on the street or what your assailant was wearing.
Our Brain Holds A Memory Network
Our brains have a specific memory network that kicks into gear whenever we are trying to remember something, Kensinger said. "But it seems like when we're having an emotional reaction, the emotional circuitry in the brain kind of turns on and enhances the processing in that typical memory network such that it works even more efficiently and even more effectively to allow us to learn and encode those aspects that are really relevant to the emotions that we're experiencing," Kensinger explains.
So by narrowly focusing the memory network on the thing triggering the emotion, such as the gun from the previous example, your brain remembers details of the gun very accurately, but "at the expense of devoting any resources toward processing anything else that's going on," Kensinger said.
Conversely, events that we experience as emotionally positive, such as a wedding, or as neutral, such as an average day at work, don't trigger the brain to focus on any one specific detail, so "you're just going to kind of remember everything going on in an equally good fashion," Kensinger stated.
Our Brain and Life-Changing Events
Those who had life-changing events like the death of a spouse, divorce, personal injury, child abuse, lost of a job, etc. are more susceptible to emotional toxins. Every thought has a corresponding emotion and every emotion affects the body. How we deal with a situation depends a lot on how we view it. It is common knowledge that our breath pattern changes with every emotion. With the millions of thoughts we have, all the corresponding emotions are stored in our body. Often they remain unreleased and unhealed, eventually resulting in extreme physical illnesses like acidity, ulcers, blood pressure, migraines and heart problems. Each cell in our body has a memory of every experience we have ever had. Emotional detoxification is a process of healing and cleansing the mind and body. All you need to do is to use that situation (especially if painful) as a stepping-stone to emotional balance.
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