If I say that forgetting is essential for mental health and well-being, I know most people will contradict me. But science has also said that forgetting is a necessary part of the smooth function of the brain. Sometimes we must eliminate unnecessary or outdated information to keep our brains on track to process the required information smoothly. Forgetting things will not make you dumb or less intelligent.
Instead, it is a process of memorizing. Ignoring unnecessary details or past experiences will help our mind categorizes the necessary information to generate appropriate responses to similar events in the future. It is essential to remember and forget things for our brain to hold and select the most relevant information.
Forgetting is Essential for Mental Health
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One thing to clarify before proceeding further is that by forgetting things, in this article, we don’t mean neurodegenerative diseases or dementia. We meant for the forgetting process in a healthy person, which is essential for the smooth working of our brain because one can’t craft a good text without deleting some parts and proofreading. Let’s say you have to write a letter or mail to someone.
You will first make a rough draft and then remove the extra information you think is unnecessary to clarify the letter or mail. The same goes for our brains. So the forgetting process helps us remember the things necessary to remember and dump all the unnecessary and outdated information. That’s why Forgetting is Essential for Mental Health.
It’s good to eliminate outdated information.
Our brains pass through a lot of information daily. Most of the information is just noise, hindering the clarity of our thinking process and slowing our decision-making process. So that is the main reason why forgetting is essential for mental health. Something needs to be done with the extra unnecessary information. Eliminating the additional information from our brain helps the brain to be more flexible.
This brain will be able to think broader and helps in effective decision-making and thinking. Eliminating the extra information helps streamline memory and optimizes our future decision-making, and that’s why Forgetting is Essential for Mental Health.
Remembering everything comes with a cost.
Take the example of a mobile phone. Today everyone is using mobiles. And if you have a lot of old data on your mobile phone, you are not deleting unnecessary data from your mobile. Now when you have to search for a particular thing, your mobile will take time to scan through all the data, even if it has not been linked to the information.
But if you delete the unnecessary data, your mobile has to search through limited data and will give your output quickly rather than the 1st case. The same thing is with the brain. Suppose you don’t pass through unnecessary information or forget outdated information. In that case, it will process all the information to remember things, and sometimes it will become frustrating, which is why Forgetting is Essential for Mental Health.
Thus with time, try to forget the information which is not required or try to update the information with the latest one so that when you have to remember anything, you remember only the required information. Forgetting has a unique role in memorizing information. And remembering things comes with some cost. If it has limited and necessary information, it will help make remembering more efficient as our brain will use fewer resources, which is another reason forgetting is Essential for Mental Health.
Forgetting is essential for post-traumatic recovery.
There is one health reason why forgetting is essential for meant health: it is suitable for people who are fighting stress, depression, or PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder. The key to fight with depression is to forget about the things which make you depressed. So forgetting things will help you to overcome depression as well.
It has been seen people with solid remembering power are the ones who suffer a lot from psychological trauma or depression, so if they learn to forget things, they can use this as a protective measure to improve their mental health, and that’s why Forgetting is Essential for Mental Health.
There is a good saying that if you want to construct a beautiful plot of your life, then you should learn to forget some things. Without forgetting some things, no one will be able to create a design of his liking. As one can’t tell a beautiful story if he can’t ignore or omit some of the secondary details, it is necessary to forget unnecessary details for a handsome living.
