Do you want to know how to keep your memory functioning at tip-top shape well into old age?  There’s definitely a way, but It’s not what you think, and you would probably never find it in a million years.

The fact is, folks, you don’t need to do a gazillion sudoku and crossword puzzles.  You don’t need to take different routes to work.  You don’t even have to fill up on brain stimulants like ginkgo, selenium and Vitamin E—though I won’t deny their effectiveness in clinical studies.

Keeping your memory sharp and staving off what people identify as memory decline is pretty simple:  Just don’t practice forgetting so much.  I know it sounds weird, but if you read a little further down the page, you’ll see what I mean.

First, think on this:  How do you learn to play a musical instrument?  How do you learn to tie your shoes?   How do you learn to print your ABC’s?  By practicing, practicing, practicing.  So how do you learn to forget everything that bothers you?

Drum roll………………..by practicing practicing and more practicing!    And not only that, practice makes perfect.

Sad to say, the very memories you want to forget are the hardest ones to lose, so you tend to practice every day all the time whether you know it or not.  That’s because emotional memories make deep rivulets in the brain, especially if they were deposited visually or reinforced with strong physical sensations.

The word ‘war’, for example, didn’t bother you much as a child, until you began to associate it with the horrible pictures and screen images that accompany it.  There’s a lot of us who would like to forget the images of war and violence.  They have been pounded into our brains 24/7 for many years now.

But if you practice forgetting day in day out, you’ll learn how—how to forget all the good stuff along with the bad.  You see, folks, forgetting comes at an extremely humongous price.  The price of forgetting everything that triggers bad memories includes the triggers for the good times, along with the people you hold dear.  ‘Cause even the good times trigger memories of horrible things. That’s just how our brain works.

Here’s another way of looking at it: When you’re trying to intentionally forget anything, you first have to mentally segregate that information.  Next, you have block it off access in your brain in order to make it really hard for your mind to retrieve.  After awhile, the good times become harder to retrieve too, til they’re pretty much irretrievable.

We all have things in our lives we’d just as soon forget forever, though. The lucky amongst us have a few million minor incidents, give or take a few thousand.

Some of us, on the other hand, have huge chunks of our lives, rich with negative emotions, that we’d just as soon mine out of our brains permanently.  If you are one of those silly humans who looks back on your teenage years as the best times of your life, then most likely you’re leaving out a substantial amount of emotionally painful experiences.

Without a doubt, the adolescent years, driven by rampant gender hormones, are some of the most challenging times that humans every face.  While the typical teenage girl brain is obsessively concerned with attracting a strong, regular featured mate, most teenage males (poor devils) are 100% concerned with sewing  wild oats in every furrow they see.  And then, of course, there’s the all the genders between what we identify as male and female who don’t even know where they stand in the mix.

Frustration, embarrassment, wild mood swings, self loathing and confidence issues are pretty much the norm during this human growth period, and it lasts about 8-9 years in our culture, if your lucky.

So Be honest.  Can you remember even one year’s worth of adolescence?  Isn’t it kind of an emotional blur of ups and downs, most of which you’ve already repressed, denied, suppressed or intentionally forgotten?

There are findings that add to fast accumulating evidence that emotion places limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind.  Some results suggest that even a mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional forgetting. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that emotional memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies.   I think this is precisely where memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer comes in— first disguised as helpful coping strategies.

Lest you think I’m nudging you towards a cliff, there is something you can practice that gets rid of the painful emotions of negative experiences while leaving the memories intact.  It’s called deleting and it’s really simple to learn and practice.