Dealing with anxiety? You might have a brushed up memory because of it!
All clouds have a silver lining! If you find yourself gasping for a missed heartbeat with every minor tension in your life, you probably suffer from anxiety. But is it all bad? Ever noticed how you vividly remember every situation in your life? All thanks for worrying about it so much! Although too much of it can have an opposite effect by impairing recall and causing people to remember neutral details.
Anxiety has peculiar ways of functioning. It can sometimes shade lense on what people remember through events. Be it interactions or conversations from the past. When anxiety levels get high, it can cause people to withdraw from surrounding rather than place them.
A study conducted with 80 undergraduate psychology students were given to standard screening test with symptoms like shakiness and dry mouth. After categorising the students, the less anxious students were kept away. The rest were asked to memorise words they read on a screen. Some images were a little disturbing, and they were asked to make a report on the same.
The results showed that students with higher anxiety could remember most of the words on the slide. The exciting difference was that words displayed over negative photos were more recognised as the emotional context made stronger memories.
It was proved that students who possessed more anxiety had an advantage over non-anxious people. People can adopt negative retrieval mode and train their memory to stay neutral to what is not essential.
Being anxious also leads to a negative mindset and create a trail of mishaps only for you to remember. It may opt your senses to be extra rude to a person or be defensive without needing it.
Having anxiety may make your stay more in the past and future and leave out the present. You must have noticed that butterfly feeling when you are anxious and hardly conceive what is happening at the moment. It is later that you realise what happened to you and how you felt through the occasion.
The bottom line is be it a memory enhancer or not, it does take a toll on your peace of mind. The best way to beat anxiety is to keep a positive mind and convince yourself that you can go through everything and emerge victoriously.
