Experiencing and Remembering

You arrived very early to the party and have been eating and drinking non-stop.   Suddenly it hits you.  Your stomach is churning and your head is pounding.  After wishing you were dead, you resolve never to get yourself into that position of excess again.  Two weeks later you see a friend who also attended the party.  She gushes about how much she enjoyed each succulent shrimp and savory sip of Scotch.  You heartily agree, adding that the host is planning another party on the 12th of the month, and that you too can’t wait to load up on the food and drinks.  Your previous experience of excess never enters your mind.  You have no intention of “depriving” yourself on the 12th.

How can a person go from resolving never to over-eat or over-drink at a party to again behaving in just that way? Daniel Kahneman (2011)  would answer by differentiating the experiencing self from the remembering self.  These selves are as their names suggest.  One experiences an event in real time that she responds to in real time, and the other recalls the experience later.  The experience and the memory never are precisely the same and, as in our example, the difference can be quite extreme.

The experiencing and remembering dichotomy has profound lifestyle and health implications.  It might lead one person continually to overeat at parties and another continually to practice unsafe sex. Positive change often begins with reconciling the experiencing and remembering selves.  That sounds easier than it is.  Our memories are abstractions, often self-serving abstractions that enable us to remember what we want and to forget the rest.  Because valid experiential feedback is essential for making corrective lifestyle adjustments, we must learn how to remember enough of the experiencing self impressions that we would prefer to forget.

Accurate memories start with a conscious intention to remember accurately.  But a global intention is not enough.  Since memory is built from abstracted impressions, we never will remember every single detail.  We typically remember what we already believe and/or what grabs us emotionally.  Therefore, we consciously must intend to remember the specific aspects of our experiencing self that we would prefer to dismiss.  If that intention causes us to focus on the uncomfortable features of our health-relevant experiences, we have a fighting chance to remember them and to learn from them.  And if our health-promoting intention and focus permit us to begin to behave more healthfully, we have a fighting chance to develop strong, enduring health habits.

To recall our specific health-relevant experiences we employ "autobiographical episodic memory."  And those memories have been shown to provide content for about 44 percent of our conversations   (Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003). That means internal or external, conscious or unconscious self-esteem or social pressures can cause us to distort our recollection and/or report of experiences.  In either case, the distortion impairs our ability to learn from experience and causes us to repeat self-defeating habits.

My advice is for you to recruit a new form of the self to stand beside the experiencing and remembering selves.  I call this the "monitoring self,” a self who does its best to faithfully record and recall our experiences.  The monitoring self knows that we want to forget the uncomfortable features of our unhealthful experiences and that that predilection can sabotage our change implementation.  An effective monitoring self knows that when we deliberately or inadvertently program out from our insight or conversations information about our health lapses, we reinforce false and self-defeating health-relevant narratives as well.

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow.   New York: Macmillan.

Pasupathi, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003).  Age and emotional experience during mutual reminiscing.  Psychology and Aging, 18, 430–442.