To forget, contrary to what many people believe, is not to withdraw from a psychological battlefield having suffered many casualties, as if it were natural to retain all the information that one day seemed relevant to us. People evolve, and that means that our propensity to evoke certain types of memories or others does too.

Next we will see why it is good to forget and why it is not a betrayal of our past identity.

Why it’s good to forget

Among the advantages you will see below, some are emotional and others are rational . This is normal, since memory works in these two areas of our mind.

1. It helps us to prioritize in our lives

Oblivion is literally a process of prioritization. Except in cases of neurological disease, what we remember best at any given time is because, in one way or another, it has to do with something we care about.

Thus, forgetting certain memories “smoothes the way” for us when choosing between possible options in a decision making process . The fact that we have forgotten a person allows us not even to worry about how we should relate to him, for example. To understand it better, the human brain only allows us to consciously decide between options that really compete with each other, instead of wasting time discarding elements that are not going to solve anything for us.

2. It is a coping mechanism

A good part of the process of overcoming trauma and bad moments in general has to do with forgetting. This, however, does not mean that we are fooling ourselves , as might be assumed from pessimism. The truth is that, whatever we do, we never have a panoramic view of the facts, ours is always a local perspective. Ours is always a local perspective. This can be happy at times, or sad at others, but neither case is better suited to reality because it is sad or happy.

Our options, then, are to opt for a more positive way of life or for another marked by unhappiness: in both, our view of things will be biased. That is why forgetting negative aspects of the past is not a bad thing, but quite the opposite. It allows us to occupy our minds with experiences that, if we have the capacity to immerse ourselves in them, we will be able to direct our subjectivity towards something that will help us to move forward.

3. Forgetting makes us more creative

When we forget, we don’t just “erase” information from our brain; what actually happens is that we transform it. In fact, every time this phenomenon occurs, some of that information we had stored is disintegrated from the rest and joined to other memories or ideas.

The result is that, while certain memories cease to exist as they did before, new ones appear that are influenced by the previous ones. In this way our mental life is enriched and has more ingredients with which to work , since it does not work on the basis of “hermetic” categories linked to specific memories linked only to a particular context.

4. It helps us to mature

This advantage of forgetting is closely related to the previous one, and it also has to do with Emotional Intelligence. Forgetting all the psychological pain that certain situations produced in the past not only prevents us from feeling uneasy, but also helps us to distance ourselves from that kind of content and to evaluate in a more rational way what happened to us and the conclusion we can draw from it.

To better understand this, we can consider how the death of a family member influences us. At first, stress and sadness cause our whole reality to change, but as that wound closes, there remains what is useful for us to learn and what we can apply to the rest of our lives: that it is important to value the moments together, that we are all human, etc. That would not happen if our emotions linked to that experience were constantly blocking any form of reasoning.

5. Can be helpful in remembering

As we have seen, memory is a selective process . That’s why eliminating (or rather “dissolving”) memories helps us to remember things more quickly. Why? Because it eliminates distractions or elements that may resemble that memory we are really trying to recover.

For example, if we have read the name of two different people who have a similar surname, forgetting the one that has to do with the less relevant one allows us to make fewer mistakes when retrieving information about the other one.

6. Allows us to better adapt to new challenges

If our memory capacity allowed us to remember almost everything that happens to us, we would be very unskillful in responding to novel problems. The reason is that our memory register would be so wide that our attention would be directed to that mental file, to look for what is relevant in it , instead of making us concentrate on the problem in front of us.

The result would be that doubts would paralyse us in a way that would keep our response capacity at bay. More information is not the same as knowing how to use it well, and so the more efficient we are at removing bits of information, the better.