One wrong decision. One poor choice. One bad behaviour. That’s all it takes. One mistake to erase or taint all the good – said, done and achieved – over the years. I don’t understand how one bad tick (✓) can override so many good ticks, but it does. And, try as I may, I am one of ‘those’ people who remembers the bad more than the good. I don’t forget the good. It just gets overshadowed by the bad.

I made a bad decision recently. I couldn’t forget it. And, I wouldn’t let myself forget it either. For over two weeks, it played in my head. I woke up and went to sleep with it. I repeatedly chastised myself. And, when I couldn’t make myself feel bad anymore, I stopped. Not really, but I have managed to forgive myself. Only a little. Long story short, my bank account was almost hacked due to my carelessness and stupidity. Luckily, it wasn’t. But, I didn’t and couldn’t focus on this. I was safe. My account was safe. I was fortunate. All was good, but…

I almost went on another rant at myself there. That’s all it takes. That one reminder of that one mistake. I am still not able to forget nor let go. I have tried to “Let it go” like the song from the movie Frozen, but to no avail. I still think of the many, many ‘what ifs’.  I am average smart. I am sensible. I am cautious. I am generally quite good with money. I save. I invest a little. I don’t spend what I don’t have, and never beyond my means. This incident made me call into question all my sensibilities.  

It also forced me to rake up other not-so-proud moments that I had safely buried in the deep recesses of my brain. Thankfully for me, there weren’t many that I could summon up. There was an almost perverse need to make me feel worse than I already was.  

In a co-authored journal article in 2001, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University said, among other things, that bad events wore off more slowly than good ones. Like many other quirks of the human psyche, there may be an evolutionary basis for this. Those who are ‘more attuned to bad things’ would have been more likely to survive threats and consequently would have increased the probability of passing along their genes. Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes but less urgent with regard to good ones[1].

Naturally, I am also my own worst critic. I have always chided myself when I have been unhappy over something I did or didn’t do. Be it exams, work, personal issues, family or friendships. Many a times, I have played scenarios in my head as to what I should have written or done. Or what I could have said or not. Or how I should have shared an advice or suggestion and/or delivered a joke or a story. I call it my washing machine moments. It swishes, turns, flips, turns around, and it repeats. Going nowhere. Solving nothing, most of the time. That said, the little optimist voice in me never fails to remind me – to learn from every situation, be better the next time, and not be stupid, silly like the last time.

Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University, said that while some people do have a more positive outlook, almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail. He added that negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones. People tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events — and use stronger words to describe them — than happy ones[2]. Similarly, in the language of emotions and emotion-related words, there is consistent evidence that humans have many more (one-and-a-half times more) words for negative emotions than for positive emotions[3]. Yikes.

I am happy I stumbled upon these research findings. It’s good to know I am not the only one who has an elephant’s memory that refuses to forget the bad bits in life. Admittedly, I do try not to be too hard on myself, but it’s a little difficult when it’s still raw. Time does help. To me, most things don’t seem as bad after a while. Or that’s what I tell myself.