How Our Memory Affects Mood: A meditation for healing

When someone is depressed, their memory of moments of joy becomes overwritten by the more pervasive dark cloud over their world. The meditation that follows is a way to strengthen memory for joy.

The goddess of memory in Greek mythology is Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses of inspiration and creativity. In ancient Greece, when a depressed or ailing person needed healing, they'd go to the sanctuaries of Asclepius, the god of medicine. The Greeks believed that the goddess Mnemosyne needed to be present during healing. Memory is essential for healing because when we have pleasant or difficult feelings, our memory and interpretation of an experience will preserve it for healing or for pain. 

Our memories are constructed and reconstructed, influenced by cognitive, emotional, and social factors. Memory consolidation plays a crucial role in how autobiographical memories—our narratives— are formed, maintained, and transformed over time, making short-term memories into long-term memories, making them stable and less susceptible to forgetting.

How Does Memory Affect Depression?

Dysthymic Disorder or Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD) is a chronic form of depression that lasts for at least two years in adults. It is common but doesn't meet the criteria for major depression, so it doesn't get as much attention in research and medicine. Many people can live with PDD and are usually not in danger of suicide. They may be high-functioning people who can put up a good front to their friends and co-workers. Yet anhedonia —the inability to experience pleasure in activities that would typically produce joy—can feel debilitating because while they can function on the outside, on the inside, they feel sad and empty and know something is missing but have no idea how to fix it.

Dysphoria—the opposite of the well-known euphoria— is a state of unease and pervasive discomfort, dissatisfaction, and negative feelings. When these symptoms are combined, we cannot remember joy, and our tales of woe are ever-present.

For the person with Dysthymia, they have trouble feeling anything but a low-grade sadness that is often inexplicable. People with Dysthymia cannot feel pleasure and have trouble even remembering pleasurable experiences. Think of Eeyore as dysthymic and Tiger as hypomanic, Piglet as anxious, and Winnie the Poo as an even-tempered good friend. While we all experience moments of sadness and anxiety, for people with PDD, the dominant mood is dull and listless. Many people beginning psychotherapy have the symptoms of Dysthymia but have trouble even describing how they feel. 

Here in Northern California, we have been deluged by the poetically termed Atmospheric Rivers. On the first sunny day, I hiked in the foothills of Mt. Diablo and noticed the new green grasses and the dappled light created by the shadows of the oaks along the path. I felt immense joy. Then, as I entered a section of the trail where the cattle graze, the path became rutted by the cow hooves, and the muddy water made my hike slow-going. Several cyclists came along, grumbling about the choppy trail. What in that day do we choose to hold in memory? What weight will it carry in our appreciation of the day?

Blake wrote about the interplay of joy and woe, and this has always been a favorite quote for me:

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

     - "Auguries of Innocence"

When joy and woe are part of the same fabric, what happens to moments of fleeting joy? A pleasurable moment was noticed for an instant, and then the mind's screen swiped left and was lost to other thoughts that become etched in the mind. On my hike, I might have been cursing the cows, the mud, and the need to slow my pace down to a crawl. That could have prevented me from remembering the dappled sunlight through the branches of the oak sentinels that lined the path before I entered the mud.

When someone is depressed, their memory of moments of joy becomes overwritten by the more pervasive dark cloud over their world. The memories of difficulty subsumed the ability to experience pleasure in the sights, sounds, and fragrances in daily life. So even the small moments of pleasure are quickly dispersed into a vapor that envelops and closes in before the joy can be experienced and appreciated long enough to become embedded in memory. The negative moments are then consolidated into memory, erasing the moments of joy.

We have evolved toward a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. This is known as negativity bias and can skew our perception toward the negative. This, coupled with a pattern of worry and rumination, can lead us to downplay simple joys and moments of contentment. 

There are several ways to help improve how we remember and store pleasurable moments so that they can improve our overall mood. Reflective practices like meditation, mindfulness, and journaling are all helpful in changing the mental narrative by enhancing awareness of pleasant moments and encoding them so that joy becomes available to us along with the woe. And, as pleasure becomes more robust, woe recedes to a level that weakens the hold of anhedonia and dysphoria. 

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Meditation: Remembering and Savoring the Good

Revisiting the Good: A meditation for helping to strengthen memory for pleasurable moments. I learned this meditation from Erik van den Brink and Frits Koster, the Mindfulness-based Compassionate Living Program creators. Finding ways to invoke the goddess of memory, we strengthen our healing by finding the good in experiences, letting them linger, and savoring them.