Ever notice how easy it is to remember the negative? I don’t mean only disaster-in-the-making negative events, but also the everyday I-can’t-find-any-stamps-with-flags negative events.

At the same time, positive events of the day tend to float by, somewhere below your level of recognition unless they are momentous, such as surviving a serious illness, getting a new project or promotion, or seeing your child’s first steps.

This is because your mind drives your memory toward the negative. The result of this action is the Zeigarnik Effect.

In 1927 Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered that our minds are constructed in such as way that we tend to remember (more…)