How To Avoid Being Emotionally Scarred By Tragic Memories

Once you've let your
memories into your nightmares,
it's too late.

Whenever something really horrible happens in your life like you accidentally kill someone with your car, speed away, and never get caught or you’re fondled by a birthday clown, you know the memory of that event will haunt you forever. How do you keep that from happening? Most people drink themselves half to death and try to blackout and hope their brain resets. That doesn’t work! You might not remember things when you’re blackout drunk, but that’s only true about things that happen while you’re blackout drunk. Unless you were blacking out as the clown was molesting you, you’re going to remember. Blacking out can’t help you forget things that already happened, especially if they’re very scarring. Spiraling into the ever tightening grip of alcoholism is not the answer. Instead, turn to science. Science tells us that the human brain needs sleep in order to consolidate memories. Our brain needs sleep to make memories, it’s that simple.

So the next time you see your grandmother fall off a rollercoaster, you grab her hand, but her hand breaks because it’s old and she falls screaming and lands on her neck, DO NOT GO TO SLEEP. I’m serious. Stay up as long as humanly possible. If you only stay up a few days that’s not going to help. Most people have a hard time sleeping after witnessing something horrifying. You need to push it to more than a week. If you can go at least ten days without sleep you’re going to start hallucinating and before you know it, the memory of that horrible thing will probably be the last thing on your mind. You’ll be way too concerned with your furniture coming alive to kill you to remember that other bad thing that happened.

The problem with tragedy is most people fall asleep very soon after it happens. When you’re depressed the body shuts down and it feels good to hibernate and escape from the pain. You have to fight that urge because while it seems like you’re running from your problems, they’re actually deeply entrenching themselves into your brain during sleep. I can’t say for sure this method will work for everyone, but it’ll damn sure work better than sleeping right after the clowns fist goes up your ass.