It has all come back to me

I have ditched my smartphone from my wake-up routine and reverted to doing a morning run through of the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags. This review had become increasingly perfunctory as I became distracted by doing a quick check for messages, news and, sad to say, bank balances. The more perfunctory, the harder to recall the images and less motivated I was to keep trying. It seemed it was slipping away from me and the memory tags were vanishing forever.

Somewhat amazingly they have all - just about - come back to me.

My life is so much better leaving checking my smartphone for later in the day. Well, later in the morning, after I've completed the run through.

I don't just do the run through now, I spend a few minutes after waking getting into a meditative state. This is something I've done on and off for years. I'll explain it on the next post.

From that state, I've resumed the run through my mental calendar. Since reverting to this process at the beginning of the month, I've gone through each year in reverse order, so 2019, 2018 and so on to 2011/2012 (I began this process on 17 December 2011).

I've aimed to cover at least two months per session of about 20 minutes. This is slower than it used to take me when things were more manageable years ago, but now I have to do a certain amount of fishing around. 

What has generally happened is I've found an image and then had a good run of remembering other images, but then hit blanks. 

I am definitely remembering the images, rather than having a memory of the specific days (which was a trap I'd fallen into: trying to recall the images by working out where I was and what I was doing). The images do unlock other memories, but the images are key.

If there's a blank, I'll jump over it. As I come to the end of the session, having covered two or three months, my mental calendar has been speckled with more and more blanks. However, the next day I've started with any month with blanks and my subconscious has the images ready to serve up. It has been quite startling sometimes to suddenly find one image and then the others cascade across the days, sometimes triggering memories that fill in isolated blanks in earlier months.

So, in the end, I have very few days where the images have not come back to me and I feel confident that continuing with this more disciplined morning routine will bring those images back to me too.

I will be remembering every day that passes.

I also have to fit in the reviews of the past month and year, to keep my calendar updated. 

As was often the case, it is the more recent past which often presents difficulties, because the images are not yet entrenched on my mental calendar, particularly for the most recent days and weeks. I tend to do the previous month or two-month review once I'm up, perhaps on a run, and again before going to sleep. Then at odd moments during the day, I'll do the 6 month review I've written about previously, generally half a week at a time, so Monday to Thursday, say, then once I've covered the 6 months, Thursday to Sunday.

Having completed the review back to 2011, rather than just cycling round again, I've embarked on monthly windows across all years. I started this today by recalling the images for every day of the months of January 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Tomorrow I aim to cover January for the remaining years.

Clearly, this is a time investment, but it is time that was eaten up by my mobile phone (which still grabs me after I've finished this process, but I'm already ahead).

Most positively, from a mental health and general balance perspective, I am viewing a wide range of aspects of my life and reflecting on the many people and events that feature in these memory tags, rather than just specific memories I would otherwise obsess about. I've written before about how enriching this is. It's good to have it back.

This doesn't cover my how life, though I will sometimes be distracted by earlier memories triggered by the review process. All the same, it is now nearly 9 years. So much has happened in that time. I am so glad to be able to remember at least one thing for every day of it.

Smartphones can be bad for your memory

Two news reports caught my attention recently and have indirectly put new life into this process of remembering every day that passes.

One said that giving attention to screens, particularly multiple screens – or "media multi-tasking" (such as scrolling through your phone while watching television) – is bad for the memory.

Another said that a large percentage of people check their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up and the majority within the first hour.

I had fallen into this habit, partly because time differences might mean a request for me to take freelance work arrives in the early morning and waiting until usual working hours would be too late to secure the contract.

But I've gone beyond checking for such emails to routinely checking through social media and news websites, bank account apps, etc. and then starting the cycle again.

At the same time, my ability to recall the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day has been failing me. I keep running through the current year, not least so I have some sense of the passage of time during the coronavirus lockdown and restrictions. 

I have also been refreshing past years, but this now takes so long it can be months before I revisit images to refresh them. And I know that I can run into difficulties if I delay for a month. The harder it is, the longer it takes and the more demotivated I've been to return to the process.

More distant years, such as 2012 and 2013 have been easier to review, but more recent years have been refreshed over a shorter time period and I could scan through several weeks with little clue of the images I had selected for each day. 

When I did find something to orientate me, I'd use that to try to guess at surrounding images to trigger a memory, with little success.

Then a few days ago it struck me that this was not how it used to work. I remembered the tags and they opened up the day to me and reminded me of the surrounding tags. When I had fewer days to remember and called up the images more frequently, I could often remember remembering them the last time around. Sometimes I'd have introduced a stronger connection between consecutive days to help me with the recall.

So, I decided to go back to a meditation routine I used to do morning and night, descending a mental staircase to a special place where I was totally relaxed and could then let my thoughts wander. I got into this meditative state and then returned to my mental calendar - hosting it in a particular place in this special place I was visualising. Where there were blanks, I visualised polishing the square on my mental calendar to reveal the image.

And it has been working.

I've coupled this with ditching the smartphone scanning in the morning - other than a quick check for work requests - and using my first half hour in bed after waking to engage in this review. I have the target of completing at least two months of historic images per morning (in addition to refreshing the current year during the day and when I am going to sleep).

Images are not only coming back to me, I'm suddenly remembering images that I had lost for other years and am jumping across the calendar pages to run over those days.

So I'm optimistic that I can get back into this routine and it will hopefully become easier as the images are reinforced once more.

Keeping away from my phone for this half hour and filling my mind with the richness that comes from recalling past days, with all the thoughts and reflections they trigger, can only be for the good.