For example: If I’m writing down notes for something it’s easier to remember later on, but if I had a bad experience and felt negative emotions and wrote about that it doesn’t effect me as much and is easier to forget about.
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This isn’t the clinical answer but writing stuff down for memory helps me organize my thoughts and normalize using a visual reference for tasks. I can remember a small series but when work and personal life mix, it’s easier to have paper that has 10+ things on it versus try to manage them in my head.
As far as “forgetting things”, I believe it works in the same way that you are organizing your thoughts but in this case it’s putting chaos of the day or an event on paper instead of “refreshing” it in your head. I don’t think it works for everyone as a method to decompress but for some, it helps disconnect from the day or memories by “getting them out of their head”. Mileage may vary.
One of the theories about how our memory works is called “layers of processing”, and it pretty much explains this specific situation. Imagine that your brain is an office building and every floor does “something”, from distinguishing shapes to analyzing emotions, just the normal brain stuff, and the higher the floor is the more important stuff happens there. Now your memory is kinda like a magazine that stores client requests: If a request moves up several floors it means that it’s important so info about it should be moved more upfront, meanwhile in the reverse situation when it moves some floors down then it means that the company is “getting done with it” and it can be moved further back into the magazine.
In the example that you presented thinking about doing a specific task at your home engages the motoric floor, which is located really far down the office building, and writing that task down transports the info about it from that floor to the language semantic floor, which is somewhere in the middle of the building, making it more important. Meanwhile, in the case of traumatic experiences you are moving them from the top levels of emotional analysis back down to the middle of the building, marking it as less important data and easier to forget.
Side note: This isn’t the only memory mechanism in our brains, in fact there are a lot of them and many contradict and fight one another, so don’t try to understand the entire inner workings of our memory based on this analogy because the topic is much more complex.
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