Why does the brain mostly remember tragic, bad or embarassing memories instead of the happy ones

Question

Why does the brain mostly remember tragic, bad or embarassing memories instead of the happy ones

In: 4262

Answer 1

I’m not seeing this in the comments, so I’ll add this:

Adrenaline, the chemical your body makes when under stress (and causes most of the things we call stress), temporarily makes your brain focus more on memorizing things.

As a side effect, your ability to memorize things WITHOUT adrenaline gets a tiiiiiny bit worse each time you make a dose. For a person with a plain life and an “average brain” (if such a thing exists) the side-effect will be something you can easily adapt to. If you spend most of your childhood heavily stressed or have a brain naturally wired to feel a little stressed, however, it can easily become a self-feeding cycle of bad.

So you are not only wired to memorize stressful things, but your ability to memorize things that aren’t stressful will get worse the longer you are stressed. Since happiness tends to not be stressful, it gets forgotten.