Stay calm and carry on! A little anxiety can improve your memory

Canada, February 26: Have you ever got worried or anxious over small silly issues? Panicked and disturbed over things that don’t really mean much? Relax, lay back because a little anxiety can help you in remembering things. According to a study published in the journal Journal Brain Science, it shows that there are manageable levels of anxiety actually aided people in being able to recall the details of the events.

 

The researchers noted that when anxiety levels get too high or gets inclined into fear, it leads to the coloring of memories where people begin to associate otherwise neutral elements of an experience to the negative context.

Myra Fernandes, Professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada says,“People with high anxiety have to be careful. Up to a certain degree, there is an optimal level of anxiety that is going to benefit your memory, but we know from other researches that high levels of anxiety can cause people to reach a tipping point, which impacts their memories and performance.”

According to the study conducted by the researchers, as they assessed some undergraduate students, they were divided in two groups. While one half of the participants were randomly assigned a deep encoding instruction group, the other half were randomly assigned to shallow encoding group.

Assessing the results it was seen that individuals with high anxiety levels showed a heightened sensitivity to the influences of emotional context on their memory, with neutral information becoming tainted, or coloured by the emotion with which it was associated during encoding.

So basically it shows that by thinking about emotional events or by thinking about negative events this might put you in a negative mindset that can bias you or change the way you perceive your current environment.