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It is obvious in our everyday lives that stress affects us in negative ways. How a person can tell the difference between good stress and bad stress has to do with intensity and duration. Both high intensity and long duration stressors come with negative health effects just like too much of anything. However, the stress in smaller doses is very beneficial and gets us out of horrible situations. We also have what is called intrinsic and extrinsic stressors. Intrinsic stress is what comes from within a task and extrinsic comes from outside of the task at hand. Stress has a huge effect on memory and this, in turn, affects how we view ourselves. Our bodies and minds are connected in so many different ways (Sandi, 2013).

When one looks inwards towards themselves one finds that they are the only ones that can truly help themselves. By knowing one’s self, having an understanding of the environment they live in, and listening to their bodies a person can become more healthy as a whole (mind, body, and environment). We need to ask ourselves the questions, why am I feeling that stress that I am? Is it accurate? Is the way I think healthy? Are there parts of my past that contribute to the way I think and act? Piecing together different parts of your being, how you act, why you act the way you act, and what you want are all important pieces of you. Identity is a combination of our memories, experiences, and perceptions of ourselves. We can reflect on ourselves and have an awareness of this. Identity is part of every person and is how we make sense of ourselves in context (Kleinknecht, 2020). The context piece is something we tend to forget when we look at ourselves. When these things are in place we find ourselves feeling good and having a strong sense of life!

It is worth noting that different people react differently to stress so this varies widely in the population: gender, age, life experience, and genetics all play a role in dictating whether or not a person will have intense or low-level stress and how long it will last. Acute stress has been shown to aid in implicit memory. Implicit memory is that information that you remember effortlessly. Whereas performance on explicit memory tasks was affected negatively when there was too little or too much external stress in moderately stressful tasks. Stress also impairs memory retrieval. Chronic stress impacts memory as well as altering brain structure in rats. Being under high stress changes the cognitive system that you are working under from being a more flexible one to a more rigid one making it more difficult to problem solve (Sandi 2013).

Memory is important to the way that we view ourselves. The self memory system is what psychologists believe is the best way to see the self. It is dynamic and takes into account your experience and your future goals to make decisions about the future. The self that you are right now is dependent upon where you are, what is going on chemically in your body, and what you have recently experienced. Specific experience has to do with the goals you have for yourself in the future. When one of these pieces is disrupted, you feel unbalanced in your sense of self.

To begin explaining this we will start with what is known as autobiographical memory. This is the memory of the self. We have non-autobiographical memory which is the memory of facts and things that aren’t necessarily associated with you in time. Regular memories we are not usually aware of happening whereas an autobiographical memory will pop up in your mind and either be an image or playout like a movie. To break down further how the autobiographical memory system works we can start with the smallest piece, with what is called episodic memory. It is a memory of yourself in time and space, what you smelled, what you saw, what you were feeling at that time. It can be visual and is usually a clip. What we remember in these episodic memories have to do with what our goals are, and how we are feeling. Feelings affect memory and the goals we create through our past tell our brains what we need to remember. These memories live within what are called general events. They are things like an entire wedding, a first date, a special holiday. These give way to many smaller episodic memories. Lastly, what encompasses the general events are what are called lifetime periods. This is the general stretch of time. Like the time you were in school or when you worked at that one job. These periods can intersect with each other as they are so large but help to narrow down the search of memory more easily and allow for more connections with general, then episodic memory with certain other episodic memories. The reconstruction of memory is always created by the brain. The reconstruction is never perfect and doesn’t need to be — our brains fill in the missing information (Conway & Loveday, 2014). We can see that if our brains are not creating these memories the same due to stress this will alter how we view ourselves, inherently changing our identities. When we have stress, it impairs our capability to encode so there isn’t much to the memory except for a few specific events that we will remember very well (Mandler 1984).

Within our autobiographical memories we have what are called correspondent  memories, which means that they are accurate to what happened, and coherent memories, which are memories that are true to your experience of this situation. They are true to the self. Most of our autobiographical memories are true to the self but not as accurate to how the event happened. Another part of what I previously described as part of what we use to create the self, is the Remembering Imagining System. This has to do with memory but also goal orientation. This system dictates that we remember most clearly. This system explains that the further away something happens in time the harder it is to remember and the more gaps there are in the memory. These memories are usually coherent but not correspondent. The memories that have just recently occurred are both correspondent and coherent. The reason our long-term memories are more coherent than correspondence is that it is more important for us as individuals to feel that sense of ourselves than it is to know the actual details of the event. Interestingly, how we construct the future is the same as how we remember the past; the closer the future is, the clearer we can imagine it, the further away from the fuzzier it will be (Conway & Loveday, 2014).

This paired with the self memory system explains how we make goals and how these goals affect what we remember, our future decisions, and eventually ourselves. It has to do with what we think of ourselves and what we want for our future. We must have long-term goals but to complete them we need to have short-term goals that we can visualize, that feel more tangible to use. How do you improve your health? By doing healthy things little by little and building it up. We as humans cannot change in a day.

We have amazing minds but it’s hard to keep multiple pieces in our minds to analyze them to truly see our autobiographical memories and examine them (Pennebaker 2018). Something that can be helpful is writing them out. When we write out our thoughts and how we felt in the moments when events occur. Just the act of writing them out, not necessarily even reading them, helps us have a better idea of ourselves. We can examine how we are feeling and processing something, this can change how we react in the future and help change our goals and sense of self.

By writing our goals out we can have a more tangible way to get us to the place we want to be. The Remembering Imagining System dictates that we cannot easily see far into our future therefore it is imperative to make little incremental discussions every day to get us there. By breaking down our big goals into smaller goals we can change that. This will change the framework of how we see the big goal, and instead of it stressing us out automatically, it can feel accomplishable. By knowing about how our brains remember things and how stress can affect the brains we can understand how to change little things to help our stress. Changing how we understand stress overall changes the way we view ourselves in the world. For example, say a young person is trying to finish a big project for school, it is the biggest one they have had thus far in their student career. The final product is due months away and she is very stressed about the situation she is in. She could be using her Remembering-Imagining system to think about all the past times that she has failed and a project that way into the future. The outcome of this is a spiral downwards towards distress and negativity where she doesn’t want to do the work because she thinks the will fail, and eventually this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The other alternative is that she uses her Remembering-Imagining system to plan out small attainable goals for herself to finish each day so that she can have the experience of accomplishment that combat past feelings of being incapable. Eventually, these new memories help her feel like a capable persona because she can complete all the small tasks she has given herself. These tasks stack on top of each other creating a final product that reaches the one big goal she set for herself.