Why Do We Remember the Losses and Forget the Wins?
Winning feels good, losing feels bad. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is why we forget most of the wins and remember most of the losses.
You may not forget the fact that you won, but it’s easy to forget the details of how you won. The only exception are those really hard fought wins. You remember those.
On the other hand, losses seem to leave a permanent implant in your long term memory. I can seriously remember nearly all of the details of the dozen or so losses I took more than 20 years ago as a high school wrestler. Yet, I can only remember tiny details of 2 or 3 of the nearly 70 wins.
The best explanation I can come up with is that extreme emotions increase our memory function. As stated in Psychology Today:
A normal function of emotion is to enhance memory in order to improve recall of experiences that have importance or relevance for our survival. Emotion acts like a highlighter pen that emphasizes certain aspects of experiences to make them more memorable.
So the emotional wins and emotional losses stick since they trigger our primal survival instincts. While easy wins and those losses that don’t matter fade to oblivion.