3 practical tips to preserve the beauty of our memories

Taking photos or shooting videos frantically can spoil – rather thann capture – the magic of the moments we live and ruin the memories that would have be imprinted in our memory. Complying with the anxiety of immortalizing or instantly sharing an experience – instead of observing, contemplating, “savoring” the reality we live – we risk, somehow, wasting the beauty of the present.

Furthermore, worrying too much about the “pose to make” at the time of shooting, instead of focusing on the people we are with and what surrounds us, can decrease the degree of participation in the situation in which we find ourselves, and therefore reduce the pleasure of the memory.

To reveal all this is a study coordinated by Maryanne Garry, professor of Psychology at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

If we want good memories, in short, the mania for selfies and uncontrolled sharing on Social must be kept at bay.

Below, some suggestions to enjoy the present more and preserve the beauty of memories…

1. Fix your eyes on reality, rather than on a screen

When we do something pleasant, new, and particular – but even in moments of normal routine – we can feel the desire to enclose reality in the memory of a mobile phone, almost as if we wanted to make the moment we are living last forever.

Certainly it is nice to keep and relook at videos and photos, because they allow us to dive into the past. It is a pleasure to review the first steps of a child who is now an adolescent, or much more simply “to return,” with our mind, to a concert we saw thanks to short films shot with a mobile phone.

Problems arise when, instead of reserving videos or photos of only marginal spaces, they “invade” our moments.

Here, then, we may be more concerned about capturing the baby’s first steps instead of watching him move proudly and happily towards us; or we spend the whole time of a concert with the phone in our hands, instead of dancing and singing with those we have near us…

Therefore, our first suggestion is: look around, observe, and enjoy the moment. If you are tempted to take out the phone to snap a photo, stop. Set your eyes on the reality, appreciate the beauty of what you are experiencing and only then, if you do, give yourself the chance to remember it in the future with a video or photo. First of all, reality must be lived, not filmed.

2. Photo memory yes, but with measure: better few but good

When we go to a party, on a trip, or participate in an event, it happens that we spend most of the time with our phone glued to our hands. We become photographers or serial cameramen: we take photos of everything, of everyone, with everyone. In particular, the selfies will rain down – readily shared on social media. We take so many photos that we can set up an exhibition. We spend so much energy looking for the best shot, but we don’t realize that this “effort” will cause us stress, just enough to prevent us from “savoring the moment.”

We are anxious to capture everything. We believe that in this way we will “remember better”: in fact, the opposite will happen, because giving too much attention to the shots, leads us to focus less on what we are experiencing.

Better one click less and one more word with the person next to us.

Our advice then is: photos and videos, yes, but not so many. Better few but good quality photos.

A single photo or a well-made video will be enough to plunge us, in an instant, with the mind and the heart, back into a whole day.

3. Share the moment with whoever is next to you, then with those who are distant

Worrying excessively about sharing photos or videos on social media with those who are far away from us can lead us to not live real life fully with who we have next to us. It is a paradox, yet it may happen.

Have you ever seen 4, 6, or 8 people around a table, all in silence, with a cell phone in hand? What memory can you have of an evening like this?

Maybe, the Facebook profile has been updated, but the relationship with those next to us has not been cared for.

Our advice, then, is to keep your fingers intertwined if you remain on social media for more than a minute when you have a person near you, in the flesh, or are walking through a park in bloom …