Thinking about thinking part 1 of 3

There are many things in life that people want to forget, terrible breakups, failed dreams, the list goes on and on. Sadly, this is not how life works. As my sister pointed out to me in an email the other day,

"when you want to forget something you can't because the act of wanting to forget it just makes you think about it even more, ergo making you even more unhappy, and stressing over a problem that isn't even worth your time."

She's absolutely right, trying to forget is one of the sure fire ways to remember something. In an article I read for my psych class recently, there was an interesting research study done. It stated that if a person is given a list of words to memorize and then told to forget a few of the words, they are more likely to remember the words they were told to forget because they were thinking about trying to forget about them.