20/09/2025
I’m recording Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud, next week (a great honour) and that has got me thinking about memory. I used to take it for granted that memory worked like a filing cabinet. Something happened, you filed it away, and years later you pulled out the file and there it was, intact and waiting. Maybe a little faded, like an old photograph, but basically faithful to the original. That story about the filing cabinet turned out to be one of the least accurate myths I’ve ever assumed to be true.
Memory doesn’t really work like that, it is not a camera, it is not a tape recorder, it is not a vault of untouched documents, no, memory is a storyteller, and like all storytellers it edits, exaggerates, softens, forgets, and adds new meaning over time. Every time you recall something, you are not playing back an old tape, you are reconstructing it in the moment, putting it together with scraps of images, feelings, and impressions. And you retell that story with new beliefs, impressions, and reasons that you are carrying today. Which means that the past is never just the past, it is always being rewritten by the present.
Perhaps a breakup you went through in your twenties once felt like the defining catastrophe of young adulthood. When you told the story back then, it was all heartbreak and betrayal or evidence that you were unlovable. But then telling the story years later it has a different shape. Perhaps now it is about independence, growth, and discovering who you were outside of a relationship. The facts of what happened are the same, but the meaning has changed, and the meaning is what memory really clings to.
One of the biggest influences on how a memory gets retold is mood. The term for this is: mood-congruent memory. It means that your current mood decides which memories are easiest to access and how they get interpreted. When I’m feeling low, I can suddenly recall every rejection letter I ever received, every awkward conversation, every friendship that ended badly. When I’m feeling light and expansive, those same memories feel distant, while happy ones leap forward instead: successes, moments of connection, scenes where I felt proud or seen. Mood is like a highlighter pen. A happy mood illuminates the wins, enjoyment, a feeling of belonging. A sad mood draws thick lines under the losses, the failures, the moments of loneliness.
Mood and memory work in a loop. Sometimes mood comes first. You wake up anxious, and then your brain goes hunting for memories to explain why you feel that way. “Ah, of course, that meeting went badly yesterday. That’s why I feel so tense.” Other times memory comes first. You recall something painful or embarrassing out of the blue, and suddenly the mood follows. Either way, one feeds the other, and it can be hard to tell which came first.
If you start paying attention, you’ll notice this everywhere. In relationships, for instance: when things are good, you remember the sweet early days, the kindness, the jokes you share. When they are not so good, you remember the red flags you “should have seen coming.” At work, if you’ve just had a win, you recall all the little moments of effort that built up to it, and you tell yourself a story about persistence. If you’ve had a setback, you remember all the times you fumbled or felt invisible, and the story shifts into one about struggle and disappointment. Even childhood memories bend and flex depending on mood. A move to a new house might come back as a grand adventure when you are feeling positive, or as a destabilising loss when you are feeling low. The event hasn’t changed. The mood has changed the story.
This mood-memory loop shows up most powerfully in the context of mental health. In depression, negative memories crowd out positive ones. Happy moments feel dim, like they happened to someone else, while failures and losses feel close at hand. The brain uses those memories as evidence: “Of course I feel hopeless, look at my track record.” Anxiety works differently but with a similar dynamic. The anxious mind pulls up memories of past danger or embarrassment and uses them as fuel to predict more of the same in the future. And shocks, like car crashes, a parent dying in your early childhood, being physically or sexually abused, in other words - trauma can freeze memory in fragments. Instead of a story that has been integrated into the broader narrative of a life, trauma memories can return as raw flashbacks, vivid sensations, or overwhelming emotions. The mood here doesn’t just colour the memory, it locks it in place. That can work the other way around too, the fragmented memory can lock the mood in place.
Therapy, in many forms, is often about loosening that loop. It helps people recall neglected moments of strength or joy. It encourages them to re-author old stories so that a painful event is not only remembered as a wound but also as a turning point or a lesson. Sometimes therapy is about giving people the tools to build coherence out of fragments, to place a traumatic memory back into the wider story of their life so that it no longer dominates every chapter. What is striking to me is that this process is possible only because memory is not fixed. The same flexibility that makes memory unreliable also makes it healable.
And that is the hopeful part of all this. It might sound bleak to realise our memories cannot be trusted as faithful records. But that flexibility is not a flaw, it is a feature. If memory were just a cold, unchanging archive, we would be trapped inside our past selves. Instead, memory is alive, it shifts, it adapts to who we are becoming. We reinterpret, we reframe, we weave new meaning through old events. Yes, there is a downside. We forget things, we distort, we even invent. But the upside is resilience. We get to grow. We get to change the story of who we are.
The past is never just the past. It is more like a draft, a story that gets edited every time you remember it. And your mood, whether it is joy, grief, anxiety, or the ordinary grey of an average Monday, is always sitting there with the pen in hand.
This is a cut and paste from my Substack. To get more articles like this please go to PhilippaPerry(dot)Substack(dot)com (put . Instead of (dot) obvs! There you can subscribe (there are free as well as paid options).
