The Danger of Living in the Past

Your past happened once. You do not need to keep making your body participate in it. People sometimes say that your mind cannot tell the difference between the past, present, and future. Scientifically, that statement needs a little clarification. Your brain has systems capable of recognizing that a memory is a memory. However, remembering an emotionally intense experience can reactivate some of the same systems involved when the experience originally happened. Mental imagery, emotional memory, and rumination can produce real emotional and physiological responses even though nothing is physically happening to you in that moment. Something can be over in your life while your body is still responding to the memory of it.

Think about something embarrassing that happened ten years ago. Really think about it. Remember the room, the people, what was said, what you felt, and what happened afterward. Your face might get warm. Your stomach might tighten. Your heart rate might change. You might suddenly feel angry, ashamed, nervous, or irritated. Nobody transported you ten years into the past. A memory created a response in your body right now. Research on mental imagery supports this. Imagining emotionally charged situations can activate emotional systems and produce responses similar to those produced by actual emotional experiences. The memory is stored with more than a list of facts. Your brain can also pull up some of the feelings and physical responses that came with it.

Now think about what happens when you do this repeatedly. You wake up thinking about what somebody did to you. You tell the story again at lunch. You replay the argument while driving. You watch something that reminds you of it that evening. You lie in bed imagining what you should have said. The original event may have happened years ago, yet it continues receiving attention today. Science has a name for part of this pattern: rumination, or repetitive negative thinking. Research has consistently connected persistent rumination and repetitive negative thinking with depression, anxiety, emotional distress, and difficulty recovering from stressful experiences. Research examining treatments for depression has also found that reducing repetitive negative thinking is associated with reductions in depressive symptoms.

This is why I tell people to be very careful about where they repeatedly send their minds. You may have heard me talk about the Reticular Activating System, or RAS. The RAS is involved in arousal, alertness, and attention, although attention is actually controlled by several interacting systems throughout the brain. Your brain is constantly deciding which pieces of an enormous amount of available information deserve your attention. Your expectations, goals, emotional state, previous experiences, and what you repeatedly focus on can influence what gets noticed.

If your attention is constantly occupied by betrayal, rejection, failure, humiliation, danger, or everything that went wrong, those themes remain highly available when your brain interprets what is happening around you. You may notice information connected to them faster. You may interpret situations through them. You may make decisions influenced by them, and those decisions affect what happens next. This is one very real way yesterday can participate in creating tomorrow. Your thoughts influence attention, attention influences interpretation, interpretation influences emotional responses and decisions, decisions influence behavior, and behavior influences outcomes. Keep feeding the same pattern, and you increase the chances of continuing to operate from that pattern.

When an old thought appears, you do not have to sit there and give it another thirty minutes of your life. Redirect your attention. Find something you genuinely appreciate. If you cannot think of anything at that moment, physically change what you are doing. Go outside. Hug a tree. Pet an animal. Feel the sun. Stand in the rain. Put on music. Dance. Sing. Call somebody you love. Make something. Cook something. Walk around the block. Find something in your current environment that gives your brain another experience to process. You are teaching your attention where else it can go.

At first, this can be hard as hell. A thought you have practiced thousands of times has thousands of repetitions behind it. Expecting yourself to replace that habit immediately is unrealistic. Catch it, redirect it, and repeat. Then keep doing it. Every interruption is another opportunity to practice a different response. Give your brain new material too. Listen to affirmations that support the beliefs you are trying to build. Listen to music that creates the emotional state you want to experience. Spend time with people who allow you to exist in your current life instead of constantly dragging an old version of you back into the room. Create experiences connected to who you are becoming.

There is fascinating research showing how powerful the direction of memory can be. In experimental research, recalling positive autobiographical memories after stress reduced the cortisol response and reduced negative feelings compared with recalling neutral memories. Positive emotional states have also been shown in some experiments to alter and broaden aspects of attention and thinking. Your thoughts are not magical commands to the universe, but what you repeatedly think about can change what is happening inside your brain and body and influence what you notice and do next.

Be careful with the things you repeatedly expose yourself to as well. A favorite movie, television show, song, location, conversation, photograph, social media account, or person can become associated with a period of your life. If something repeatedly sends you into hours of rumination about an experience you are trying to move beyond, pay attention to that response. You are allowed to change what you consume and who receives access to you. Avoiding every reminder of a painful experience forever is not necessarily healthy either, particularly with trauma and anxiety. Sometimes safely processing a memory is exactly what allows its emotional grip to weaken. The goal is to stop automatically feeding a memory every time it asks for your attention.

Learn from your past. Take the information. Recognize the pattern. Change what needs changing, and then come back to today. This is also where meditation becomes extremely useful. You do not need to become some meditation expert who can sit silently for an hour. Start with your breathing. Pay attention to the air entering your body and leaving it. When your mind wanders, return your attention to your breath. Slow-breathing research has found measurable effects involving the autonomic nervous system, heart-rate variability, brain activity, and psychological states. Your breath gives your attention something happening right now to focus on, which can help bring your attention back to the present instead of allowing your mind to keep running through yesterday.

Once you learn how to return your attention to the present, you can deliberately decide where you want your mind to go next. This is where something I have said for years becomes incredibly important: Remember Your Future and Create It™. You already know what accomplishment feels like because you have accomplished things before. Use those memories as evidence of what you are capable of doing. Think about what excites you, what kind of life draws you in, where you would love to live, what you would create, who you would spend your time with, and what an ordinary Tuesday would look like if you actually enjoyed the life you were living. Give your brain somewhere to go besides backward.

I believe desire can serve as information about direction. Something continues pulling at you for a reason. Explore it. Imagine it. Research it. Build toward it. Collect evidence that supports your ability to create it, and start making decisions that belong to the person living that life. You cannot change the fact that something happened, but you can change how much attention, time, behavior, and future decision-making you continue giving it. Your past can teach you without becoming your permanent address.

Learning from past experiences is healthy. Processing what happened is healthy. Remembering something occasionally is human. Living mentally inside the same painful experience every damn day keeps that experience involved in a life that has already moved forward in time. Come back to your breath, come back to your surroundings, come back to today, and decide where you are going. Retrain your brain, give your attention something worth building, and Remember Your Future and Create It™.

— Ocean~Spirithealer

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