Any of you dwell in the past too much? I think that I spend too much time lamenting about the way things were, and I can’t enjoy the here and now at the moment. I can only lament about that same moment well after it happened. The memory’s accuracy becomes skewed by the events that have happened since.
Any of you deal with this?
Yes, but I supplement my lamenting the past with planning what *may * happen in the future. The present, generally, is completely lost on me. 
I can relate . . . it’s this odd psychological thing I need to get over.
I read in the first chapter of “7 Habits of Highly Effrctive People,” the author makes the observation that stressing about or dwelling on the past is such a 100% waste of time, because there isn’t a single thing you can do to change it.
Makes so much sense, but is easier said than done for me!
“Wherever You Go, There You Are” and Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s other works are all about this, the Buddhist idea of mindfulness applied to everyday life. We spend all our time brooding on the past and worried about the future, but what about right now.
My problem is, as soon as you concentrate on right now, it’s the past, and even right now as in later today is the future. “Right now” seems like no particular time at all. But I’m not particularly enlightened. :smack:
I switched my mindset from dwelling on the past to making up for it in the future.
This works well for me.
I used to have a similar but slightly different problem. I used to spend a lot of time going over potential confrontations in my mind. If *s/he *says this, I’ll say this. I usually only covered the negative scenarios. It did add some value to my life, because it often made me prepared.
But I look back on those days and believe that I was an anger junkie. It was not a healthy way to look at the world, always imagining ways to be angry.
I finally broke myself of this habit by repeating a nonsense phrase over and over whenever I found myself in those ugly thought patterns. (I believe it was “Health, wealth and happiness.” or something similar.) It took me a long time, but soon I lost the habit of always being angry. My BP went down and I had far fewer emotional lows.
Sometimes when I cruise past the pit I want to stop in and ask if those guys are anger junkies. Some of them seem outraged on a regular basis.
I sometimes get appalled at how I react in certain situations . . . how infuriated I can become overal something extremely trivial!!
My older brother was a huge influence on me growing up, and in retrospect I can see now that he was the last person that should have been an influence on anyone. He’s easily the most negative person I know, and I sometimes think I am a milder version of him.
I made alot of progess in the last few years, once I was able to recognize my bad habit of being angry/unhappy. I’d see right past anything good and dwell on what was bad. This contributed to lamenting about the past . . . since I couldn’t enjoy the present, the past was where I would go mentally.
Thank you for sharing your montra. I am going to try something similar, maybe a different phrase. It’s one thing to recognize the problem, but switching your mindset has proven tricky. Sometimes I can pull it off, other times, I can’t.
I’ve been dwelling this week on events from 17 years ago. Nothing like new information being handed to you on a silver platter. I hate being a grown-up. I want to rant and whine and cry for what wasn’t.
yeah, I dwell in the past sometimes. I wish that during college I had become good at playing guitar, as I did later, so I could have jammed with people and joined bands. Instead I was the local ragtime pianist. I like that music, I really do, but … it’s so nerdy, you know?
I don’t know. I used to have this problem a lot. I have complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder… I spent a good portion of time feeling sorry for things that happened to me as a kid. Now I live very much in the present moment and think very little about the past… but my body is still caught up in that cycle of depression and anxiety in many ways. Currently, my life is fabulous, but I still FEEL hopeless, and that FEELING comes from the past… so I’m trying to work through that. I don’t know if you would call that “stuck in the past” or not. I suppose my answer would be, “To a certain extent, but a hell of a lot less often than I used to.”
Cool. I think, to be honest, any phrase would have worked. Heck, I believe I could have sung “row row row your boat” over and over to myself. Anything to break the thought pattern. I recently read a book about meditation and one of the things it said reminded me of that time in my life (the time when I was trying to break those patterns.)
It said that when you are learning to meditate, don’t get discouraged if your mind keeps wandering back to what you were thinking. Just start over and practice practice practice.
I had the same thing. I’d catch myself thinking angry thoughts and I’d start repeating my little phrase. But after a while I’d be back to thinking angry thoughts again. Each time I caught myself, I’d start over (and over and over.) It took - I’m guessing - close to a year before I fully broke the pattern. And heck, even now I will sometimes find myself doing it - especially if I have a long drive by myself. But I don’t have the habit anymore. Not like I used to. Life is better (I think) too.
Especially about my family.
My Mom & Dad are aging, & sick, my brothers & sister cold & distant.
I get no joy from Now, only from Then.
You’ve got that right. My favorite quote is “First impressions are soon forgotten.” If I try to think back to my last job interview or my first day at work at a job it will surprise me how little impact it had. And the things that troubled me that day were all swamped by the things that happened in the next few weeks. As far as my boss, the last impression is just about the only one that comes to mind without effort.
That’s exactly my situation as well. Since I have a hard time being happy, I continually improve my life in many ways to try and bring hapiness. Now, I take a step back and compare where I’m at and what I have to my peers, and think to myself “wow, I have it so much better.” But I guess I don’t, because I can’t enjoy it like I should. It’s like we’re trapped in our own brains.
Totally. I just started Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is very very present-focused in its pragmatic attempts to deal with what negative cognitions/behaviors are going on right this moment and how to change them for the better.
At the end of the 2-hour intake, in which I responded to various detailed questions about precisely the kinds of thoughts I was having that seemed to be leading to my downfall, my new therapist looked at me and said, “Well, I think now that we’ve spent some time together I have a much better understanding of what things are currently causing you difficulty.”
I just blinked in surprise and said, “Yeah. So do I.”
Six years of psychodynamic therapy and it took one 2-hour session in CBT to realize the REAL problem. It’s not the past that’s the problem. It’s that getting stuck in your brain thing.
Oh, and FWIW, meditation rules. I sit shikantaza daily and I love it. It’s increased everything from my pain tolerance to my baseline mood.
I’m taking Remeral (SP?) after reacting poorly to Lexipro. It was a huge relief at first, but my brain has caught up. I don’t really notice its benefits any more unless I don’t take it for a few days . . . my anxiety goes off the charts. I should talk to my doctor about what’s next I guess.