Whether you’re finding yourself thinking too much about the past, or obsessing over upsetting memories, it’s difficult to “get over” the past and live in the present.
Part of the reason that it’s so difficult to stop ruminating about the past is due to how our brains are wired. Specific memories, feelings and thought patterns often arrange themselves together if they coalesce around a past event. There’s a saying in brain science that goes: What fires together, gets wired together. This basically means that we create well-worn “paths” in the neural structures of our brains that we can get caught in. Once we start thinking about one thing, it leads to the next and so on and on.
Here are some concrete tools to stop thinking about the past:
- Notice when you are thinking too much about the past. Pay attention to where your mind is. If you’re obsessing about the past, say to yourself “I’m obsessing again, and I’m working on letting this stuff go.”
2. Use an Interruption Technique. This is where you jolt your mind out of the obsessive pattern by thinking about something else, moving your body around, giving your brain a new task (such as solving a simple math problem), or even singing to interrupt the ruminating on the past.
3. Re-write the story of the past event. Take a more balanced view of the past event and re-frame it as something both good and bad, not simply something bad that happened that you can beat yourself up over. For example, you could re-frame a job firing as: “I didn’t do well in that job, but I did learn new skills and I know what to work on in my next job.”