9 Major Reasons to Stop Dwelling on Your Past

August 17, 2021

Do you:

• keep talking about your past negative career, relationship or life experiences?
• feel trapped or stuck in the past, and unable to move on with your life?
• fester or dwell on what has happened and wish you could change it?

It is great to talk about or reflect on past career, relationship and life experiences in order to learn from and/or celebrate these.  However, prolonged talking or dwelling on past negative experiences can be detrimental.

Here are 9 major reasons to stop dwelling on your past so that you can move on and enjoy your career, relationship and life now.

1. It Traps You in the Past

All our past memories have emotions associated with them, whether positive or negative or a combination. Any time you recall and talk about the past, you get connected to and feel the emotions you felt at the time; you relive it over again. For some people, it can be re-traumatising to recall past negative experiences. If you keep talking about the past negative experiences, you stay stuck in the past.

2. It Reduces Your Resilience

Having unresolved past emotions, self doubts and insecurities makes it easier for people or situations to push your “buttons”.  When these “buttons” are pushed, they reduce your ability to effectively deal with current life events.  This is because they trigger the past, and compromise your ability to objectively see current situations.  This is turn affects your ability to come up with solutions.  It also reduces your resilience and ability to bounce back from current challenges. 

3. It Sabotages Your Time and Opportunities

When you are stuck in the past and dwell on it, your brain focuses on it. Your brain will keep attracting to you the things you focus on.  If you focus on the past, you will keep attracting the past.  You will keep feeling past emotions, and keep running past patterns and behaviours.  If you spend most of your time dwelling on the past, you are wasting the here and now experiences, and time you will never get back.  This will also narrow your focus, and cause you to subconsciously miss out on new opportunities.

4. You Sabotage Your Health

Suppressing past emotions and burying them or ignoring them can cause emotional stress, which in turn can suppress your immune system.  Some emotions like fear and anxiety can cause you to be stuck in inaction.  Your energy levels will also be depleted as it takes a lot of energy to hold onto suppressed emotions.  Holding onto past unaddressed emotions also sabotages you feeling positive emotions, like motivation and confidence. 

5. It Can Lead to Unhealthy Habits

If you cover up the real issues and do not deal with the past in a healthy way, you could cover up the deeper issues with unhealthy habits.  Many unhealthy habits and addictions are the result of deeper unaddressed past issues.  For example, emotional eating often covers up unresolved past emotions of anger, hurt, etc.

6. You Sabotage Your Professional and Personal Relationships

Holding onto the past and not addressing it can sabotage your professional and personal relationships in many ways, including:

• You blame others for what happened to you in the past
• Your emotional “buttons” are pushed and can lead to disagreements, misunderstandings and break ups
• You take things too personally based on your past career or relationship experiences
• Distrust of others due to your past experiences with people
• Attracting people with the same behaviours towards you that people in the past had, and being re-traumatised by their behaviour
• Subconsciously pushing others away due to your unresolved past issues
• Creating disempowering relationship dynamics in your current professional and/or personal relationships.

7. It Prevents You from Learning

The only reason we have unresolved past emotions and memories is so that we can learn from them.  Once we learn from these, we stop repeating the same patterns.  If we do not learn, we are destined to keep attracting the same people and situations in our career, relationships and life.  For example, we can keep attracting the same toxic workplaces despite changing jobs several times.

8. It Feeds Negativity and Sabotages Your Confidence

Dwelling on the past feeds your inner critic as you fester over what you wish you had done, what you could have or should have done.  Beating up on yourself and self-blame feeds the negative self talk, and the inner critic that keeps doubting yourself. Over time, this negativity causes low self-esteem and self-worth, and sabotages your confidence and success.

9. It Can Result in Deeper Mental Health Issues

Holding onto the past, dwelling on it and festering over what you did or did not do, etc. can cause your mental health to suffer.  According to research, dwelling over the past problems leads to a loss of positive thinking. It also increases the risk of developing mental health conditions, including anxiety/panic attacks, depression, trauma/PTSD and more.

Transforming the Past

If you are experiencing any of the above, it is a sign that your past is probably holding you back.  While the past is fixed and is unable to be changed, you can transform your relationship to the past and what has happened.  This will enable you to learn from it and let it go.  This way you will still be able to remember the past without the emotional charge.  Then you will be free to enjoy every moment each day, and create the life you choose.

While there are many approaches to overcoming the past, our focus is less on talking, and more on changing the past patterns.  Once we help you to identify all the past patterns, we address them quickly and safely without needing to work with past memories, feeling the emotions or reliving the past.  We use techniques with proven success, and which work on an unconscious level for fast and long term change.

We have also trained many counsellors, therapists, mental health, allied health, and medical practitioners in advanced behavioural change techniques so they too can help their clients achieve faster, safer results in less time and less stress.

Begin Transforming Your Past

Here are some ways you can begin transforming your past today:

• Help yourself to some free resources
• Book your free 30 mins NLP discovery call
• Empower Yourself with NLP online course. Enrol in this self development, self paced course with code NLP34% by 31st August 2021 to save 34%.

Looking forward to empowering you!

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