How can I live in the present, not in the past or the future?

November 23, 2019 10:39 PM

I know this sounds a little difficult to answer, but I have a huge issue with this. I carry around a lot of regrets about a lot of things which I think I should have done differently in the past. I also think a lot about the future, about how things will somehow change for the better. Neither of these things are helpful for me as a person and I want to leave these mentalities, they're ultimately toxic and self defeating.

This place is very human, and I have found many answers by asking these questions around here before. I cannot think of a better place to ask this.

I have a hard time dropping all these things. On the one hand I keep holding onto memories of the past, of things that happened 7+ years ago in school. For instance, I had the opportunity to exceed at math but I never did so because I thought that was for "nerds and losers", I was always good at it, and yet I developed a fear of math instead of embracing my talent. I'm changing this, I'm looking for math professors to give me private lessons and teach me more about it. However sometimes I wonder if I would have a better life if I had just learned to accept this talent of mine.

On the other hand I get obsessed over the future. I don't enjoy things for their own sake. No I'm always learning something, because it "should have a benefit toward the future" or it should give me an "advantage". Everything I do, I do thinking about some future image of myself, which in reality is an unreachable standard. Even if I achieve what I want it will never be enough, given that fitting into this image is just impossible.

I am plagued by these thoughts, I have been plagued by them for many years. I don't want to live this way anymore, I want to be in the present and I want to be happy with myself as I am now. The things I want to do, they should be additions or enhancements to my person, not part of some impossible ideal.

I don't know how to stop this, you have to plan for the future but you can't obsess over it. This sounds somewhat contradictory. I don't want to keep dragging my regrets everywhere, the things I did, I did long ago, I have paid enough for those mistakes.

I go to a therapist, I have told her as much, I have progressed a lot, but I feel this is one of my last challenges to end. I'm not really sure what to do to end this, so I come here to ask for advice.

Has anybody ever faced this? I am happy to hear about your experiences and advice.

posted by Tarsonis10 to Human Relations (10 answers total)

Best answer: What helped me with facing regrets was the thought that “I did the best I could with what I had at the time. Now I have learned from that experience I can do better next time.” Or “anyone faced with my circumstances would have done the same thing. People don’t know what they would do in that situation unless they’ve been through it themselves”

There are always ways to make yourself feel bad about a past event but these thoughts are not productive cause you can’t change the past - the key is to find ways to be kind to your past self and realise that person was doing the best they could, even if you have since learned/ now believe that another course of action would have been preferable to the one you took. In fact that realisation is a sign you learned something from the experience.
posted by EatMyHat at 11:19 PM on November 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

Best answer: It took a long time for me to get where I am today. If you notice yourself obsessing over the past, just remind yourself that you are not your thoughts and re-direct your attention to something else. Do the same thing when you are obsessing about the future. That is the best way for me, at least, to get out of unhelpful thinking patterns.

I know exactly how you feel because I spent so much of my adult life in exactly your situation. I was constantly filled with regret or anger or sorrow about my past and fear and anxiety about my future. In my particular case, a lot of therapy plus going to Al-Anon meetings (which are for the friends and relatives of alcoholics) helped me a fair amount. So did a weekly meditation group that I attended for a couple of years.

As a perfectionist in recovery, it is very hard to accept that I made choices that turned out badly. But Al-Anon helped me understand that I am not actually responsible for outcomes, I am only responsible for doing the best I can in any given moment. Every single second that I spend regretting my past is a wasted moment because the past can never be reclaimed. I don’t know why it took me so many years to understand that, so I want to congratulate you for understanding that it’s a mistake to live in the past and the future instead of in the present. Supposedly there is an AA slogan that says if you have 1 foot in the past and 1 foot in the future you piss all over today. And that’s hard fought for me, for years. The present was just a misery because I was always living somewhere else in my head.

I had many obsessive thoughts about the past until I got my ADHD diagnosis. On medication, I have many fewer obsessive thoughts. It helps to remember that I can’t actually control anything except my own behavior, and even that is impossible on some days.

Probably the single most helpful thing for me has been to be gentle with myself and accept that I am not a super human, I am not super productive, I am just human. I deserve pleasure, and fun, and rest just like everyone else. I used to punish myself for not being perfect by never allowing myself to have any fun if I had not been 150% productive. Today I am more realistic. If I am able to get three things (or 2 or 1) done on any given day, that’s a good day for me personally given my situation. I schedule in fun for myself and with friends. I set aside time to think about my future and to make plans for it, but I don’t obsess over it anymore.

This is not easy work, but it is important work. Good luck!
posted by Bella Donna at 3:01 AM on November 24, 2019 [13 favorites]

The past and the future are pretty much the default places anybody's mind will end up taking them until they've done the considerable amount of deliberate focussed work that it takes to train it to do otherwise. And knowing how to do that work, or thinking about that work, or even knowing that one would be perfectly capable of doing it if one only chose to, is not at all the same thing as putting in the thousands of hours it actually takes to actually do it.

Personally I suspect that this tendency to spend time beating ourselves up uselessly for past errors (as opposed to actually doing the work to make the changes required to avoid repeatedly making similar ones), and to spend yet more time trying to nail down a future that in fact we cannot know well enough to nail down, is a symptom of deep personal insecurity; and that the root of this insecurity is the really common mistake of holding certain recurring patterns within our minds to be who and/or what we actually are.

How can I live in the present, not in the past or the future?

First step, it seems to me, is to get a solid grip on this "I" that's supposed to be what's actually doing the living.

It seems to me that the "I" that becomes apparent first whenever I ask myself the question "who am I"? is in fact one of those recurring mind-patterns. It's always there every time I go looking for it, so the natural conclusion is that it's a real thing with the same kind of object persistence as this chair I'm sitting in, which is similarly always there every time I go looking for it.

But there is a fundamental difference between my who-am-I and my chair, and that is that my chair is not capable of being brought repeatedly into existence by that very act of seeking. The human soul, by way of contrast, is not only not immortal; it doesn't even have genuine object persistence. It just simulates it, like a strobe light simulating stillness.

If I'm looking for a referent for the word "me" that really does justify an assumption of the same kind of object persistence that I ascribe to my chair, the best I can do is refer to the object that's actually sitting in that chair: i.e. the me that breathes and eats and shits and sticks around regardless of what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, or even if I'm unconscious. All the rest of the candidates for me-hood are then easily seen to be nothing more than patterns of internal behaviour: things that actual-me is doing. Or did do, or might have done, or will do, or might do.

Having spent many many hours pondering the fundamental question of genuine personal identity, I have yet to poke any genuine holes in this rather physicalist self-concept. I am an embodied being, no more but particularly and especially no less. I frequently find it helpful to remind myself of this when I start feeling caught in a vortex of regret or worry; dragging myself back to being fully present right here right now is much easier when I've got a solid destination to drag towards.

I think having an ego with a truly unbearable fear of its own death and/or disgrace is a really common human experience. Convincing mine that it simply had this wrong, and had never been properly alive in the first place but could usually be relied upon to spring into existence anew whenever executive decision-assistance services are required, has been really good for me.

The ego I'll be using to get stuff right in the future is not the same one that fucked up all that shit in my past; it's a better one, one that I'll be constructing when it's time to construct it but not before, and from better-informed patterns at that.

Is any of that of any use to you?
posted by flabdablet at 3:55 AM on November 24, 2019 [15 favorites]

Daily meditation will help you train your mind to be present in the here and now. Constantly being elsewhere is a habit that can be broken, or at least significantly reduced.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:21 AM on November 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Move a part of your attention to the out-breath. Repeat.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:29 AM on November 24, 2019

There's an old rule of thumb that therapists use: People who live in the past are depressed and people who live in the future are anxious. So when you find yourself living in the past, treat yourself for depression with the self care and positive self talk that goes with minor depression. And when you find yourself living in the future, treat yourself for anxiety.

Both the past and the future are lovely places to live at times, and refuges from current conditions. Time spent in those places can be good times - anticipating good things and remembering good things. It's only a problem when you are spending time in the bad past or in the bad future. So if you find yourself in the past and unable to stop thinking about it, try changing the way you think about it - instead of regretting that you didn't study math, look at what you did then that was positive and focus on how you worked on getting your diploma choosing a way to do it that did not over burden you, and which enable you to feel more comfortable about your identity.

The thing is, if you understand the past you understand why you did what you did and you know that really the over achievement was not a realistic option. The past is no longer uncertain so we forget how scary it was. And things we know now seem obvious, but we forget we didn't know them then. We simplify the past and forget that when we didn't study it was because we wanted to study but were too anxious or too sad, or too overwhelmed or too preoccupied to do so. If you went back you almost certainly couldn't study the math because you would realise with a jolt that there was a reason why you took the easy route and wrote it off as not possible. You were doing something with that time and you almost certainly would have to do that again - unless you were a completely different person. You might not want to hang around with the friends you had then now, but at the time you were learning your social skills from them and they were filling your social needs. Whatever it was that you did instead was something you needed to do.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:18 AM on November 24, 2019 [9 favorites]

I think you've made a great first step in seeing this behavior in yourself. If it weren't so hard to find a good psychotherapist, that's what I'd recommend.
posted by tmdonahue at 5:32 PM on November 24, 2019

Since you already know that these critical and anxious thoughts are not helping you, I would really recommend "Taming Your Gremlin:A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way"
The idea is to starting thinking of those negative thought patterns as gremlins, trying to make you miserable. The author then gives you strategies, mostly based on mindfulness approaches, to decrease the power of the "gremlins". It is an easy read and one for the few self-help books that didn't make me feel like overwhelmed and discouraged.
posted by metahawk at 7:10 PM on November 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Something else that's well worth your time will be learning to shift your attention away from the content of thoughts about the past and future toward the fact of those thoughts as thoughts. So the next time you catch yourself feeling caught up in regret about lost opportunities to get more maths on board during your school years, make a point of explicitly mentioning to yourself that you are in fact completely present right now, that the activity you're presently engaged in is that of thinking about the past, and ask yourself whether that's actually what you'd prefer to be doing right now. And if it isn't, find something else to be going on with. Such as, perhaps, working through the next exercise in a high-school-level calculus textbook?

The central idea of a meditative practice is to define a preset purpose and point of focus for the duration of a meditation session, so that you can skip straight past the part where you ask yourself what you'd prefer to be doing and the search for something more appropriate, and go immediately from noticing that you're thinking about the past again to switching your attention back to the session's point of focus. By carving the attention-switching process down to its bare essentials in this way, you maximize the rate at which you build the skill of performing it.

But even when you're not actively meditating, there's value in making a habit of explicitly acknowledging the distinction that can always be made between the content of any intrusive thought and the fact of that thought. Doing this can act as a little candle to light your way out of the dark and self-perpetuating depths of depressing regret or anxious worry.
posted by flabdablet at 2:56 AM on November 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

You sound a lot like my brother, which isn't a bad thing. He's a good guy.

We recently took a trip together to NYC and he kept talking about visiting certain sites. When I would ask why, he'd say "So you can say you've been there!"

That's not how I live my life. I don't live in the past, and have no interest in saying "I did this thing once. I was at this place." I would much rather live in the moment, enjoy where I'm at, and not stress about having enough time to do X, Y, and Z before we run out of time.

From what I can tell, it is an immutable characteristic of our different worldviews. Neither is wrong, and I don't think either of us could change this part of our personality if we wanted to. He leans toward nostalgia, and I lean toward the present.

My only advice for you would be to train yourself to go with the flow. Don't worry about what you've already done; don't worry about what you might miss out on if you make the wrong choice; don't worry about preserving memories so you can validate your happiness later; just be present in the present. That sounds cheesy, but it's how I prefer things.

(Two side effects to my way of living: I am rarely surprised and I am rarely disappointed. I have no idea if that is preferable to any other way of living.)
posted by tacodave at 4:37 PM on November 25, 2019