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Stop Ghosting Yourself: The High Cost of Mental Time Travel
Momentum Objectives:
- Recognize the dangers of fixating on your past and future.
- Reframe past experiences for a more balanced narrative.
- Battle the illusion of control with deliberate, intentional action.
- Understand the real cost of absence and the importance of being present.
YOUR MIND is a mental time machine, allowing you to travel between different eras of your life. One moment, you are reliving a past mistake, replaying a painful memory, or wallowing over a missed opportunity. The next, you are projecting yourself into an imagined future, a land of make-believe, consumed with anxiety about potential failures and worrying about all the uncertainty that comes with the unknown. It is . exhausting. In fact, the constant mental time travel is creating a burden so significant that it is stopping you from engaging in your life and, more important, from accessing the power within the present moment.
"Check out the big brain on Brad!" The infamous line from the cult classic film Pulp Fiction is a fun reminder that the human brain is indeed remarkable, and in the words of Samuel L. Jackson, we all have the capability to be "smart motherf*ckers." In fact, the brain's creativity and imagination mixed with the ability to project thoughts, feelings, and behaviors onto someone else isn't just impressive; it's potentially dangerous. The brain can trap you in a perpetual cycle of time travel that never lets you experience the present moment. You get pulled into the past, haunted by regrets and the dreaded "what ifs," while simultaneously being pushed into the future so you can worry about what hasn't happened yet.
Hear me say this: you are not Marty McFly. (That is a reference to the movie Back to the Future. . I got you, Gen Z.) You are not a time traveler.
Loosening the Grip of the Past
Your past, with its Amazon-style warehouse of memories, can be tricky to navigate. It shapes who you think you are, influences your decisions, and provides a sense of how you got to where you are now. While some of these memories are bursting with joy and offer comfort when you need them, others become shackles that bind you to the scabbed-over wounds of the past. These truly painful memories can play on repeat, over and over, becoming energy vampires and preventing you from embracing the moment right in front of you. You become so hyperfocused on what was that you miss out on the potential of what is.
Did you know the human mind has a peculiar tendency to fixate on the negative? It's not just you. It's all of us. Our brains want to dig into the dirty details of past mistakes and shame us for what we should have done differently. This process of reflection, on the surface, appears to be driven by a desire for understanding or even self-improvement. However, it often becomes a self-destructive cycle that traps you in an endless loop of negative self-talk, crushing your self-esteem and ushering in a sense of overall . well . "sh*ttiness." Wait, was I supposed to spell that with a "y"? I could never get that right. You get the point.
This fixation on the past can manifest itself in a variety of ways. You might hold on to grudges a little longer or relive past hurts so tightly that they poison your current relationships. You might constantly compare your present situation to a false, romanticized version of your past, convincing yourself that life was simpler and you were happier. You might relive the "glory days" of your youth so often that you don't engage in the reality of your current life. You may even sabotage your own success by telling yourself that you are not smart enough, your best days are behind you, or you are not worthy of happiness.
The emotional toll of continuously looking over your shoulder can give you more than a stiff neck. It can suck the life out of you, making you feel exhausted and constantly depressed. It can trigger your anxiety and distort your view of the present moment so much that you miss the opportunity to experience true joy. And then come the physical problems: headaches, stomach issues, sexual dysfunction, lack of sleep, aches and pains, and to top it off, no motivation to want to deal with any of it. Sound familiar?
The truth is you become emotionally unavailable to pretty much everyone. You disconnect, banishing yourself to a private emotional island to play a sad solo version of Survivor. You miss the opportunities to create new memories because you have decided to put on your producer hat and splice together a TikTok-worthy reel of the worst moments of your life just so you can watch it on repeat.
Loosening the grip of the past requires deliberate intention. You need to recognize the patterns of negativity and rewrite the stories you tell yourself about your past experiences. However, it isn't always a pattern of negativity; sometimes it's an "illusion of negativity" that twists your memories and makes it hard to remember the "happy" stuff but easy to recall an embarrassing moment with vivid detail. The mere aura of negativity has the ability to consume your memory and distort your perspective. Whether a pattern or illusion, it requires amping up your ability for self-compassion and forgiving yourself for prior mistakes. It requires letting go. It's time to accept the fact that you can't change the past and you need to hand over the keys to your time machine.
Take a Moment
That's Not How I Remember It.
Let's reframe a past experience to reduce its emotional grip. Write down a painful or regretful memory that often invades your thoughts. What are the lessons learned from this experience, and how has it contributed to your growth? How does this new narrative make you feel about the memory?
It's important to point out that the process of letting go isn't about forgetting or denying the past. It's about reframing your experiences, both good and bad, into a more balanced narrative of your life. You can honor your past without being defined, fooled, manipulated, or controlled by it.
Reframing My Own Past
I know this intimately. In 2012 my eldest son, Theo, was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome that required a bone marrow transplant to survive. On August 12, 2012, Theo received his transplant and began a 263-day nightmare in the Kids Beating Cancer Pediatric Transplant Center at Florida Hospital in Orlando.
While the transplant was successful, Theo developed a horrendous case of graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD, which happens when the donated bone marrow doesn't recognize the transplant environment and begins to attack the body. The only treatment when this happens is to suppress the immune system and hope for the best. If you reach level 4 of GVHD, it's fatal. Theo had reached that level and was seemingly going for a world record. Unfortunately, this treatment places the body at extreme risk of infection. As fate would have it, he contracted a deadly fungus called mucormycosis. The proper treatment for this infection is to radically boost the immune system so the body can attack the fungus. Two necessary treatments with opposite tactics created a zero-sum game. On March 23, 2013, the team of doctors called me into a room and explained that no matter which issue they treated, the other would take Theo's life. They recommended that I call who I needed to and go back to my son's hospital room and say my goodbyes.
I was living my real-life nightmare, and I couldn't wake myself up from it. I walked back to the room desperately trying to think about what to say and how to explain this to Theo's younger brother, Brady. As I sat on the edge of Theo's bed, I gave away every ounce of hope I had based on the recommendation of a room full of doctors. I didn't want to. I knew they didn't have the kind of power to determine who lives and dies. But I did it anyway. And instead of fighting for a miracle, I made the worst decision I have ever made. Against my better judgement, I said goodbye.
Hearing your child quietly whisper "I'm going to miss you, Daddy" is something you don't get over. Ever.
But meanwhile, something miraculous was happening. When I called my younger brother, Todd, to tell him the dire news, he was devastated. To make matters worse, he lived 1,500?miles away and couldn't make it to the hospital in time. So instead, he threw a Hail Mary. He filmed a video of himself holding up 55 different posterboards explaining Theo's case and pleading for help from anyone who could. He never actually said a word in the video. He only played the song "Fix You" by Coldplay as the soundtrack for a desperately needed miracle.
Almost overnight, the video had 500,000 views. We started to receive calls from people all over the world who believed they could help. The callers included brilliant doctors with uniquely specific experience in the challenges we were facing. Come to find out, the zero-sum game our doctors perceived wasn't entirely true. An experimental treatment would allow us to address both diseases at the same time-an option our doctors hadn't been unaware of. Within 24?hours of my brother's video going viral, we had a crazy plan to try to save...
