When your current life doesn’t work
What can you do when you believe that your current life is not working properly for you, or not working at all?
This may be a difficult question, but it is an important one.
Symptoms that suggest you are dissatisfied with your current life include agonizing over your past, feeling sorry for yourself, complaining that you “didn’t do this or that,” and repeating your old failures.
After taking into account all the above indicators, there is one more that is a sure sign that you are not satisfied with your current life: your excuse for not making any positive changes.
Let me tell you something. Whenever people ask me to tell them about my previous traumatic experiences, like how my family escaped the war in my homeland, I refuse to tell them anything.
Am I being rude by not responding to your request? No problem. I am protecting myself from allowing a past traumatic experience to ruin my present life.
When people start talking about previous negative or traumatic experiences, they are actually bringing those past traumas into the present. In those moments, they live in the past.
Is it useful to drag negative experiences from the past to the present? No, it is not.
Bringing a bad, sad, or traumatic experience into the present also brings strong emotional charges that are connected to that experience.
Of course, if you’ve had a strong emotional experience, the neural circuitry in your brain will remember it forever. Every experience is accompanied by strong emotions, whether positive or negative, and every negative experience leads to the release of “bad chemicals” (stress hormones).
When you talk about your past traumatic experience, you are reliving it in the present, thereby releasing the same stress hormones twenty or more years after the event occurred. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between the real life event and your memory of that event, which is creating the same emotions.
The problem starts when people think and feel about the past and do nothing about the present.
You can’t change your past. You can only change your present. However, notice that I did not say that you can change everything in your current life.
However, if you think something is wrong in your current life, try to change it if you can.
Don’t dwell on the past while making excuses that life isn’t “fair.” (Who said life is fair, anyway?) It’s just one more excuse to do nothing to change your current life.
Start changing your life by changing your neurochemistry; you can do this simply by changing the way you think about things in your life.
Remember: your thoughts and feelings create your present.
When you break the cycle of negativity around you, your present life will work for you.