Depressed by the past? Nine tricks to overcome it
What happened at work can’t get out of your head and makes you feel incapable of taking on new challenges? Do you think you can't overcome the pain of breaking up with the person you considered to be the love of your life? The loss of that relative has left you feeling empty and you can't get your previous life back? You may find yourself depressed by the past. Here are 9 tips for you to finally get to know how to overcome depression and learn to enjoy your present.
Make the most of what you've experienced
Your past is surely made up of countless good moments, but also of difficulties and complicated situations. Everything you have experienced has an effect on your present and leads you to act in a certain way. The past is a valuable source of knowledge that helps you face the day to day, trying not to make the same mistakes.It is necessary that what you have lived generates experience and not a blockage that prevents you from continuing. You cannot go back, your past is not going to change, but your future can. You are here and the moment is now, every time you move your mind to the past you are moving away from your current self and your main objective, which is none other than to be happy. Turn pain into learning and that will give you the strength to move forward and forget the past.
Recognize how it makes you feel
The events that have caused you pain and you have not been able to finish assuming, can continue to have a negative effect on you and even cause you to feel depressed by the past. Past wounds have both physical and emotional effects long after they occur.The union body and mind is much stronger than you can imagine, negative thoughts and feelings have a direct influence on your emotional health but also on the physical, as they often generate back or neck pain, loss of energy or excessive fatigue. On the other hand, positive emotions cause the strengthening of the immune system, which generates an important improvement at the physical level. Depression can be healed, work to heal the wound and your mind and body will thank you.
To forget the past, forget the bad
Forgiveness, whether to oneself or to others, is a process that needs patience and reflection. Making mistakes is part of our learning and realizing that failure does not mean failure is the first step to assume what happened and begin to improve. Analyzing your past failures will help you create your identity and face the future with more weapons.To forgive yourself it is necessary that you learn to be aware of the situations you live in and know how to assume the responsibility that corresponds to you. Once you are able to carry out forgiveness with yourself, it is important that you do it with others. If you manage to forgive, they will automatically begin to change behaviours that hurt you for more adaptive ones.
Put your energy into what's to come
As Alejandro Jodorowsky said, "You can't change your past, but you can change your relationship with it". It is precisely this philosophy that is going to help you heal the wounds that have been with you for a long time because it is as negative to live thinking about what will happen as to do it tied to those that happened in the past. Accepting your current reality to break with everything that is not in the present is necessary to stop feeling depressed by the past.All the moments bring memories and teachings that you use in your daily life, everything that is about to come poses new challenges and objectives, everything that is happening now gives you the opportunity to be happy. You can not change what happened, so do not spend energy trying and direct it to face new situations with what you learned from past experiences.
Live in the here and now
Very often thoughts move us to other situations or times and take us away from what is really important, the present. Focusing on the moment you are living will also help you save energy since you focus on a specific point and do not let your mind turn to other thoughts. A key point to achieve the consciousness of the present is to think about what we are doing and not what is going to happen next. Learn to pay attention to the emotion you are feeling in each moment.
Reinvent yourself and reinvent your world
Lack of novelty and forceful routines can lead to problems of motivation and reluctance. If the moments lived in the past are still painful and affect you in your day to day, starting to change habits will help you know how to cure depression, break that bond with yesterday and enjoy things hitherto unknown to you.The first point to create new routines is to try different things, sure that many will not manage to bring you the benefits you expected but it is likely that in that search you will find some activity that makes you feel better. It is important that the changes you are introducing are made progressively because trying to change life radically leads to abandon and go back to the previous life. Examples of routines that you can introduce can be: practice some exercise, make changes in your diet, read books of different styles or discover new music.
Make room for happiness
Focusing on the solution rather than the problem is fundamental in the process of definitively overcoming the past and leaving it behind. Learning to use positive communication with yourself and others will help you feel better and consequently improve your self-esteem. Thinking about kind phrases that you can use to tell yourself, such as "I can do it and I'm going to do it", will help you to value yourself more. The fact that letting go of negativity improves your self-esteem leads to progress not only in your emotional well-being but also in your level of work or academic performance and in your personal relationships.
Make your peace of mind count
Sometimes it is difficult to act as if you were the priority of your life, however, in order for things to go well and manage to forget the past, it is necessary for you to be the protagonist of your life and treat yourself as such. Work, family commitments and social relationships sometimes lead you not to be able to enjoy moments for yourself. Disconnecting from all your worries and commitments is necessary to put aside everything you do and focus on who you are. Try to devote some time a week just for yourself, you will see that it will help you to think more clearly and face the day to day in a more effective way.
Trust someone who can help you
If you try to put these tips into practice so that you don't feel depressed by the past, you will see that not only will you feel better about yourself, but you will also feel stronger to deal with complicated situations that may arise in the future. However, on many occasions, an event becomes entrenched and prevents you from moving forward in the way you would like.If you want to improve your level of well-being, in therapyside we can help you. We are international leaders in online psychology and we have the right therapist for you.