Is dwelling on the past healthy or unhealthy?

We’ve all done it before and we usually kick ourselves afterwards because we know we contributed to our own depressed mood by dwelling on past negative experiences.

We sometimes will play out the scene in our head and add new dialogue that we never said as if somehow our replay edition will come to life and change things. Right?

First of all, let me be the one to say that your feelings are normal. While some unbalanced humans may enjoy emotional conflict, most people want good emotional relationships. When those desires are unmet they will try to routes to achieving it. As a consequence, one may begin to replay past experiences over in their head to see if there was anything they could have said or done to change the negative outcome.

While such self-reflection may be healthy when kept in balance, it can also be unhealthy if overly done or the self-reflection becomes a means to emotionally berate yourself or someone else.

For example, if you find that you are thinking about the past conversation you had with your friend and you realize that maybe you spoke too unkindly, self-reflections can be a healthy way of correcting negative behavior. However, if you use that experience to remind yourself that you’re no good at friendships and that you would be better off alone, your self-reflection has now become an unhealthy exercise in which you label yourself as a failure.

You can immediately see why balance would be in order. But how does one achieve such balance?

I will published the answer to that question later this week.

#mentalhealth #healthythoughts #unhealthythoughts