Comment by dilap

Comment by dilap a year ago

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A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm stuck on is to think the following:

In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.

It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.

alexey-salmin a year ago

> In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this.

Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for regrets get saturated

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rthnbgrredf a year ago

Even better is to just focus on the here and now. The past cannot be changed and the future is just a mental construct, both can cause anexity and endless thinking.

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unshavedyak a year ago

My issue is i regret rather non-issues. Which makes it difficult to avoid because A. they're often small, stupid things that are difficult to avoid imo. And B. i'm sure i'd just find something else. The small things are objectively not reasons to be obsessing and regretting.. yet i do. So i think it's a problem in my frame of mind, not the action in focus.

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adammarples a year ago

Our brains are machines for trying to avoid future mistakes, and doubling down on focusing on them isn't ideal. It's good that at least you're not also tying them to the past, which is doomed, but that's not what the future has to be. It's better not to focus on fears and let the possibility of the future open up instead.

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  • anthonyrstevens a year ago

    I think I could make a good argument that our brains are machines for repeating past mistakes. Interesting to think about the opposite sides of the argument.

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layer8 a year ago

The biological purpose of regretting past actions is to avoid them in the future, though.

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