This post about mental movies will perhaps appear as “self improvement” advice, and who knows–you might learn something useful to apply to your own life. But the purpose is really just to introduce a new idea, and to get you thinking. It ends with several unanswered questions, as many of these posts do…

Suppose a man went almost every day to the same bad movie, even though he did not enjoy it. Some people would laugh at this, or say the man had a mental problem. But many of us revisit our own terrible internal movies again and again.

We justify this, perhaps as “learning from our mistakes so we don’t make them again,” even though this doesn’t seem to be the result. We might feel that by dwelling on our past we can “pay” some price that absolves our guilt (wouldn’t simply not doing it again be a better way?). We may even feel that we can somehow “fix” our problems by torturing ourselves with bad memories and imagined scenarios.

For all of our excuses and justifications, we don’t get those kind of positive results. Nor can we think of a single case where we have seen another person improve their life by focusing on their disturbing “mental movies.” In fact, we discourage our own friends from such “dwelling on the past,” or “imagining all the things that can go wrong.” Yet many of us still walk into that theater day after day.

Three Questions

1. Do you ever run memories through your mind only to feel the regrets again?

2. Is it possible that you can choose not to do that?

3. Justification is not causation, so why do we actually return to our bad “movies,” and what does that suggest about how to stop?