Mental Fitness for Good Health

Brain Research Shows Why It’s so Hard to Get Free from the Past

In sports, family life and in areas of self-actualization, we want to become free from our painful and embarrassing past failures, shortcomings and psychic representations of these events in our minds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we did not have psychic representations of bad and painful experiences in our minds?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we never rehashed our errors and disappointments?

Wouldn’t it be nice if our past failures, insecurities, fears and guilt didn’t capture our minds and influence us in the future?

Now psychological researchers have shown as reported in Science Daily:

"That thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation.

This challenges long-standing beliefs that thoughts about the future develop exclusively in the frontal lobe.

Remembering your past may go hand-in-hand with envisioning your future!

Now, psychologists at Washington University are finding that your ability to envision the future does in fact goes hand-in-hand with remembering the past. Both processes spark similar neural activity in the brain.

They asked college students to recall past events and then envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future. The results? Similar areas of the brain "lit up" in both scenarios.

All the regions that we know are important for memory are just as important when we imagine our future," Szpunar says."

This research shows the power of past psychic representations of our failures and disappointments in creating fear, anxiety, guilt, insecurity and inefficiency and similar future situations.

This research shows the importance of repetitively making Self Affirmations that are not past based in order to overcome the influence of our past, unconscious thought processes.

This research shows the necessity for repetitively thinking powerful thoughts to develop mental fitness and open up windows of opportunity for change in our lives.

This research validates the use of visualization to visualize how we want to be successful in the future rather than allowing our past failures and shortcomings to shape our future performances and quality of life.

Repetitive, conscious, affirming visualization and thinking about ourselves and our future is necessary to break the continual re-creation of the past in our lives.

Remember, We Live Within the Environment Created by Our Choices!

Dr. Hal

Life and Mental Fitness Coach

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