Keeping brooding bouts at bay

At times, especially while in low spirits, it so happens that when we try ruminating over our past days, to our surprise, we find our mind slickly sifting off all the surplus good memories, and tenaciously dredging up those disconcerting ones, dreadfully entrenched in the mind.

These bitter memories, linked with bad experiences, are the ones responsible for engendering brooding bouts in us.

Now, just try letting your mind hark back to your childhood days, redolent with umpteen good moments.

In case, you find your mind hovering over only those ‘unpleasant memories’ – like the times you’d have got severely scolded by a singularly strict school teacher over dereliction in your student duties, or, the times you’d have got whacked by your parents, for having indulged in mischievous escapades, then indubitably it means you have launched on your brooding sessions!

Incidentally, when you are in this ‘brooding frame of mind’, if you try recalling your many other past moments too, like say, your time spent at your previous workplace, lo!

Once again those unsettling memories spring up in your mind space - such as some terrible squabble with a colleague, sparked by a severe misunderstanding.

Or, the time you’d have been in the tight-spot with the top-brass, all because of a work-dodging subordinate, who’d have reneged on his promise of completing the assigned work on time.

It looks like at every chapter of life, we are lugging behind the cumbersome negative baggage of bitter memories to brood over. This bitter-memory baggage could be anything - an indelibly etched mental hurt, humiliation, a terrible professional/financial fall, a disappointment, a failure in something, etc.

Many times we even brood over someone’s betrayal to us too, particularly on whom we’d have reposed profound trust. It flusters deeply when such folks commit breach of trust by playing double games, indulging in backstabbing.

What we don’t realize here is that all these brooding bouts, if left unchecked, can metamorphose into chronic worrying, which is highly deleterious to one’s mental heath.

This apart, once we launch on this brooding session, unwittingly we’d start frittering away all our valuable free time, just by faffing around, without doing anything productive/constructive, besides blocking the smooth flow of our other daily activities too.

Thus we’d be losing out even on our present precious moments. For instance, like say, if we are brooding even when we are cramming down scrumptious food or watching a good telly show, apparently we’d mechanically be doing these things sans enjoying, with mental thoughts meandering in myriad directions!

So, instead of brooding over the “dead and long-buried” past mistakes, if we try viewing them as enriching/enlightening experiences, we’d certainly learn to move up and move on successfully in life.

And of course, we’d also stop using the ‘bitter past memories’ as the grist for our ‘brooding-session’ mill!