It’s quite easy to allow your mind to over analyze every little thing you've ever done wrong, and allow for regrets to dictate your life. Living with regrets is certainly a burden, but something we must learn to overcome in order to appreciate the good moments for what they're truly worth. Dwelling on the past does nothing but keep you stuck in your tracks, which is why it's important that we learn to live and let go.
Holding a grudge over previous events or actions does nothing but destroy your emotional state. The stress caused from holding onto the past is a huge gateway to increasing anxiety. Making ourselves and the people around us believe we do not care about either our own or someone else's wrongdoings, is a lot more challenging than one may expect.
Oftentimes it isn't just a mental shift that occurs, but a physical one as well. The aggressions and anxiety we struggle with on a daily basis have their way of expressing themselves through aches and pains, that many brush off and blame on something else. Putting our frustrations behind us will minimize the emotional and physical damage, as well as alleviate the control they’ll have on future endeavors.
Perfectionist tendencies are another hard-hitter, and also the category of people I find myself trapped amongst as well. It's easy for perfectionists to beat themselves up over something so small and insignificant because they set such high expectations for everything they strive to accomplish. Whether they set them high to please someone else, or even just to put themselves at ease, it's difficult to prevent the emotional exhaustion that comes from living with regrets simply because our quality of work did not meet our expected standard of absolute perfection. I know for sure that if there's anything that could possibly shake me to my core, it would be not getting the grade I wanted on a paper. I find that getting a 100 is the only way to know I did well, and anything less than that means I severely messed up somewhere. I feel a tremendous amount of weight lifted from my shoulders when I have my work validated by someone else. The unhealthy obsession I have with achieving the best leaves me feeling utterly exhausted, but it's something I am in the process of trying to overcome. Nothing will ever be perfect, and that's something I, and many people, have a hard time comprehending.
Rather than allowing ourselves to feel a sense of loss or sorrow over things we do not necessarily always have control over, it's important that the main thing we take away from these issues is the lesson to be learned from our mistakes. The corrective steps taken to fix our wrongdoings, ignoring the duration of time between events, shows growth and keeps people motivated to try harder. The actions or events we may not consider to be our proudest moments are all building blocks that come together to develop our character. Without those embarrassing or disheartening moments, we are left with nothing to grow from. As Jenna McDugall from the band Tonight Alive sang in the song We Are, "We can only learn from where we went wrong."
It's important to keep in mind that no two people respond to the same coping mechanisms when it comes to handling emotional trauma of any kind. Whether it be from depression, anxiety, or trying to escape the regrets that cloud our rationality, the key element to grasp onto is the things that make you happy. Those elements play a crucial part in recovery from escaping the past once and for all.
