How often do you lay awake thinking of other peoples mistakes?

My point is, everyone else is too busy thinking about their own top ten to worry about yours, so you are basically the only one keeping that moment alive. Once you can get far enough away from the situation to realize that in the grand scheme nobody cares, you’ll be able to forgive yourself a bit easier (in my experience)

The only thing that has somewhat worked for me is to be physically active. I can clearly tell the difference between periods where I am active vs periods when I’m inactive.

Something as simple as taking a long walk in green areas have done wonders in the past. It empties my mind and I become nothing more than a machine that moves. It is the closest I can get to meditation and I think a lot of anxiety is trapped energy that needs a physical outlet.

I’m not diagnosed with anything, but I have been an anxious bitch for my entire adult life due to some bad things I went through, so I know how persistent and irrationally extreme anxiety can become.

Walking in forests and fields are not gonna magically cure life long brain patterns, but they sure as shit make them shut up for long enough that you get to enjoy life a little and are too exhausted to worry about all the stupid things that don’t matter, but your brain loves torturing you with.

When you have walked in a forest for an hour or two or even just 20 minutes, something inside you automatically calms. Nature is so important for the soul and we sometimes forget that. Of course, in case you live in a scorching hot desert, you may not have this option, but if you have a forest around where you live, go for a walk on a well used trail and take in the changing seasons. After a couple of weeks and months, the longterm effects will be apparent. You’ll still be anxious, but a lot less so.

You can never change the past, but you can change the future.

Your mistakes are going to continue, in fact they will probably get bigger. I’ll be vulnerable, I fucked up majorly and was let go from a previous job. It was a stupid fuckup, I should have caught it earlier, and it caused real money to be lost by the company and I let down my team. That guilt and embarrassment will stick with me for a long time.

However, I can’t let it stop me. It paralyzed me for a bit, I lost my confidence and stopped wanting to try at my position, but then one day I just started thinking about it. What did I actually do wrong, where did I go wrong, how did I let people down, and I decided I wanted to do my best to avoid that. So now at a new job I remember that incident, and I call out things earlier, I’m a bit less cocky, I do several little things that I just had to learn the hard way I guess.

The long point of my anecdote I guess is that those feelings never really go away, you’ll always be laying there at night and thinking about them. Growing though is acknowledging them, not trying to hide from them, and figuring out how you want to better yourself going forward.

Someone once told me that it is wery easy for you to remember these instances and think at how you made a fool for yourself or how you were wrong or maybe even bad towards someone. These things are still vivid after 10-20 years.

However remembering how others were towards you fades a lot easier, to the point that remembering such instances from others against you from 5 years ago is difficult.

It sometimes helps me thinking that others likely moved on and probably do not even remember the episode, so I should let it go.

Did you learn from it, even if it wasn’t a mistake that is called growth, maturity and wisdom.

We are all absolute dumbasses and those of us who survive our younger years either understand how fucking lucky we were or wallow in ignorance.

You recognize your ‘mistakes’…that is the first step and probably the biggest.

Keep going. You’ll do great.

That’s called ruminating. Are you neurodivergent? Therapy and/or correcting the behavior every time you catch yourself doing it.