How to Stop Dwelling on the Past | Warrior Notes

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What is going on everybody? Welcome to this edition of the Warrior Soul Podcast. My name is Chris Albert. And if you haven't been here before, the Warrior Soul Podcast works to empower US military veterans and anybody else willing to listen to live their absolute best lives. And we do that by delivering tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas that you can implement right here, right now, right after listening to this podcast to show up as a wiser, stronger, more capable version of yourself either in the civilian world, in your job, whatever you're doing.

And I say that because if you're not a veteran, anything I talk about here, right now, can apply to you as well. That's true if you're an active duty military member. It's true if you've never served in the military. We're here to make more capable human beings. And the reason why I do this is because one, I believe that the veteran community is the sleeping giant in this country.

I think that if we wake up as a community, we can have an impact on this country. We can direct its growth. We can help take this country to an amazing place. And I've been doing this podcast for three years and this year we've been experiencing massive growth. Our downloads each month have been exponentially increasing and that means that a lot of you are out there sharing the show, a lot of you are out there telling people about the podcast and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that.

So I'm gonna ask you to do is a couple of things right now and each of these things will just take a moment of your time and they're absolutely free. All I'm asking you to do is number one subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. You can do that on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe there. Number two, if you can, please please share these episodes out with people who can use this information. And then finally, finally, please if you can head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review.

I know a lot of you don't listen on iTunes, but iTunes is what drives the algorithm. So if you can, just head over over there, write a sentence or two about how the podcast has helped you. Leave us a five star rating if the podcast has helped you, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. Every time you do that, you are helping to get this information into the ears of more veterans and more people who need it. Today, I want to talk to you about a really important subject, and it is a subject that tends to wrap a lot of us up.

And that's dealing with the past. You know, lot of us deal with situations from our past that are very trying, that are very heartbreaking, that have damaged us in some way. They might have damaged us mentally, they might have damaged us physically, but it's really the mental stuff that carries forward. And it's not even really the event that happened that damages us so much, it's how we deal with it and how it affects us in the present. Because a lot of times it just keeps us from realizing what we need to do right now to make our lives better because we dwell.

And when we dwell and when we obsess over things that happened to us in the past, whether it was done to us by other people, whether it was events outside of our control, we take the focus off of our lives right now. And what I want you to understand is that in so many ways, you are a different person than you were just ten years ago. The human body completely remakes itself every eight years. Now what do I mean by that? Your cells are constantly regenerating.

That means that your your cells are replacing themselves, and your brain is completely different every eight years. So for you to think about who you were ten years ago, and for you to compare yourself to that person, well, you're comparing yourself to a completely different individual. You're comparing yourself to a ghost, somebody who doesn't exist anymore. Yes, you have the memories. Yes, you still have the same DNA.

But you are a completely different individual. And that also means something because your brain remakes itself every eight years. Well, it also means that your brain is constantly being influenced by its environment, by the people who surround you, and by your own thoughts. And if you are constantly thinking in a negative capacity, what you're essentially doing through the process of neuroplasticity is you're changing your brain to think in a different manner, to think in a more negative manner, to think in an underperforming manner. And that's one of the problems we want to address right now, and that's why we want to get you to stop doing this.

Because every time you do it, you are influencing your brain to transform in a way that is not going to serve you, that's not gonna serve the people around you, that's not gonna serve your family, and that's not gonna serve society. Essentially what you're doing is you are making yourself weaker. Weaker with every negative thought. Weaker every single time you put yourself down. Every single time you go back to the past and you think, oh, why couldn't I have done this?

Or oh, I should have done things this way. Or oh, I was so great back then, but now I'm a big pile of shit. You can't do that to yourself. Because, again, it's not just you that's on the line here. It's everybody around you.

Your family, your spouse, your kids, society in general. Now the big question is, well, then how do you stop? How do you stop doing this to yourself? And you might be of the mind that, you know, I've tried. I've tried everything in the world.

And I've definitely done that in the past. I've definitely tried and failed multiple times to try to get certain situations out of my head. And one of the things here, and one of the dichotomies here that I'm going to go over is that, well, you're not necessarily gonna be able to get these things out of your head. It's not a process of of zapping your thoughts and eliminating memories or repressing them in any way. That's actually not healthy.

Alright? But what you do need to start doing is you need to start recognizing it. And you need to start recognizing what it's actually doing to you. Because one of the things about dwelling on the past is that well there's a part of us that actually likes it. There's a part of us that actually likes being negative, that actually likes putting ourselves down.

And it gets to the point where it's almost a reflex, and we do it without thinking. So what I want to do today is I want to give you some simple tips, some simple thought exercises, some simple things you can actually do, actions you can take to start to change this train of thought that you have. And before I go into it, I want to say this. If this doesn't work for you instantly, that doesn't mean you're dumb, it doesn't mean that you're a bad person, it doesn't mean that you're weak, it means that you're a human being who is affected by memory. Simple as that.

You can change this, but it's going to take work. It's going to take practice. It's going to take time. You know, it took years and years and decades for you to get to this point. It's going to take some time to undo it.

But you need to be willing to do the work. And what I'll tell you is this, there's nothing more worthwhile in the world than investing in yourself and investing in your brand. I'm not talking about monetarily, I'm not talking about money here. I'm talking about action. Taking the necessary action to to get out of that monkey brain of yours and to start getting your brain on a track that's gonna allow you to grow.

That's gonna allow you to actually do the things to make your life better. Alright? So let's get started on this and let's start talking about some of these actions you can take. The first thing is this, you've got to recognize it. You've to recognize it for what it is.

And that is the fact that you're literally sitting there wrestling with ghosts. You know, I don't know. You've probably been in this situation before. A lot of people in this audience have probably been in this situation before. But have you ever had a really, really bad nightmare and you're rolling around in bed, you're tossing and turning, you're you're wrestling with the sheets.

Alright? And then, you know, maybe you're in a fight in your dream, maybe you're you're doing something in your dream, you wake up and you realize that you're wrestling with a sheet or a pillow. Right? And the first thought that comes into your mind, Oh man, it was just a dream. And then the next thought is, Oh man, it was a dream.

Why am I dreaming that right now? Right? But at the end of the day you wake up, you're back in your bed, you're in your bedroom, your wife, your girlfriend, your partner is next to you. And maybe nobody is next to you, maybe it's just your teddy bear, right? But the point is you're safe.

And what I want you to understand right now is that what you're doing when you're going back to the past is you're essentially wrestling in the dark with a sheet. Right? It's it's a sheet, or we can call it a ghost, or whatever you want to call it. But you're wrestling with a figment of your imagination, something that no longer exists anymore. And the reason why I say it's something that no longer exists anymore is because it's something you can't control.

What happened in the past already happened. You can't go back in time, you can't create a time machine and say oh I'm gonna go back there and fix all this, right? I wish I could. I wish I could go back to high school and slap some sense into my freaking head. But I can't do that.

I can't. I wish I could go back to when I was 25 and slap some sense in my head. But again, we can't do that. We have to admit that to ourselves. And once you admit that to yourself, start to see the futility in spending so much time and energy on it.

If you're sitting there, constantly dwelling on something that you can't control anymore, well what you're not doing is focusing on what you can control. And the only thing you can control right now is this moment. This moment in time. Right? You can't even control what you were doing when you when when you, started listening to this podcast.

Right? You already started. Yeah. You can hit the stop button if you want right now and stop and and go do something else. But you get my point.

Right? You can't go back. You can't go back to five minutes ago. You can't go back to five years ago. You can't go back to ten years ago.

You can't go back to twenty years ago. So that is the first step. Just recognizing when you're doing it. And when you recognize when you're doing it, don't beat yourself up about it. Don't say Oh, you're so weak, why are you thinking about this right now?

Just recognize it. Recognize it, and when you recognize it, what tends to happen is that memory starts to dissolve, and you come back to the present. That image that's in your brain starts to dissolve, and you come back to the present. And then the next thing is you gotta decide what to do with the present. But let me give you a couple of quick tools that can help you to recognize it. The first one is this, meditation.

Right? And I know a lot of you, you think about meditation and you think about a monk sitting there in the lotus position and he's chanting to himself and all this stuff like that. That's not what I'm telling you to do. Right? It has nothing to do with religion.

It doesn't even have to do anything with spirituality. It just has to do with being able to recognize your thoughts in your brain. Why? Because most of our actions are actually affected by our subconscious. We don't even realize when a lot of these thoughts are coming up.

Could just pop in your brain right now, and you have no real control over that. And what meditation does is it helps you to realize it. It helps you to recognize that. And it helps you to focus through those thoughts, to stay present, to be focused on what matters right now. Right?

And so you got to train yourself with it. Now you don't have to meditate for hours. All you really need to do is maybe ten minutes a day. And one application that's helped me out quite a bit is Sam Harris's Waking Up. It's an app you can get on on Apple or you can get it on on I know a lot of you guys out there hate Apple and you're in Android.

You can get it on Android. But the reason why I like that app is because Sam Harris is just really good at explaining meditation and explaining its importance and explaining why we do it. He doesn't put any kind of mysticism in there or spirituality. He doesn't cloud it. He breaks it down to its functional purpose.

And that's why I highly recommend that app. I've actually got a meditation group. I meditate every day at 7AM on the Waking Up app and if you want what you could do is just find the meditation group. It's called the Warrior Soul Meditation Group. If you're having problems finding it just email me at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com.

I'll send you a link and then you can join the group. You don't have to pay nothing. It's nothing like that. We just sit there. We don't talk or anything like that.

It's just that you know that there's a group there meditating with you while you're doing it. So that's the first thing. Meditating. Meditating every day if you can, if you miss one again don't beat yourself up, but try to make it a regular practice so that you can start to recognize when those thoughts are coming up. Another tool that has equally been bastardized by self help is journaling.

Journaling. And I know you hear all these self help guys are saying, oh you gotta write down your gratitude every day, three things you're grateful for and things like that. And I think that's valuable. One other thing that I think is very valuable for people like us is that you sit with your book each day, your journal, and you write down everything that pisses you off. What's pissing you off right now in the moment?

Now if you got something from your past that's pissing you off, maybe there was something happened yesterday, maybe there was something that happened last month or years ago, write it down in your journal. Write it down, write and and be crazy with it. Be be insane with it. Right? Because nobody's gonna see it.

Right? And then essentially what I find is that that allows me to empty my brain of that situation and lock it up on the page. Right? And that gives me that scratches that itch that I want of just complaining or or being bitchy about a situation or being mad about a situation. It just allows me to do that and I find that it just helps me to cleanse my brain of the whole thing.

And, you know, I think that as you go through your day, if you do that first and the thing comes up in your mind, just say, oh, you know what? I already spent my time on that today. Already spent the amount of time that I had to to worry about that. Now I gotta focus on what's up right now. What's important?

Okay? So those two things, meditation and journaling. The next thing. This is another really, really important thing that I think a lot of people neglect. One of the reasons why we spend so much time on the past is because we have no idea of where we want to go.

We have no idea of where we want to go, where we want to end up, where we're bringing ourselves in life. And so this is something that I've talked about in past episodes. I think it's one of the most important things for you to do is to essentially sit down and actually specify what you want. What do you want your life to look like? Where are you going?

And what this is called is a vision. Now, one of the problems that people have with this is that they conflate this with the secret or the power of manifestation or the power of thought, and all these things where you're supposedly gonna manifest things out of thin air. And what I'm here to tell you is that what I'm talking about is not that. I'm not talking about you manifesting things out of thin air. I'm not talking about the power of thought or anything like that.

What a vision is is like a compass and a map. If you have no idea of where you want to go, or what you want to work toward, what can start to happen in life is that you get dragged in multiple directions. Think about it like this. We live in a world where you are constantly in communication with others through social media, through email, through text. And if you don't have any idea of where you want to go you can get dragged in a million directions.

Right? And Beyond that what can happen is you can get dragged to a place that you never wanted to be in the first place. That happens a lot of people are like well how the hell did I get here? The reason why you got there, the way that you got there is because well, you weren't thinking about it. Right?

You just followed a path, or you followed what other people told you to do, or you just went with the flow. And for a lot of people, they they have never really thought about what they actually wanted. Right? I've talked to a lot of marines, a lot of soldiers, a lot of veterans who told me, you know what? When I got out, I just kind of did what everybody told me to do, and now I'm in this place where I never really wanted to be here.

I never never even thought about what I wanted. Right? You need to think about that. Because you need a target. You need something to work toward.

And you know what? That's not necessarily just gonna manifest itself. It's not something that's just gonna pop up out of thin air. But in order to get there, you gotta do some work to get there. Right?

So get that vision done. I'll post a link to another episode I did about how to create your vision on the show notes for this episode, and you guys can check that out as well. Finally, here's the other thing. I I and this third one is so important as well because I interviewed a guy named Noah Currier. Right?

Noah is the CEO of Oscar Mike, which stands for On the Move. And Noah's story is absolutely crazy. He essentially, three days after he got back from an appointment, he got into a car accident and became a quadriplegic. And if that was not bad enough, he gets through his therapy, he's finally figuring out how to be an active person as a quadriplegic, and then all of a sudden, his fiance gets killed in another car accident. And I as I was talking to him, I couldn't believe what this guy had gone through.

But here's the deal, and and this was not easy for him by any means. He was to a point to where he was going to take his own life. He was right there. And what happened was he found a mission. He got real busy.

Right? Somebody came to him with the idea of competing in adaptive sports, and he got real active. He started doing a skiing competition. He he wanted to do these things over and over again because he loved the feeling of being out there. He figured out that if he was active and he was doing something, he wasn't dwelling on all the crazy things that had happened to him.

And then after that, he built his business. He built Oscar Mike. And that has made him immensely successful, but it's also made him immensely busy. He doesn't have the time to think about it. That's not to say that this stuff doesn't stick in his mind sometimes, but what happens is whenever it does stick in his mind, he's got too much work to sit there dwell on it and not do anything.

Right? And that's what you need to do. You need to figure out something that's gonna allow you to take action and move forward in your life, and that's going to keep you busy. Because if you don't and you're not doing anything, that's when these things start to invade our minds. That's when we sit there and we start to go down to that.

That's what Nick Koumalatsos calls the the well of bad emotions. Right? In his book, Excommunicated Warrior. Right? And if you want to avoid that, you gotta get busy.

You gotta get to work. You gotta start doing things. Right? And so those are the steps that I would take. So number one, put the work in to practice and recognize when you're doing this to yourself.

Number two, have an idea of where you want to go. Create a vision for yourself. And then number three, get to work. Find something that you could spend your time on that doesn't involve just sitting around and thinking. Alright?

And I hope that these work out for you. I hope from the bottom of my heart that you take these actions and you actually implement them. I know that there's some of you out there like, oh, this isn't gonna work for me. This is much BS. No, man.

Take action. Do something. Right? It's better than what you're doing right now. It's better than what you're doing to your brain right now.

And above all, it's better than what you're doing to the people around you right now. You know? And I can't tell you how important this is. So with that guys, let me know what you think. If you've got questions, if you've got concerns, you're always welcome to email me or message me on social media. My Instagram account is at Warrior Soul Agoge that's a g o g e at the end. My email account is chris@warriorsoulagoge.com and I spell my name c h r I s. And other than that, you know, I want to thank you guys so much for listening.

If you know of somebody who can use this information that I just went over, please share this episode out with them. And I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsors, F Bomb Nutrition. They make delicious packets of fats, macadamia nut butters. They they mix them up with chocolate. They mix them up with sea salt.

They mix them up with coconut butter. They're so delicious you can carry them around with you wherever you want to go. They also make cheese snacks and they make meat sticks. Whatever you get from them you will be absolutely pleased. You can head over to www.dropanfbomb.com.

Use that code Warrior Soul at checkout. You'll get 20 off your first order. The next thing is Save the Brave. Save the Brave is a five zero one c three charity for veterans. They do camaraderie events for veterans.

You know, those activities I was talking about. Things that you can get involved with, deep sea fishing, golfing. They also do a lot of events for gold star families. You If wanna check them out, head over to www.savethebrave.org. They're a great, great organization, and their board doesn't take a salary.

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So again, I will back at you later on this week with some more awesome content. I hope you have a wonderful week. Get out there and live your best life while you can. Please put this stuff into practice. I'll be talking to you soon.

This is Chris, and I am out.