Cultivating Happiness

Do you find yourself ruminating over the past, having difficulty letting it go? Well, on one hand, recalling good memories brings back warm and joyous feelings; on the other, putting too much focus on the history is a sure way to induce anxiety.

There are many reasons for choosing to stay in the past but as holocaust survivor turned clinical psychologist Dr. Edith Eger put best, which I will paraphrase: humans have the tendency to be attached to the past because that is all they know while the future is an unknown quantity, thus perceived as a risk. She went on to share that at the time of liberation at the concentration camp, many people crossed the gate of the world’s most inhumane prison yet walked right back. They were institutionalized for so long that they had trouble figuring out what they could do outside of the concentration camp. This story is extreme yet very telling to show how much our tendency to hold on to something we know can be so damaging.

One of the slogan Dr. Eger advocates for is “Evolve, Not Revolve”. How insightful! Yet it is always easier said than done. At the end of the day, we have to convince ourselves in our own way to move on. During the past year, I had my fair share of anxiety and almost all of them were a result of ruminating over the past. In some cases, I was nostalgic about the pre-pandemic world, something no one can bring back; in other cases, I went back to some bad memories of unpleasant events, poor decisions I made. I felt trapped in the whirlpool of the past, demoralized, helpless as I cannot change history.

One perspective that nudged me out of the negativity loop is as follows: mistakes teach us a good lesson about what not to do. Life is about experiences, positive, neutral as well as negative, the full spectrum. My background as a computer scientist trained on AI, this analogy sealed the deal (so to speak): if you try to train an AI model to tell good things from bad things, yet you never provide negative examples in the training phase, then let me tell you, the model would have learnt nothing about the intended task. It simply will just predict everything as good! Our brain is an amazing biological neural network that has enormous potential and plasticity. We should provide it with diverse life experiences to continue cultivating it to become more sophisticated. Life ebbs and flows, goes up and down. While as nice as it is to be “up”, more often than not, it is those “down” moments that truly taught us about who we are, what we value and how to change for the better. Frederick Douglass wisely remarked: “no struggle, no progress”. This is a quote I take to heart and remind myself every day.

Now it’s your turn, close your eyes, and let it go. You deserve freedom and liberation from your own mental prison.