How to Stop Obsessing Over Past Decisions (OCD & Regret)

Music. Hello and welcome to the OCD and Anxiety Podcast, where we explore how to have a more positive relationship with anxiety disorders, taking back control so that you can start living the life you choose and not the one chosen by your fears. Music.

Have you ever made a decision big or small only to spend hours days or even years obsessing over whether you made the right choice maybe you move to a new city and keep wondering if you could have stayed or perhaps you walked away from a relationship and replay every detail convinced that actually you made a mistake. The past can feel like a puzzle that you need to solve but no matter how much you think about it the answer never comes.

If this sounds familiar you're not just overthinking you might be dealing with OCD driven regret and today we're talking about how to break free from the endless loop that decisions from the past can get us stuck in.

Remember that if you are struggling with OCD or anxiety and you would like to get some support with that well you can by heading over to my website robertjamescoaching.com there you can book in directly for a free session or if you prefer you can send me a message and let me know about what you're struggling with.

Also the podcast is now on YouTube I'm also posting weekly meditations there as well as a series of videos about sensory motor ocd so to check that out you can follow the link in in the show notes or you can search for the ocd and anxiety podcast on youtube many thanks and if you have any questions at all about anything i speak about today do please let me know off we go.

So why does OCD make regret worse? Well, the brain really craves certainty, but past decisions can't be undone. Certainly, when I first moved to Barcelona, I was enjoying myself, I was having a good time, but, you know, I wasn't sure about what I wanted to do. After a few years of being there, I felt like perhaps I needed to kind of have a change and move to the beach. And so I kind of moved away from the city and changed my life.

And then I met my now fiancé and we had children together and now we live just outside the city in the suburbs but there's a part of me that always thinks about well what would have happened if actually I stayed in Barcelona what would my life have been like you know could I have perhaps had a different kind of relationship what would that have been like what if I stayed with this particular person and had a relationship with them or a family with them now of course this isn't very nice

you know i'm very happy with my family and my situation this isn't something that i want to be spending a lot of time thinking about and actually i don't most of the time these days but certainly in the past i would spend hours going over this kind of thing thinking about my decisions and whether i made the best decisions in the past and you know kind of thinking about the life that i could have had if i made different decisions and there's actually a tv show on right now on apple tv

called dark matter which interestingly is about this kind of thing it's about a guy who uh he makes this he's a scientist and he makes this this machine that allows him to.

Travel into parallel worlds where he's making different decisions and he can see the different kind of lives that he could have had if he'd made these different decisions throughout his life and it really got me thinking about kind of ocd because in a way sometimes i think many of us with ocd. I wish that we had that kind of machine to be able to go back and travel and see what our life would have been like if we'd made different decisions in the past about different things.

And unfortunately, this kind of thinking is really not helpful. And of course, as well, I think it can make us feel some shame or some guilt when we're thinking that way because we're constantly denying the present. We're constantly saying that, you know, what we do have in our lives today is perhaps not good enough.

In some way and we wish that we'd made some different decisions or some different choices and that can make us feel bad about ourselves when we're constantly doing that all the time. The problem is that OCD of course tells you that if you think about it enough you're going to find clarity and of course that never quite happens. This is the trick of the OCD.

It loves to tell us that. It loves to get us thinking that if we only just think about it a little bit more, if we just imagine that scenario a bit more if we can think about perhaps the the faults of living in in that city still or you know some of the bad aspects of that past relationship you know then we can stop fantasizing about it we can let it go and so you know really what we're doing is we're playing that certainty game we're kind of digging up the

past we're trying to make sure that we've made the right decision you know or sometimes we're just going into it and it can almost feel like we're trying to kind of you know create something for for ourselves to focus on to ruminate on i think at times ocd can be quite addictive you know we really want to be at ruminating and so you know you might find yourself kind of thinking about the past in order to have something to to ruminate on

not because you want to be ruminating all the time but because you know There does seem to be that addictive quality to OCD. When we're not doing it, then perhaps you're feeling a bit too much of your difficult emotions and that's not very nice. And so we might actually perform compulsions instead because that can kind of make you feel a little bit better. On some level. And of course, the problem is that there is no perfect answer in the past. There is no perfect decision that you can make.

So all you're going to do is you're going to go round in circles, trying to figure it all out, trying to have more certainty about it. And in the process, you're making yourself more anxious and you're bringing yourself out of the present.

And then, of course, you're going to not be able to enjoy what you do have as much as you would like another thing about this trap is when we're ruminating we might get some kind of temporary relief because maybe you figure something out about the past or maybe you arrive at a point where you feel momentarily a bit better.

About it but because you know you've had to kind of perform a compulsion in order to get to that place at some point the doubt is going to creep back in again you're going to think about another angle from that situation or something else is going to pop up about it and it's going to make you want to start ruminating about it again and so you get back into that that cycle and it's never ending potentially we.

Can just go round and round in that the entire day unless we we realize that actually we're the boss we we do get to choose whether we stay in that cycle or not so what are the compulsions that people typically perform with this well the first is mentally reviewing and that is going over the the same old scenario again and again in order to try to have more certainty about it another is asking for reassurance so you might ask your your friends or your family what they think about the choice and

then there's comparing alternate realities actually imagining how life could have been if if you did make that different choice and of course there's also then googling and researching maybe you'll look up stories of people who made similar choices hoping to find some kind of validation the true fears of course that none of these compulsions actually help they only keep you locked in the cycle so how do you break free from this well tip one is to remember that there is no perfect choice

i think this is something that really helped me a lot you know when i was kind of going over these past scenarios all the time i think on some level i believe that that there was some kind of perfect choice out there to be made and perfectionism or maladaptive perfectionism is really often at the heart of OCD.

When you realise that actually there isn't any perfect decision and that in the past you were making a decision based on the information that you had at the time, it's all very well kind of retroactively going back and looking at your decision. Because now you have more information, you have a different perspective. Maybe you would make a different decision now if you made that decision.

But that isn't a helpful way to think about it. The reality is that you were a different person at that time and you made a decision based on the information that you had in that moment.

And that was the decision that you made. you know so really kind of going over it and thinking i should have made a more perfect or a better decision is just a kind of form of torture it's not fair to you you know if we're going to practice self-compassion then you know the most important thing is to realize that you know you you you were doing your best in the past and you made a decision and it's okay if it if it wasn't perfect and who's to say it wasn't perfect

and in fact maybe it was the right decision in that moment you know based on the information that you had in your hands at that time tip two then is to let go of looking for certainty about that decision and you know a big part of the reason for for why people get caught up with this idea of looking for perfection about their past decisions is because they're looking for certainty and i think a big thing that helped me was to realize that actually you know i didn't

make perfect decisions in the past that you know i was doing the best I could but you know there's no such thing as a perfect decision and when you let yourself off the hook like that when you say you know I'm not going to look for certainty about this anymore because what's the point you know it was an imperfect situation and so I'm going to let go of the search for certainty about that well suddenly you start to feel a bit better

because you know you're giving yourself more self-compassion you're letting yourself off the hook when the what if thoughts start annoying you? Instead of, you know, did I make a mistake? Say, ah, my OCD is trying to convince me that I made a mistake. And what this does is it actually creates a bit of distance between you and the thought. So instead of believing it, we see it a bit more for what it is, which is just a trick of the mind.

Tip four is to drop the mental compulsions. Remind yourself that if you keep going into the past and digging around, then you're going to keep on winding yourself up. If instead you can learn to resist the urge to kind of ask the question and try to come back to the present each time that you find yourself, indulging in kind of going into the past, that can really help you to just kind of let go of these things. If you take one thing from today's episode, then let it be this.

The past isn't something that you can fix. It's only something that you can actually make peace with.

Obsessing over past choices is OCD's way of tricking you into believing that certainty about the past is possible. But real freedom comes when you stop searching for the perfect answers and actually you start living in the present today. Many thanks. I really hope that you found that helpful if you have any questions at all about anything I spoke about today and please do subscribe for more podcasts like this.

Just a quick reminder that if you want to get a free session all you need to do to get that is to head over to my website www.robertjamescoaching.com and there you can leave me a message and we can arrange the free session and now just a quick reminder of my disclaimer any information that you view on my website instagram page facebook group or anywhere else online or any information that you listen to on the podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be

a substitute for actual medical or mental health advice from a doctor psychologist or any other medical or mental health professional. Music.