How Historical Hypotheticals Can Destroy Your Future

Anyone who has navigated an illness, chronic condition, burnout, or trauma knows the frustration of vacillating energy levels.

Some days you feel like you can conquer the world: You plow through 10 hours of work in a few hours. Everything is easy. You can push yourself hard and have energy to spare.

Other days, you feel like you’re trying to run through quicksand. It takes 5 hours to do 10 minutes of work. No amount of trying harder helps. Everything feels stuck.

You might have weeks — or even years — when the “running on lead legs” days are the norm, and the high energy days are few and far between.

In other seasons of life, those “bad” days might be sporadic within a sea of good days.

In the depths of chronic illness, fatigue, or pain, you don’t have full capacity for all the things you want to do. As your energy and capacity return, it’s easy to forget about those bad days.

You might find it hard to connect with those moments when you could hardly function.

From the place of higher energy and expanded capacity, you might look back at the past and be filled with regret that you didn’t push harder or do more.

Looking back with a false idealism about what you could have done in the past given the energy levels you feel in the present is a form of historical hypothetical.

This is a cognitive and emotional trap.

It creates shame about not doing more in the past, anchoring you in regret and remorse. That’s a guaranteed way to be unable to move into the future.

The way you feel when your energy returns is not the way you felt when you were struggling to put one foot in front of the other just to move through your day.

If you have a strong inner critic who insists that your capacity in the past was greater than what you believed it to be at the time, and you were just slacking off, tell that inner critic to listen up for this next part.

Yes, it’s true that sometimes our true capacity exceeds what we believe it to be.

Even if your past capacity was greater than what you perceived it to be, it does nothing for you to ruminate over what could have been. You can’t change the past, so it’s pointless to chase an alternate version of it.

The historical hypothetical can’t be proven true.

The most dangerous sentences start with words like