Free Thought Series: The Time Traveling Brain

I've recently started watching the Netflix documentary show called The Mind, Explained and I was intrigued by the premise of the show. Episode after episode, Emma Stone guided us on a tour of the mind and I appreciated the show's easily digestible approach to neuroscience. My favorite episode out of all five in total was the one on mindfulness. The show used the metaphor of our brains' time traveling between the past and the future with our thoughts and showing how mindfulness is the practice of training the mind to strengthen awareness and attention to the present.  

After the episode ended the only thought in my mind was how brilliant the time travel metaphor was. I wanted to expand on the concept of our time traveling minds because our realities all boil down to perspective. I couldn't tell you throughout the years how many times I've woken up around an hour before my alarm goes off and when I try to close my eyes to rest for that bonus that the hour either feels as if it had tripled in duration, or my alarm seems to have gone off right has my head re-hit the pillow. Objectively the same amount of time would have past in either scenario, but my perception views it as a lap in time. The same concept applies when I'm at work. In the middle of the day during our slow period an hour can feel like an eternity, well at the end of my day when I'm finishing up emails or straightening up the office an hour will simply fly by before I even realized what happened. Time is only as strong as how we feel it is based on our perception of it.

I see a majority of people spending an unnecessary amount of mental energy focusing on things in the past they'll never be able to change, while equally worrying about all possibilities of potential future outcomes and mindfulness helps us focus on the present. However, my practice of mindfulness isn't rooted in meditation as it traditionally is, but more with self-conversation using thought to check in on my present-self to pull my time traveling brain back to the present. Although regretting our past and being worrisome of our futures is completely normal, it's still important to acknowledge how some of us may spend too much time, time-traveling and I believe there is a strong benefit with working to keep yourself in the present to break the stress, worries, and anxieties caused by our own internal narratives or am I the only one?