Sundays come with a little more space, a little more quiet, and a little more room to notice what’s really going on inside us. Maybe that’s why Sundays can be such a good time for reflection.
Life slows down just enough for us to hear our own thoughts moving back and forth through time, between past, present, and future.
I was thinking about that the other day, reflecting on how depression is tied to the past, stress to the present, and anxiety to the future.
There is plenty of research behind this idea.
That depression often grows out of what has already happened. Out of loss, regret, disappointment, and all the things we’re carrying long after the moment has passed. The past may be over, yet it continues to live in us.
Stress feels different. Stress usually comes from what’s right in front of us. The pressure, the deadlines, the noise, the demands, the weight of the present when too much is happening at once.
Anxiety is future-oriented. It lives in what’s next, what if, what could go wrong. It pushes us into tomorrow before tomorrow gets here.
Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is built around a similar idea: that much of human suffering comes from being trapped in mental time, replaying the past or pre-living the future, instead of inhabiting the present moment.
It seems that the mind is rarely content to stay where the body is.
The body is here, in the kitchen, sipping coffee, looking out the window, trying to have a peaceful day. But the mind is somewhere else entirely, replaying something that happened years ago or racing ahead into a future that has not arrived.
It helps to pause once in a while and simply ask: where is my mind spending most of its time right now?