Key points

• Counter cognitive immobility and unlock meaningful personal growth.
• Overcoming mental entrapment in the past can support your goals and enhance your overall well-being.
• Emotional ties to the past can cause mental immobilisation, making it harder to embrace change.

Every new year brings a wave of resolutions, accompanied by countless posts offering tips and strategies to improve our lives. While these can be helpful, we often repeat past mistakes without fully understanding why—or how to overcome them.

I have written that cognitive immobility is a stressful mental entrapment that leads to a conscious or unconscious effort to recreate past incidents in one or more locations that one lived in or visited in the past. By doing so, we are hoping to retrieve what is missing or left behind.

Understanding the psychological barriers to sustaining our goals can provide a clearer perspective on why change is often so challenging—and help us approach our goals with greater clarity, purpose, and resilience.

We may deviate from our resolutions, even those that could greatly enhance our lives, due to what can be described as a persistent reexperiencing and reconstruction of past events or life experiences. Emotional attachments to certain locations or past moments can cause us to mentally revisit the scenes, sounds, smells, and sights associated with them. When we repeatedly relive those past episodes it can lead us to revert to familiar habits, making it difficult to fully embrace new changes.

Another reason could be what we have called mental immobilisation to the past, a characteristic of cognitive immobility. In our recent research paper published in Diaspora Studies, we explored this phenomenon through the lived experiences of individuals who were unable to cognitively move beyond their past.

For instance, we featured the experiences of two Syrian students who fled to Türkiye but struggled to integrate and move forward in their new lives. The students were part of a study conducted by Kaya and Keklik (2022: 7755).

The first student shared that:

I am still in Syria. My soul is there. I always have memories of my dead
cousins. This affects my getting used to here. Those days will never come
back. F7

The second student expressed a similar sentiment:

I left my homeland, my nation, my relatives, everything in Syria. I was physically here but spiritually there. This affected my getting used to here (M4).

For them to live in the present in Turkey, they have to depart cognitively from Syria. They described being “spiritually there,” their “soul is there,” and frequently recalling the sights, scenes, and sounds of their previous lives in Syria. It could be that they are mentally immobilised in Syria. This raises an important question: How can we move forward and sustain our resolutions when faced with such a phenomenon?

Even with serious efforts to adopt and maintain new habits, the persistent reexperiencing and reconstruction of past events can trap us into experiencing mental immobilisation in the past. This entrapment may often lead to relapsing into old behaviours. To sustain our goals, we must counter cognitive immobility by breaking free from the grip of past experiences. (The tips and remedies outlined in related discussions offer helpful strategies, albeit not exhaustively.)

By countering the pull to remain in the past, we can engage more effectively for the year ahead. Beyond this, addressing cognitive immobility has broader benefits, which include enhancing our quality of life.

Take the first step today by countering cognitive immobility and commit to sustaining the changes you seek to remain in the present.