Cognitive immobility, the feeling of being stuck in the past, is a sensation that many individuals have experienced but that had never been conceptualised before publication of this study in Culture & Psychology and this article in The Conversation. Now that we have a word for the phenomenon, the next step is to figure out how to alleviate it, something that is now underway.

Cognitive immobility is classified into three levels: awareness/separation, retrieval and stabilisation. In my research paper, I viewed cognitive immobility from transnational perspectives, examining the experiences of someone who has moved from one place to another, but the phenomenon relates to many aspects of life experiences, such as broken relationships, dementia, abandonment by friends/family and bereavement. It could be related to many other events in a person’s life, such as cultural traditions, abuse, trauma, the losing a home, and integrating into a new culture, among others.

Cognitive immobility is a stressful sense of mental entrapment in a place or multiple places, which results in a conscious or unconscious effort to recreate memories of people, places, events, cultures and things that someone encountered in a place they lived or visited in the past. It boils down to being stuck, and efforts to become unstuck could include reconstructive memories and physical mobility, among others.

Continually remembering past episodes, favourable or unpleasant, can lead to cognitive immobility. For some people, recreating pleasant memories is a defence mechanism or solace, and a way of coping with current circumstances, which may not be as nice as the previous ones. Doing this at the initial stage of change could seem helpful, but it may create a situation which causes that person to become entrapped in the past, thereby causing cognitive immobility to creep in. Recreating unhappy memories might induce negative feelings and could similarly entrap a person.

The first stage of immobility outlined in the research piece is that of awareness/separation. During this phase, people are initially bewildered by their experiences of being cognitively entrapped elsewhere. This is the stage of uncertainty and confusion when someone discovers that they cannot stop thinking about or longing for life experiences or places they have left behind. This feeling could emanate from pleasant or unpleasant memories of people, places, things, cultures and events. At this stage, a person who has left a relationship or marriage would become aware of the feelings of loss and other emotional stress that comes from this awareness. A typical response is to justify or reproach their actions and decisions, and to want to be left alone.

The second stage is retrieval. This is when someone seeks to recover and revisit the locations where they believe they may have lost something. During this stage, individuals attempt to resolve the issue of being entrapped in a location or life experience by making efforts to retrieve the lost item, person or home. If they cannot do so by physically travelling there or in person, they mentally re-experience the incidents by recognising and recreating memories, a process which can cause discomfort. When the unconscious remembering sets in, the mental journey becomes stressful. If assistance is not sought and provided, these conditions could lead to anger, despair, a sense of loss, depression and even psychosis in the affected individual.

The last stage is stabilisation: rather than seeking to re-experience (which could happen at times) or reclaim the lost or left-behind items, people tend to aim to retain values and pursue goals to help them with the loss, alleviating the sense of entrapment. This is the preferred stage for those who experience cognitive immobility.