Ayo what up dawg. You got bad memories or experiences? I bet you do, everybody does; but that is no excuse to let those negative emotions that are attached to those moments in your life, hang over you like a guillotine. Instead, what we are going to learn and practice is how to cause a diminution of that negativity that creeps up from your past.

So, it’s a pretty simple process but that doesn’t make it easy. In fact you might even try to fight it the first time.

But here we go:

Step 1. Close your eyes and visualise that moment or experience in your mind that is causing you suffering of some kind, make it as real as possible, almost as if it were happening now.

Step 2. In your mind, put a black border around the image. Almost like how the picture at the movie theatre looks, you know with those black bars above and below.

Step 3. Now, this next part depends on the memory itself. Let’s say it was your parent, partner or boss who was yelling at you for some reason. With your imagination, shift how big their nose is, make it teeny tiny or ridiculously oversized. Then change their voice, make it cartoonishly high pitch or the opposite; or another option could be to have white noise play over the image in your head to block out the person’s voice. Change the colour of the scene in some fashion, like put a purple filter over the image. Now your memory might not involve someone yelling at you, it could just be an embarrassing moment from your life. For instance, I peed my pants on the high ropes at year 5 camp, this moment didn’t involve anyone else so what I did was put white noise over the scene instead. So, depending on your memory, get creative with how you play around with the setting.

Step 4. By this point, your negative experience should look more like a weird and wacky surrealist short film than your actual past. But now it is time to take it to the next level… again. What I want you then to do is, using your mind, push this movie far away from you. Watch as it slowly gets smaller and smaller the more distance is made between you and it. Then once it has become nothing more than a dot on the horizon, let it go blip and disappear.

Step 5. Open your eyes and ask yourself, “Am I going to let that silly movie control how I live my life?” (FYI the answer is no).

Now, like all things, practice makes perfect. But just being aware of this technique is a huge addition to your arsenal against gloom.

Pro tip, just like you can use the movie image trick to push negative memories away, you can also do the opposite. You can bring positive moments closer to you.

Stay safe. Stay strong.