Does your friend spend a lot of time alone? As someone who struggles with the same thing, I find that being alone a lot of the time makes me reflect on the past a lot and old wounds tend to fester.

Some people are thinkers in that way, and while it can have its upsides, it certainly has downsides. I think spending more time laughing with others, relating to them and having fun is better than thinking all the time. But personally I'm in the process of finding people I can relate to better.

I have anxiety disorder and you have highlighted an insight of mine after examining my condition for a while. The moments that my condition flares up uncontrollably are the moments when I've spent a significant amount of time "thinking". When I spend time with friends I genuinely care about and can relate to, I get so distracted, I almost feel like a normal person.

I've been there. Now that I'm back to normal, I love my thinking time, but during the anxiety times I never wanted to be alone.

Great to hear that you were able to come out on top. I'm taking medication right now, exercising and taking it one step at a time at the moment. I would love to get rid of it entirely but I'm starting to acknowledge that unless there's a revolutionary break through in medical science then I'm stuck with this condition for the rest of my life. Just have to figure out ways to cope.

Maybe, maybe not. Here's the obligatory 'what worked for me'.

I looked at a bundle of research and treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy appeared to have better long-term outcomes and after 10 years or so of depression and several years of anxiety I had never tried it.

So I gave up the 'I'm stuck with this forever' mentality and started retraining my brain to not have the anxiety response. After roughly 6 months of work I was able to shake it and I'm not on SSRI, Benzos or whatever.

IMO anxiety is recursive, having anxiety gives people anxiety and trains you to have an anxiety response (see hebbian learning). Getting out of that loop is a huge deal.

Thanks! Always love hearing stories like these. I definitely do not want to get stuck on medication for the rest of my life and of course having a 'stuck with this forever' mentality is hardly useful.

Indeed, while it has great advantages in various fields like computers and history, not being able to forget your old misdeeds is an unending curse, akin to open wounds that can never close. You have to find ways to make peace with yourself, accept that you are a fallible person (and you gain respect for the doctrine of Original Sin), and it's a strong motivation to improve so you commit less of them.

This sounds like a excellent plot for a movie.

"My name is Earl" has similar premise

I think of it not as good recall but rather a comparatively longer duration of "the present". Which does present (heh) problems because some things are still in the present for me while for most others those things have been consigned to the past.

It is a really interesting way of looking at it.

I don't know if there is any kind of concept like "long present" for people that does have a hard time forgetting things. I will be one of the "short present" guys for whom what happened this morning is a long time ago. :)

My friend is always correcting me when I say, some time ago when he recalls perfectly that it was two days ago. I guess that two days ago is part of his "present" while it is just part of my "past".

At the beginning I was trying to ask him to forget about that issues, that only was making him unhappy. But I was able to see that it was a different way of perceiving things. Do you have found any way of moving things faster to the past? Or you are not able or don't want to do it? It will be also interesting to know how much people can control this. I have seen a lot of techniques to try to remember more, but not so much to try to remember less.