Seriously, I could be taking a leisurely walk or brushing my teeth, and bam, an awkward memory from 2014 comes rushing back to haunt me like it was yesterday š©
Why does our brain do this? Is it normal, or is there an explanation behind this weird reflex?
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This is normal. We have evolved a system in your brains allows us to learn from our mistakes and avoid danger. The hard part is that evolution tuned it to be sensitive enough to detect dangers in the wild that we generally no longer need to worry about. Never do I worry I am going to be eaten by a lion, but that is one of the reasons this mechanism exists.
This is still a useful trait in modern times, but it can also lead to what you describe. That being, reliving a past time you were flooded with stress hormones. If this becomes a problem, seek a professional, without shame. I am just a weirdo on the internet, so a professional is going to be better equipped to help if you need it.
It’s actually your younger self from another universe going through that very action, and it sync up with all the other older versions of yourself, making all of you universally cringe at the same time.
Ya. Thank you.
(Not a professional opinion)
if there is a purpose behind it, its probably the brain’s way of “preventing” it from happening again.
humans are inherently social, as relying on each other was necessary for our survival years ago. shame and guilt exist to deter us from behaviours that may result in us being disliked or excluded from others. so our brain replays cringy memories as a way of reminding us “don’t say this” or “don’t do that”.
Iāve been living with the same thing pretty much all my life, I donāt exactly remember when it started. Itās annoying af.
I donāt think itās normal, others I know do not have this experience nor ruminate over it for hours/days/weeks afterwards.
I do think it has a link to shame/guilt/trauma and Iāve been working on that for a while & can say the number of times it happens has decreased but it still happens.
A lot of the times for me itās at night when Iām trying to go to sleep but it does happen during the day as well.
Itās definitely a base function of our evolution but imo those who endured trauma, their brains become āwiredā differently to those who have not.
Edit – to expand on last paragraph, our brains response to base emotions is different/heightened and reactions/responses tend to either extreme (eg very emotional or shutdown) rather than a more balanced response from non trauma brain.
We’re social animals. Our survival has always depended on being part of a group. If you got rejected by your tribe, you were alone, exposed, and probably dead soon after. So our brains treat rejection as a real threat. When we mess up, break a rule, or let people down, we feel shame because deep down it signals that we might lose our place in the group. And that used to mean our life was in danger. Your body remembers that kind of threat for decades.
Your brain flags emotional memories to learn from – random triggers just hit “replay” unexpectedly. Totally normal!
I mean, that’s kinda how all memories work. Good ones and shitty ones. You just made this revelation because those memories are so jarring and less fun.
I’d you ain’t cringing, you ain’t growing.
It exists in your subconscious mind which still affects you to this day, you just arenāt aware of itās presence. Everyone experiences this. Every moment in our life snowballs and creates who we are. But..who we really are depends on how we treat ourselves, our values, and how we treat other people.
It is a gift to become aware of how much useless chatter your brain generates and to let negative thoughts pass by without engaging with them if they aren’t useful to you in the moment.
It can be life changing.
It’s you’re monkey brain trying to protect you from danger. The issue caused a negative response so your brain said “let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Its the same reason uncanny valley is a thing. Your brain saying that human doesn’t look quite human better stay away which protects you from an individual that may have a disease or parasite, or may be a corpse, or from a divergent evolution of humanoid that could mean you harm.
You mind doesn’t have a real concept of linear time.
Yesterday i had a visceral reaction to a memory thats over 30 years old. If it goes away, it doesnt happen fast.
Thank you for reminding me of that time I sat next to a girl in an otherwise completely empty train carriage because my ticket told me that I needed to sit there. I’ve only been cringing at that for about twenty years.
I still occasionally flash back to a single specific instance of interrupting two people talking in the break room at a job from literally 20 years ago.
Brains are weird.
Ugh yes, those random shame flashbacks, like your brain has a cringe playlist on shuffle š©
It gets better as you get older and forget more, thank God š¬
You recognized a pattern, and your brain freaked put and tried to remind you of the last time it saw this pattern. I wonder if you did something different that day while washing up, and the next time you do the same thing your brain will freak out because it knows what happened last time
That’s trauma my friend. It may not seem important now, but for some reason your brain wasn’t able to process that event when you were 14, and it stuffed it away. It’s a primary sign of PTSD. That being said, you’d need a doctor to go through everything with you, but yeah, that’s trauma.
Whenever it happens to me I try to go through the entire event in my head and find out why it bothers me. If the reasons it bothers me are because I was a teenage kid who got embarrassed then I can tell myself it’s ok to let it go. I try to work through the memory and let my younger self off the hook for holding in to it for so long.
It’s a skill you can develop. You should think about a trauma therapy session or two, just to see if you may need help with processing all that stuff you carry around.
Just a thought. š
I quit my job 2 years ago basically out of shameā¦ I just didnāt do my job very well and I think about that time of my life every day and beat myself up on why I just canāt get over it.
āMe that one time I called my teacher momā
My regrets (2 in the forefront) are something I think of daily. I started back at church for a while, hoping that would help. I canāt forgive myself.
Because you never learned the lesson and you still are bent on blaming and punishing yourself for things out of your control or that others dude to you yet you don’t have the balls to face them.
I have a theory (I’m just a self-led student of psychology with no qualifications) that we tend to have those memories pop up during times we feel calm or safe because we are trying to process them. Maybe at the time we were too upset at having just experienced the shame and embarrassment to do more than put the memory aside for later. Then a calm moment comes and we feel safe enough to re-experience those emotions and try to process all the details of how we want to feel about and respond to them.
Lately a thing I do is visualize myself facing down a sort of abstract, shadowy thing representing all that shame. I stand my ground, make eye contact, and start a conversation with it. Usually it explains how ashamed and stupid we feel, how badly it hurts, and how badly it wants to protect us from these things. The shadow doesn’t want me to process the memory because it’s afraid it will hurt, but it can’t help continuously popping up anyway. It can’t go away, it can only hide around my mind until I accidentally trip over it. I know that even though it seems like it’s trying to scare me away with these intense feelings, it’s really just an emotion reaching out to my conscious self for help. My conscious self is the “adult” in my brain, and it’s his job to manage the shadows and help them become healthy. He is the one who can think objectively and make choices not based on immediate emotional reactions. The shadow can’t do that, it needs my help.
When I calm the thing down a little by showing that I won’t fight, judge, or avoid the thought, I create a back-and-forth in my mind where I act like I’m talking to a friend, and I try my best to reassure the shadow that we can handle this. Often it takes multiple repeated conversations, but at some point I usually notice that my shameful memory begins to lose its intensity in my mind. Very slowly, it goes from something that makes me physically cringe from shame to a neutral memory of just…a thing that happened, not much different than my memory of standing at the bus stop yesterday. Sometimes this takes a couple days, and for really intense stuff it can take months. It does work for me though, whenever I have the wherewithal to get into that healthier mindset and try.
I relate to this. The memories that creep back seemingly out of nowhere are crushing.
Probably some evolutionary survival instinct gone rogue; āremember this shame so you never do it again,ā like bro, chill, it was a middle school talent show, not war crimes.
Bro i feel u… humiliations are the worst fear of human beings…these memories though embarrassing, are still a part of you..you cant escape them unless u weren’t affected by it..in some or the other way its our subconscious’ way of reminding us that we are alive and are getting affected..if you wont remember any humiliation, you wont feel as alive a u probably would be feeling now. Dont let these memories haunt you..embrace them and laugh it away…!!
When Iām driving in my car it happens the most. Then to anyone looking at me, I would appear as a twitchy gremlin as I hunch over and hiss āCringe!ā To myself.
Oh man, I feel you on this one. Itās like youāre just chilling, minding your own business,maybe brushing your teeth or walking outsidecand then BAM, out of nowhere, you’re suddenly reliving the most awkward, cringeworthy moment from 2014. Why does our brain do this??
Hereās the deal, itās totally normal, though super annoying. Our brains are wired to hold onto memories tied to strong emotions like humiliation or shame because these emotions are linked to our social survival instincts. Basically, your brain is like, āOof, that felt bad. Letās make sure you never do that again!ā So it stores those awkward moments a little too vividly. Thanks, brain.
But why do they resurface randomly? Itās because our brain isnāt always good at telling the difference between past and present. So, any little thing that remotely resembles the event maybe the sound of a certain song or a situation that feels similarcan trigger the memory. Itās like a random mental pop quiz of embarrassment.
The good news? This is actually your brainās way of helping you avoid embarrassing situations in the future, but also… itās just really bad timing sometimes. Eventually, those memories lose their power, and theyāll pop up less often as time goes on. In the meantime, just know youāre not alone. Literally everyone has that one embarrassing thing theyāll never quite escape from. Welcome to the club, my friend..
Memories of shame resurface because emotionally intense events leave strong neural imprints. When a similar emotional state, context, or memory is encountered, the brain may involuntarily recall that memory. You could colloquially call this a low-level trauma response, in that’s its similar to how something like PTSD works but at a much, much smaller level. Often itās a function of how our brain prioritises emotionally charged events for survival relevance.
These memory pathways can be modified through conscious reflection, behavioural techniques, or with help from therapies like CBT or EMDR. Over time, this reduces the emotional intensity of recalled events and helps with regulation.
What I found interesting is realising that the things that tend to pop up into my head like that can point me towards deep-seated issues, or things I should work on. Like, if all those memory spasms are to do with shame or inadequacy, I can use it to investigate and hopefully fix low self-esteem at the root.
It’s because the emotions were suppressed at that time. That’s why now if you feel like crying or weeping, you should let it out, let yourself emote, it’s OK. Afterwards you won’t feel nothing.
It’s because your subconscious is consumed with loathing and envy against “you” (the conscious mind), and tries its best to make you miserable whenever it possibly can.
It’s a warning from your brain not to fuck up again. Sometimes the brain overdoes it and it’s a problem.