I recommend taking up mindfulness meditation. At the moment you are buying into very unhelpful thought patterns revolving around age regression. It’s totally pointless, it’s doing nothing to improve your life and it’s a waste of time. And when you do it you just feel bad. The simple solution is stop doing it. It’s as simple as that, but not doing it and instead focusing on the present moment and the reality of what ‘is’ ‘now’ is something that requires practice.

All this “could have been” is total rubbish and nonsense. What a total waste of time. In 20 years do you want to look back on when you were 59 and you could have been enjoying your life but instead you were sitting about brooding and worrying about what you didn’t do when you were younger?

Focus on the present and future, they’re the only things you can influence in any way. I’m not saying it’s totally easy to disconnect from all this obsession with the past, but I am saying that if you don’t do it then you’ll regret it. (In fact, you definitely will, cos you’ll still be looking back at the past with sorrow!!!) So WHAT INSTEAD? WELL, when you connect to the present and future and focus on how you can shape them, you become empowered, free and a master of your own destiny. As I say, look at mindfulness meditation for a place to start.

Forget all this past stuff and focus on the now and your next steps in life.

• This reply was modified 10 years ago by Rock Banana.