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Cognitive Immobility – Getting Trapped in the Past
By Joanne Toller Change is hard. We sometimes long for the feelings of memories, safety, or belonging experienced in another place or time in our lives. This connection to the past can cause cognitive immobility, a stressful mental entrapment that leads to conscious or unconscious
Feeling stuck in the past? Experts are starting to explore how this mindset could affect your health.
By Emily Swaim Have you ever felt as though your body and your mind were divided between two different places? Perhaps you keep turning the wrong way toward the grocery store, because in your old town the shop was on the left instead of the
Supporting refugees by addressing cognitive immobility
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
Stuck in the Past: The Awareness
At feasts, remember that you are entertaining two guests, body and soul. What you give to the body, you presently lose; what you give to the soul, you keep for ever. Epictetus
‘Cognitive immobility’ – when you’re mentally trapped in a place from your past
If you have moved from one country to another, you may have left something behind – be it a relationship, a home, a feeling of safety or a sense of belonging. Because of this, you will continually reconstruct mental simulations of scenes, smells, sounds and
About Ezenwa Olumba
I’m a doctoral researcher who researches and writes about issues at the intersection of memory, migration, and politics. I’m particularly interested in how violence, culture, atrocities on people and other life experiences influence people’s emotions, collective actions, (im)mobility aspirations, and identities. My outstanding research on ‘Cognitive Immobility’ has been well received, and the blog post emanating from it has been read by over 500k people worldwide and translated into other languages. I have published a research article on conflicts and blog posts on drones, eco-violence, and relief funding.