Psychological research helps to explain why certain awkward memories feel mentally “sticky.” Here’s how you can weaken their grip on your mind.
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You probably can’t remember what you had for dinner four nights ago. But you likely can remember, in excruciating detail, the exact moment you said something painfully awkward in high school. You remember the tone of your voice, the expression on the other person’s face, the heat rushing to your cheeks. Maybe it happened ten years ago. Maybe twenty. Yet somehow, your brain has preserved the embarrassing moment in amber.
Most people know the experience of lying awake at night while their mind compulsively replays their old mistakes, awkward conversations or humiliating moments. Ironically, these are often memories that no one else remembers, that barely registered to anyone else involved. Yet to you, they feel emotionally alive, almost recent.
Being told that this tendency is “normal” is rarely any consolation, but it’s true. Still, psychologists have spent decades trying to understand why the mind clings so tightly to painful social memories. And ultimately, what we know now is that these mental spirals are not random acts of self-torment. They emerge from a very specific psychological process — one that can, fortunately, be interrupted.
Psychologists use the term “perseverative thinking” to describe repetitive, difficult-to-control thought patterns that circle around distressing topics. This includes rumination about the past (e.g., “Why did I say that?”), worry about the future (e.g., “What if I embarrass myself again?”) and repetitive self-evaluation.
Importantly, perseverative thinking is not the same thing as ordinary reflection. Healthily reflecting on a difficult experience is an essential part of learning, adapting and making sense of your life. Perseverative thinking, however, will trap you in a loop that feels mentally active, but without ever actually leading you anywhere productive.
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In a 2025 review published in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, neuroscientists argue that this process arises from dysfunctional interactions among several psychological systems that are involved in self-regulation.
The authors explain that the human mind naturally spends a remarkable amount of time detached from immediate reality. Even while we’re walking, showering or sitting at work, we mentally revisit the past, imagine hypothetical futures, replay conversations or invent entirely fictional scenarios. In many ways, this ability is psychologically useful, as it helps us to plan ahead, solve problems and build coherent identities. However, this becomes problematic when the mind starts treating distressing thoughts as unresolved threats that require constant monitoring.
According to the review, perseverative thinking is partly driven by what researchers call “discrepancy monitoring”: the brain’s tendency to continuously compare reality against how it thinks things “should” have gone. This is what makes embarrassing memories so especially sticky, because the brain keeps flagging it as unfinished business. The social mistake feels unresolved, so the mind repeatedly drags it back into awareness in an attempt to process or fix it retroactively.
Ironically, this repeated mental rehearsal often strengthens the memory instead of resolving it. The researchers note that perseverative thinking can gradually distort how people mentally represent themselves and the world around them. If a certain negative memories is repeatedly retrieved, it becomes easier to access over time. In turn, this makes social threats feel more common, more important and more predictive of future rejection than what they actually are in reality.
So, the more that your mind rehearses humiliation, the more psychologically “available” humiliation becomes to your mind.
(Wondering whether your late-night overthinking is occasional or part of a stronger perseverative thinking pattern? Keep reading to the end to find out how you can measure your own perseverative thinking patterns using a psychology-backed questionnaire.)
You’ve probably learned firsthand that not all memories replay equally. The moments most likely to intrude are usually the ones tied to shame, embarrassment or perceived social failure. This is why we rarely lose sleep replaying mildly inconvenient or neutral memories, but frequently obsess over the times that we made a fool of ourselves publicly or misread a social cue.
In her 2024 novel Awkwardness: A Theory, philosopher Alexandra Plakias argues that the intense “cringe” people feel when revisiting old awkward moments isn’t actually caused by awkwardness of the moment itself. Rather, it stems from retrospective feelings of shame and embarrassment.
Although the original awkward moment may have passed in seconds, the memory lingers because it becomes psychologically tied to your identity. This is why recalling the moment feels as though confronting hard evidence of your inadequacy as a person, rather than what it actually is: simply remembering something unfortunate that happened.
This is partly due to how shame functions in the human psyche. Unlike emotions such as fear or surprise, shame is a social emotion; it is fundamentally relational. It has played an invaluable role in human evolution by guiding us in while navigating social belonging, status and group acceptance.
This is why some psychologists describe shame as a form of “social pain.” In the same way that physical pain alerts your body to an injury, shame alerts your mind to potential social injury, such as rejection, exclusion or damage to reputation.
The unfortunate aspect of this process is that the brain doesn’t need an audience to recreate the horrific feeling of embarrassment. Even if you’re lying alone in bed at night, you’d still be able to mentally reconstruct the social context of the embarrassing memory so vividly that the emotional response resurfaces perfectly intact.
That’s precisely why awkward interactions from years ago can still provoke a visceral reaction today. Your body responds not just to the memory itself, but to what your brain thinks that memory symbolizes about your social identity.
The encouraging news is that psychologists have also identified mechanisms that can weaken unwanted mental loops. In a 2012 study published in Neuron, researchers found that people can intentionally reduce the accessibility of their most unwanted memories using two distinct psychological strategies.
Using fMRI scans, the authors of the study identified separate neural systems that are involved in the suppression or redirection of intrusive memories. Their findings suggest that forgetting isn’t always a passive process that we have no control over. In actuality, we can purposefully influence which of our memories deserve mental airtime.
The first strategy is called “direct suppression,” which involves interrupting the memory before it fully unfolds. In practice, this means noticing the moment that your brain begins replaying an embarrassing scene and deliberately refusing to elaborate on it further. Instead of mentally replaying the conversation frame by frame, you cut the process short.
For instance, imagine that you’ve suddenly remembered a humiliating moment from your distant past. Rather than mentally revisiting every detail, you immediately redirect your attention toward something external and concrete. You focus on the sensation of your feet against the floor, the feeling of your breathing or the sounds in the room around you.
The goal is not denial or emotional repression. It is preventing the memory from snowballing into a full cognitive spiral. The researchers found that repeatedly interrupting retrieval can gradually reduce how accessible the memory becomes over time, meaning that the brain effectively becomes less practiced at retrieving it in vivid detail.
The second strategy is “thought substitution,” and it takes the complete opposite approach. Instead of blocking the unwanted memory, this strategy involves replacing it with another mentally engaging image or memory.
Because your attention has limited capacity, a vivid substitute can be enough to crowd out the intrusive thought before it’s fully realized. This works best when the substitute memory is emotionally compelling and easy to visualize. For some people, that might be a funny memory with a close friend or partner. For others, it could be a calming nature scene, a meaningful achievement or a cherished travel memory.
The key is having the memory prepared. Trying to spontaneously come up with a replacement thought in the middle of a rumination spiral is more difficult than you’d imagine. As such, it can help to have a few “go-to” mental substitutes already chosen ahead of time. This reduces the amount of rehearsal that the unwanted memory receives, which weakens its grip on your attention.
None of this means people can permanently erase embarrassing memories. Human memory just doesn’t work like that; it’s not like deleting files from a hard drive. That said, research increasingly suggests that we’re not as powerless against our repetitive thought loops as we might think.
If you find yourself constantly replaying embarrassing conversations, mistakes or humiliating memories long after they should have faded, my Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire can offer insight into your repetitive thinking patterns.
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