Comparative thought comes in all shapes and sizes... something I allude to in today's video. But let's further explore a couple of issues that arise in the context of these unhelpful mental gymnasics. However, before I say anything else, I need to add a cavaet: bereavement is such an exceptional experience that it stands apart from everything that I am about to say - when one is bereaved one needs to feel loss, to reminisce, to celebrate the now past good times, to work through the experience... whatever that might actually mean for you - there can be no guidelines.

That aside, if you find yourself reliving the past (good or bad), craving better days (past or future), feeling bad about how things are now versus how they were or might be (feeling lonely, guilty, hard done by, victimised)... then you are not just wasting your time, you're throwing this precious moment of your life away... and you cannot get these moments back. If you've lost something - money, a job, a friend or partner (remember the above cavaet, so I'm talking about a break-up) or even think you've lost something (you might recollect the story of my client who had made a killing on the Stock Markets only to discover that, had he waited another few days he would have made a lot more - he turned a huge gain into a psychological loss!) - then what is lost is gone... just like the past. Everything arises and passes.

What matters is now and what you do now. In fact, nothing else matters. Every past moment was a now (now gone) and every future now depends on what you do in this now. Now is all that matters - not now in total isolation (that would be mindlessness rather than mindfulness) but now in the context of your purpose - what you want out of now, out of this week, this month, this quarter, this year, this life of yours. How you turn up to now impacts the next now - ad infinitum. And comparative thinking just screws that up... that's all!

Maybe I've turned into an obsessive people watcher, but I've noticed a particular trend over the last couple of years amongst people who, to quote the old U2 song, appear to be "stuck in a moment and... can't get out of it". They all appear to have something in common - they hark back to a past in which they were at their happiest.

Now, granted, we all, by default, live in our formative past - it's how our autopilot navigates our daily life. But these people are actually frozen in time. I regularly meet a friend that I've known since the 1960s. Everytime we meet, the conversation turns to the music of the late 1970s, early 80s... a time when, I know, he was at his happiest. Similarly, a close acquaintance constantly talks about holidays in the West of Ireland when he was eight or nine years old and, what's more, constantly tries to recreate that experience... without much success - time marches inexorably forward.

Again, I've noticed that - all too often in business - people rail against the current situation, saying "This is how we used to do it in XYZ Ltd." or, roughly translated, this is how I did it at the pinnacle of my career.

It's a disturbing phenomenon - a constant exercise in comparative thought - and, to my knowledge, there's no research into it at all. I can understand the complexity of doing such research: where would you find enough participants who would (a) admit to be stuck in a time-warp and (b) having admitted that be able to partake in research without knowing that was what the research was about!