One of the most powerful—and initially unsettling—reframes Scott Adams presents in Reframe Your Brain is deceptively simple: “History is imaginary.” When he shared this concept with his livestream audience, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Countless viewers reported instant relief from past traumas they’d carried for decades.
The reframe sounds absurd at first. Obviously your past happened. Obviously traumatic events were real when they occurred. Obviously your history shaped who you are. Adams isn’t denying any of this. He’s pointing out something far more subtle and liberating: the past exists only as chemical traces and electrical patterns in your brain. It has no physical reality in the present moment. And recognizing this fact can free you from its grip.
This isn’t philosophical wordplay. It’s a practical tool for releasing yourself from the tyranny of events that no longer exist anywhere except in your thoughts.
The Physical Reality of the Past
Adams begins with an observation that’s simultaneously obvious and easy to forget: “History does not exist in any material way. You can’t grab a handful of history. You can’t eat it, punch it, kick it, or photograph it.”
Take a moment to let this sink in. Whatever happened to you—whether traumatic or wonderful—exists now only as patterns in your neural circuitry. The events themselves are gone. They cannot touch you. They cannot harm you. They have no physical presence in reality.
“If your past is causing you anxiety, put the past in its place,” Adams writes. “It doesn’t exist. It never will. It can’t touch you.”
This reframe challenges our intuitive sense that the past has some kind of ongoing reality that constrains the present. We speak as if our history is something we carry, like luggage we can’t set down. Adams invites you to notice that there’s no luggage. There are only thoughts—chemical reactions happening now, triggered by current stimuli, creating the illusion of a past that’s somehow present.
Why This Reframe Works So Quickly
Adams reports that many people experience immediate relief from this reframe, and the psychological mechanism explains why. Much of our suffering from past events comes from treating them as if they’re still happening. We ruminate, replay, and relive traumatic experiences, each repetition strengthening the neural pathways that make the memories more vivid and more painful.
The “history is imaginary” reframe interrupts this cycle. When anxiety about past events arises, you remind yourself: this is a chemical reaction in my brain about something that doesn’t exist. The past isn’t attacking you. You’re attacking yourself with thoughts about something that isn’t there.
Adams emphasizes: “I use this reframe often, and it works instantly for me. It doesn’t last, but it can take you out of your negative loop right away.” The reframe isn’t a permanent cure but a pattern interrupt—a way to break the rumination cycle in the moment.
The beauty is that you can use it repeatedly. Each time your mind drifts to painful history, you invoke the reframe. Each time, it weakens the association between the memory and the emotional reaction. Over time, the past loses its power not because you’ve resolved it but because you’ve stopped feeding it energy.
The Virtual Reality Exercise
For readers who struggle with the abstract concept of “history is imaginary,” Adams offers a more concrete practice: “Observe the objects in your immediate vicinity and imagine them being some sort of computer-generated creation—like a video game or an animated movie—that looks exactly like what you assume is reality.”
This exercise serves multiple purposes. First, it pulls your attention completely into the present moment. You can’t simultaneously imagine your surroundings as virtual while dwelling on past events. Second, it occupies your brain with a challenging cognitive task that crowds out rumination. Third, it creates psychological distance from your experience—you’re observing rather than being consumed.
Adams notes: “It takes a fair amount of mental processing to reimagine your environment as computer generated, and that’s another reason it works. You want your brain distracted with a challenge—otherwise it will drift back to its default loop of negativity.”
The present moment is always benign. It’s thoughts about past or future that create suffering. Any technique that anchors you in now provides relief.
The Causation Problem
One of the most liberating aspects of this reframe involves questioning the causal stories we tell about our past. Most people in therapy or personal development work spend enormous energy identifying which past events caused which current problems. Adams suggests this entire enterprise might be fundamentally misguided.
“As a kid, I had an irrational fear of drowning,” Adams writes. He could have explained it by a specific incident where his father lifted him over a bridge railing to see a passing barge, which young Scott interpreted as an attempt to throw him in the water. “So is that the reason I had an irrational fear of water? Probably not.”
Adams concludes it’s more likely he was traumatized by the event because he already feared drowning. “It’s easy to get the causation backwards.” But here’s the key insight: it doesn’t matter which came first. What matters is whether the causal story serves you.
“Humans can rationalize just about any current bad behavior as caused by past traumas,” Adams writes. “Sometimes we might be right. But in no case does it matter if we’re right. What matters is that if you tether your current problems to the past, you limit your options for dealing with the problem.”
This is revolutionary. The therapeutic industry is built on identifying the root causes of current dysfunction in past events. Adams suggests this approach might actually prevent healing by anchoring you to a narrative that makes change seem difficult or impossible.
Untethering Present from Past
The power move is untethering your present self from your past self entirely. Adams writes: “If you believe your present self is permanently nailed to your past self and you can’t change the past, you’re stuck in a negative mindset for solving your problems. But if you untether your present problems from your past traumas, you can solve them faster and for good.”
This creates a radically different approach to personal issues. Instead of asking “What past event caused this?” you ask “What current pattern is creating this, and how can I change it?”
Someone struggling with trust issues in relationships might trace them to childhood abandonment. The traditional therapeutic approach would involve processing those childhood experiences, understanding their impact, and gradually healing the wound. This can take years.
The Adams approach: “You are a random bundle of loose wires.” Some wires in your brain aren’t connected properly. This might be because of past trauma, genetics, random chance, or any combination. The cause doesn’t matter. What matters is rewiring the connections now.
This shift from understanding the past to reprogramming the present changes the entire trajectory of personal development work.
The “You Were Born Now” Exercise
Adams offers a specific visualization for breaking free from past trauma: “Imagine you were born into the world right now with no history, no childhood, no past. Would the dangling wires in your brain have meaning to you?”
This thought experiment reveals how much power we give to our narratives about the past. If you popped into existence right now with your current brain state but no memory of how you got here, you wouldn’t think “I’m damaged because of what happened to me.” You’d think “I have some challenges to work through as I figure out this existence.”
The memories would still be there—as neural patterns—but without the causal narrative connecting them to your current state, they’d have no more significance than a dream you remembered. Both are just electrical and chemical events in your brain. Both are imaginary from the perspective of right now.
“Your history and the dreams you remember have a lot in common in the sense that neither of them exists in the world of today,” Adams writes. This isn’t denying that your history was once real. It’s recognizing that it isn’t real now, and treating non-existent things as powerful constraints on your life makes no sense.
The Deathbed Reframe
Adams offers another powerful perspective shift: “I won’t care about any of those events on my deathbed.” This reframe pulls you out of the immediate past and locates you at the end of your life, looking back at the whole arc.
From that perspective, most of what troubles you now becomes trivial. The childhood slight, the teenage humiliation, the early career setback—from your deathbed, these are footnotes at most. They’re certainly not worth the mental energy you’re giving them today.
“When you use the deathbed reframe, you see your life as bigger than your current problems,” Adams explains. “That can make the importance of today’s problem shrink, at least in terms of how you process it in your mind.”
This works because it breaks the immediacy of past trauma. When something feels emotionally present, it seems important and consequential. When you view it from the perspective of your entire life arc, its significance often collapses.
The Permission to Release
Sometimes people hold onto past trauma because releasing it feels like betrayal—of yourself, of others who suffered, of the truth of what happened. Adams addresses this directly: “In my capacity as author of this book—which you have enjoyed enough to read this far—I give you permission to release your survivor’s guilt.”
This might seem like empty words, but permission from an authority figure (even a self-appointed one) can be surprisingly powerful. Many people need external validation that it’s okay to stop suffering about past events.
Adams continues: “The function of guilt is to reduce the chances of you making an unwise decision in the future. But if the tragedy dogging you is unlikely to happen again, your guilt serves no biological or social function.”
This reframe transforms guilt from a moral necessity to a biological signal that’s misfiring. You don’t need to feel guilty about survivor’s guilt. You need to recognize that the guilt has served its purpose (if it ever had one) and can now be released.
Finding Now
One of the most elegant formulations Adams shares (attributed to Lao Tzu) is: “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. But if you are at peace, you are in the present.”
The “history is imaginary” reframe is fundamentally about learning to locate yourself in now rather than in memory. This isn’t about denying the past happened. It’s about recognizing that dwelling in past (through depression) or future (through anxiety) removes you from the only moment that actually exists.
“Look at the objects in the room,” Adams instructs. “They exist in your subjective reality. They matter. Now touch your arm or shoulder or chin. You are real, too. Is anyone else in the room? They are also real because they are present. Their history and your history are not in the room.”
This practice grounds you in physical reality right now. What’s actually happening in this moment? Usually, the answer is: nothing terrible. You’re sitting somewhere, reading. You’re breathing. You’re physically safe. The suffering comes from thoughts about non-existent events.
The Unexpected Superpower
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the “history is imaginary” reframe is how it can transform perceived weaknesses into strengths. Adams writes about his own painful childhood: “One of my superpowers is my terrible childhood.”
This sounds paradoxical until you understand what he means. The difficulties he endured made him resilient, determined, and capable of enduring discomfort in pursuit of goals. “Once you REALLY know what a bad day feels like, everything else feels like a walk on the beach.”
This reframe—from “my trauma crippled me” to “my trauma is why I can kick your ass”—doesn’t require you to be grateful for past suffering. It requires you to extract whatever advantages exist from it.
Adams lists possibilities: “You might be more alert to danger, less afraid of embarrassment, wiser, more mature, angrier (in a good way), more determined, more focused, and more willing to take smart risks.” These are competitive advantages in many domains.
The question isn’t “Why did this happen to me?” The question is “What capabilities did this give me that others lack?”
Practical Implementation
For readers wanting to use this reframe to release past trauma, Adams suggests several practices:
Daily Reminder: Each morning, remind yourself that today is the only day that exists. History is a collection of thoughts, nothing more.
Interrupt Rumination: When you catch yourself dwelling on past events, say aloud or mentally: “That doesn’t exist. It can’t hurt me.”
Present-Moment Anchoring: Throughout the day, touch physical objects and notice what’s actually here, now, as opposed to what your mind is generating about the past.
Rewrite the Narrative: Instead of asking what past event caused your current state, ask what current pattern is creating it and how you can change that pattern.
Extract the Gift: Identify what strengths or capabilities emerged from past difficulties. Focus on these rather than the difficulties themselves.
The reframe isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a practice. Each time your mind drifts to painful history, you gently redirect it: that’s not real right now. What’s real is this moment, this breath, this choice I can make now.
Over time, the neural pathways connecting past events to present suffering weaken from lack of reinforcement. The memories remain, but they lose their emotional charge. They become just information—things that happened—rather than active threats to your current wellbeing.
Adams’s promise is simple: “History doesn’t exist in any physical sense. Stop imagining the past controlling you with its invisible hand. Your past is non-existent. History is a dangling artifact of chemical and electrical reactions. Your past was real when it happened, but today it is 100 percent imaginary. Once you internalize that truth, you are free. You control the present.”
This reframe and many others appear in Scott Adams’s “Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success,” a practical guide to reprogramming your mental operating system.