I have a confusing question to ask: So several times on this app people have told others to focus on the present and not the past or future or be worried about those two things, which is very good. I'm glad people are helping with those answers in mind. But, what do they really mean by this when said? Does it mean that the present is what's making the future to begin with and the past doesn't matter because it's the past? What if the past comes back into the present and ruins my future? What if there is no future to begin with? Depending on my mood, I have thoughts about the past and future and they seem negative and I use my phone as a compulsion to distract myself from it but am I doing everything right? I keep thinking of the mistakes that had happened months ago and I keep thinking that I deserve to be locked behind a cell for these things or that I'll be beaten to death by groups of people. These specific thoughts keep reoccurring and I want them to go away. I'm worried that they're true.

Well, it’s just true that the past has already occurred and the future is uncertain. You can have projections, guesses, predictions, etc about what the future might entail based on the past, but you can’t ever truly know. The past is inalterable. You can glean lessons from it, and certainly hope to grow in ways you desire, but conjuring it repreadedly to lament what you “didn’t do right” isn’t actually accomplishing anything. How is reliving it mentally correcting it? How is being afraid of the consequences of actions in the past you can’t alter preventing your feared outcome from happening? The present is *all* there is, always. It can never be different than that. Often, our attention is carried away by thoughts and the random chains of associations it can conjure. Sometimes it contains practical or useful information we can use, but often it doesn’t. You can’t change that a thought pops in your head, but you can pull back from it and take a greater perspective. Think of a painting, and imagine that you’re standing so close to it that your nose is touching it. What do you see? Probably a blurry mess of random colors. But what happens when you stand back 30 feet and look at it? Suddenly you see a full painting and what the image actually is. Did the painting change? No. Just how you’re looking at it. The same is possible with your thoughts.

I would recommend watching eckhart tolle on YouTube talk about “the power of now”. It’s very useful.