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This part 2 of a two-part post. Click here to read part 1.
Have you ever noticed that you’re caught in a thought loop, ruminating on something you’ve ruminated on a thousand times before? And yet, even knowing that you’re caught, you still can’t get out—you can’t stop thinking the same thoughts? Just because you’re aware that you’re deep down the rabbit hole doesn’t mean that you can pull yourself out.
Our thoughts sound like us, opine like us, suffer like us, and use our memories, past experiences, beliefs, wounds, and everything else we’ve lived to make their points and argue their case. Our thoughts tell us that this time down the rabbit hole, this time running through the same loop, thinking about the same problem, we’ll find the answers, the relief we’re looking for, the peace we long for. Eventually, if we keep looping, we’ll figure out the real problem which will solve all our other problems. Our thoughts tell us that we can’t possibly abandon today’s problem, leave it unresolved and unsolved, because to do that would be to say we’re OK the problem existing, and are giving up on a solution.
So, then, how can you pull yourself out of a negative thought loop once you know you’re hooked? What strategies can you use to unhook and reenter the present moment, to find peace?
The first step, before you do anything else, is to take a beat and offer yourself a dose of compassion for what it feels like to be hooked in this moment, the struggle and suffering that getting tangled up in this sticky thought mess creates—how desperately you don’t want to be stuck here and yet don’t know how to extricate yourself. And indeed, how much you want freedom, and ultimately, peace. Acknowledging your present caught-ness and the suffering of it is the first step in getting free from it.
In psychology, there’s a saying “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” When you’re caught in a negative thought loop, you’re usually trying to work out an old wound, an experience (or set of experiences) from the past that hurt and left you wounded. That said, you can ask yourself: What experience am I reliving here, what deeper wound or core experience has this current problem triggered in me? Do I feel unheard, invalidated, unloved, unimportant, not enough…? And if I were to solve this current problem, figure it out, win the argument in my head, what would I get to feel then, who would I get to be, and what would be resolved at a deeper level?
You can also ask another question: “Have I thought about this problem before, tried to find a solution to this feeling/wound or by ruminating on it? Has the ruminating worked in terms of healing this deeper wound? Has it made me feel more heard, validated, important, enough, or whatever I’m trying to make happen?”
Simultaneously, it’s important to remind yourself that the other person or situation on which you’re ruminating most probably lives in an entirely different reality than the one you’re assuming and creating. Whatever you’re looping about, your whole story of it, the “meaning” you’ve assigned to it—it all exists in only one place: your own mind. You literally think it into existence with your thoughts.
In fact, this whole reality, this bundle of thoughts you think exists in solid form in the world, will go poof, and cease to exist—if you let it.
Remind yourself, too, that no matter what story you’ve constructed about this other person and what they think of you, who you are at the core, who you know yourself to be, remains untouched and unchanged. Your character, your “you-ness,” is not compromised or endangered by what anyone else thinks of you, and certainly not by what you think someone else thinks of you. You don’t need to disprove anyone else’s story, real or imagined, to get to be who you are.
Furthermore, ask yourself: Are you willing to do something different this time around? Are you willing to take a chance and unhook from the thoughts you’ve thought through a thousand times before, no matter how urgent your mind tells you they are, how you can’t possibly leave them behind? Can you, just for a moment, turn your attention away from the problem-at-hand and turn into this present moment? Are you bold enough to take a deep breath right now (or three), and drop out of your head and into the sensations in your body, your ticket to now?
Know, too, that if after a few breaths you still want to go back to your loop, you always can. The thoughts will be there waiting for you, right where you left off; the rabbit hole of thought will always welcome you back, and will always be delighted to get you back. Unhooking from the loop and reentering the present moment, through the breath, is really just an experiment. You’re attempting to find peace through a different route—not through more thinking, but by dropping out of thinking about the problem, and rejoining now, this next breath. As a path to peace, it’s revolutionary and highly counterintuitive, against everything you’ve ever been taught. Nevertheless, you’ve probably already test-driven more thinking as a solution to this problem, and probably know already how that goes. You may have even discovered that thinking more is, paradoxically, the problem rather than the solution. Based on present evidence and lived experience, why not try something new? Nothing ventured nothing gained.
If there’s anything I can offer you as a therapist who has worked with people’s minds for 30 years, and after a lifetime of working with my own mind, it’s this: If you want peace, trying to find it with more thinking is like trying to open a lock with a banana; it’s simply the wrong tool. As Einstein said, You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. One thing we can know with absolute certainty is that if we go down the rabbit hole, we will suffer.
