Have you ever noticed how frequently your mind returns to problems and situations that cause you pain, and insists on rehashing what’s wrong? It’s a strange phenomenon really, our addiction to thinking about problems. Even when we don’t want to think about what’s bothering us, still, we keep thinking about it. Why do we do this, and how can we break this thinking addiction?

We return to painful situations because, at the root, we believe that more thinking (about our problem), will fix it. We imagine that every problem can be figured out with more thinking. We are conditioned from the time we’re born to trust that thinking is the solution to everything that ails us. And so, painful though it may be, we keep thinking over the same issues, believing that we can think up a way to make the problem not a problem. Ultimately, we are trying to make ourselves feel better, but the solution we have come up with — more thinking — actually makes us feel worse.

Simultaneously, we keep rehashing our problems because it feels like thinking about the situation is a way of empathizing with our pain. Going over the difficulty again and again is our attempt to offer ourselves compassion. We keep repeating (to ourselves), can you believe this, how could they do this, isn’t this crazy; we do this so that we can feel heard and known, even if it’s just inside our own head.

Furthermore, we keep returning to what hurts because if we let it go, stop thinking about it, then it’s as if we will be dis-honoring how much it hurts. To stop thinking about our problems would be (we imagine) to behave as if our pain doesn’t matter. In essence, to abandon ourselves. In this way, our obsessive thinking is an attempt to award our suffering with importance and care.

Finally, we are addicted to thinking about our problems because we are identified with our suffering. Who we are (or think we are) is a tapestry of what we’ve lived through, endured, and survived. We derive our identity, in large part, from what we suffer. That said, when we dive into what’s bothering us, what’s not okay, it feels like we’re coming home, returning to some fundamental aspect of ourselves. Rehashing our difficulties allows us to feel alive. We can feel our own existence, our self, when the mind is gnawing on a problem. There’s nothing in fact that makes us feel more here than when we have a problem to figure out.

How to Let Go of Thoughts on Repeat

So, with all these reasons to keep thinking about our problems, how then can we stop and unstick from these stickiest of all thoughts?

The first step in any change process is always the same: awareness. We can’t change anything if we’re not aware of it. So, we have to notice how and when we are yet again rehashing a problem or difficult situation. We have to become a witness to our own mind and see how it keeps drawing our attention back down the rabbit hole—into suffering.

Once we become aware, we must be able to be willing to consider the idea that we, as we are, cannot figure out this problem. And therefore, we have to give up the fantasy and delusion that more thinking about it will solve it and make us feel better. We have to accept that there is no diamond at the bottom of this rubble of thought, no magic bullet in this latest round of thinking that wasn’t there in the last nine thousand rounds. In essence, we have to give up the hope that more thinking will deliver us to peace. And instead, open to the possibility that the way to peace may well be in turning away from the problem and thinking less. Surrendering to not being able to figure it out rather than trying harder to figure it out, may indeed be our refuge.

Furthermore, in order to stop the constant ruminating on our pain, we need to remember that our pain comes with us, whether we are thinking about it or not. What we’ve suffered is woven into who we are; it’s part of us. We don’t need to keep thinking about our pain in order to make it matter, take care of it, or keep it with us. We don’t have to keep thinking our pain into existence in order for it to exist.

Just for today, try noticing your own thoughts, where your attention is going, and what tapes are playing in your mind. Become aware of when you are returning, yet again, to a problem you’ve visited many times before. Try noticing what returning to this problem does to your mood and how it makes you feel.

Consider this: Maybe you cannot figure out this problem, not in the way you normally try, not with more thinking about it. As an exercise, contemplate the possibility that the way to peace and feeling better might be something ultra-radical, like not thinking about it, like turning away from the problem and leaving it there—unfixed and un-figured-out. As crazy as that might sound, try out the reality that you simply cannot figure out this problem, not with what you know and who you are right now.

Just for today, instead of moving into the problem yet again, searching for that diamond in the rubble, do something revolutionary: Turn your attention away from the problem and back to your present moment. Opt out of what’s wrong and move toward what’s here now. With the simple intention to not do what you’ve always done, and therefore, not end up with the same result you’ve always ended up with, try out the reality that you simply cannot figure this out, that you have to leave it undone. So too, know that you will not find peace through more thinking. If you’re looking for peace, be willing to try a different route.

The post Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About the Same Problems appeared first on Nancy Colier.

We return to our suffering, because fundamentally we’re trying to make the negative experience come out a different way. Our mental replays are attempts to re-script what we don’t want into a new reality. If we can just understand our pain more clearly, spend more time with it, we’ll be able to figure it out—in other words, make it go away. If we can know the cause, who’s to blame and what needs to be done about it, we’ll be okay.

We hold on to our pain, paradoxically, in an effort to figure out how to let it go.

With pain, or any sort of negative experience, comes a host of uncomfortable feelings. In response to the feelings we don’t want to feel, our mind takes control and steers us in a more familiar direction. Over and over again, the mind restructures and reframes the contents of our pain in an effort to avoid directly feeling it. The mind will always choose thinking about pain over experiencing it directly.

So, too, we counterintuitively cling to suffering as a way of taking care of ourselves. Continually thinking about what hurts helps us feel that our pain matters, that it didn’t happen for no reason, and that it won’t be forgotten. Our ruminations award our suffering importance and value, which it doesn’t always receive from those it wants it from. To stop revisiting our pain can feel like abandoning it, moving on before it’s been truly heard or taken care of.

Pain is also profoundly intertwined with our sense of identity. We remind ourselves of our pain as a way of keeping alive our personal narrative, our story of me, what’s happened to me, and my life. We’re deeply attached to our stories of suffering; you could say we love our pain. As a result, we’re reluctant to let it go, to stop bringing it back into the present moment, even when it’s no longer useful or active. To do so would be to lose touch with who we believe we fundamentally are, what makes us us.

If we didn’t keep reminding ourselves of our story, we might forget who we are in our minds, and then what? Who would we be, and what would life look like if we didn’t relate from an already formed idea of who we are?

At an existential level, returning to our suffering allows us to feel a primal sense of I-ness, to feel that we exist. We experience ourselves as a distinct self when we’re thinking about a problem. With a problem in its craw, the mind can feel alive and working, and because we imagine ourselves to be synonymous with mind, our sense of self is also alive and strong in this process. It is actually through the process of thinking that we create a sense of self; we literally think ourselves into existence.

To give up ruminating over problems feels threatening at a primal level. How would we know that we were here if we didn’t keep engaging the mind in problems, the very activity that allows the mind to feel itself? How would we know who we are if not through the mind by which we know ourselves to be? What would happen if we stopped remembering and reestablishing who we are all the time? Without an agenda of what needs to be fixed, we literally lose our separateness from life.

Our addiction to suffering is at some level driven by a desire to feel better. But regardless, the result is that it makes us feel worse and causes us to suffer more than we actually need to. What can be done, then, to break this addiction to pain?

Solutions

1. Develop awareness. The key to breaking any habit is awareness. Start noticing those moments when you’re actively choosing to revisit your pain, to literally direct your attention back to what could bother you. Become conscious of your tendency to insert moments of peace with morsels of suffering. Notice that you are doing this to yourself.

2. Acknowledge that you’re caught. When you notice that you’re down the rabbit hole in your story of suffering, velcro-ed to it, take a moment and acknowledge that you’re there, that you’re caught. Say it out loud: “Wow, I’m really caught”; “I’m really doing this to myself right now”; or whatever words fit. Stop for a moment, and with kindness, be with yourself exactly where you are, acknowledge the truth of feeling powerless or stuck inside your pain story.

3. Inquire. Ask your mind (without judgment) what it’s hoping to accomplish in luring your attention back to your suffering. Is it to figure out your problem, make it come out a different way, make your pain feel heard? Do you need to remember the pain to protect yourself from it happening again? Is it scary to just feel good? Does remembering your problem ground you?

Get curious about your mind’s intentions: Does the rehashing and ruminating lead you to peace? Does it make you feel better? Eventually, you will discover that trying to get to peace with the mind is like trying to open a lock with a banana; it’s simply the wrong tool. The next time you return to the scene of your pain, you can remind yourself that more thinking doesn’t actually work, and you will know this from your own experience, your own inquiry. Failure is a great teacher here.

4. Shift your focus from thinking about the problem to actually feeling it. Sense where and how in your body, in what sensations you are experiencing this pain story. You can place your hand on your heart as you do this and offer yourself some sweet words, perhaps even a prayer of healing for this suffering. Unhook from your head story and drop into a body-felt experience.

5. Say “no” or “stop” out loud. We can learn to say “no” to our mind’s inclinations, just as we say no to a child who’s doing something that will harm her. Sometimes a wiser and more evolved part of us has to step in and put a stop to the harmful behavior the mind is engaged in. Say “no” or “stop” out loud, so you can hear and experience it directly through your senses, rather than as just another thought inside the negative-addicted mind.

6. Ask yourself, what’s at risk if you let go of your pain? Investigate what feels dangerous about living without reminding yourself of what’s happened to you and what’s still wrong. Make the active choice to not fill your now with the past. Be bold: Create a new identity that’s not pieced together from your personal narrative, but always fresh and endlessly changing.

In the process, you will discover that you can be entirely well and happy at this moment without having to go back and make anything that came before it different.

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