Why we get stuck in negative thinking loops

Thinking gives us a sense of agency, makes us feel less vulnerable and afraid, less at the mercy of change and what we can’t control. We don’t know another way, don’t know how to let go of what we see as our lifeboat. We are so heavily invested and reliant upon thinking as the way to keep ourselves safe that we don’t stop for long enough to get a glimpse of a way of living that doesn’t necessitate constant thinking.

We hold the deep conviction that thinking will make whatever we’re thinking about better. It’s ingrained in us from the time we’re born: Thinking is the solution—to every problem and non-problem. But what if it’s not? What if the premise at the center of everything we believe and do is faulty? What if thinking, the way we do it, is actually the problem, not the solution?

People often ask me if it’s possible to recover from chronic overthinking. The answer is yes, it’s possible. But in order to recover, you have to be ready to fall out of love with your thoughts and with your thinking process. You have to stop believing that your thoughts are the most important thing on Earth and, of course, the absolute truth.

Furthermore, you have to hit rock bottom—your bottom. You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, anxious, frightened, stressed, distracted, unhappy, and all the rest of the states of mind that your thoughts inflict upon you. In short, you have to get fed up with your thinking process and what the voice in your head is shouting or whispering at you. You have to find a new way of responding to your thoughts when they arise and a new way of thinking about thinking.

How to stop overthinking

The first step in breaking free from overthinking is making a commitment to listen to your own mind. In other words, to make the leap from being the one doing the thinking, the thinker, to the one the thoughts are talking to, the listener (or, if you choose, non-listener). When you’re caught in a thought loop of any kind, what you’ve lost is space … the space between the one listening to the thoughts and the thoughts themselves. When you’re caught, your thoughts don’t appear separate from who you are. Thoughts are you, and you are thoughts.

But the moment you recognize what’s happening inside your mind is the moment you start to feel relief. Acknowledging the presence of thoughts, ironically, allows you to feel disentangled from the thoughts and the whole thought tsunami. With awareness and acknowledgment, suddenly, there’s a separate shore from which to observe the thoughts without being drowned by them.

It is helpful in this acknowledgment, too, to give a name to your negative thinker or thinkers. When you label this voice of negativity inside you, it lightens and further separates you from the negative messages. Naming creates space.

You can use different names, too: one for your catastrophizer, the one who reminds you of everything that could (and will) go wrong (I call her Aunt Mathilda); one for your self-critic, the one who reminds you of everything wrong with you; one for your grievance keeper, who reminds you of every injustice anyone has ever done to you, right down to how the bus purposefully splashed you this morning. If you like, you can match the kind of thoughts to the names of people you’ve known who remind you of such sentiments. What’s paramount is that when the thoughts arise, you take a moment to acknowledge the voice with its proper name: Oh look, it’s Aunt Mathilda, here to tell me that I’m going to fail and that it will all end in disaster. Thank you for sharing, Mathilda. Now you can go!

When you recognize that the negative thoughts have (or are trying to) seize your current reality and that your present moment is being injected with this toxic content, you can name this truth as well. You might take a moment to pause and consciously offer yourself a dose of compassion right there, at the center of the storm. You can acknowledge that you are really trapped in the thoughts, down the rabbit hole, and suffering, wishing you could get out but not knowing how to do it. This compassionate pause, stepping back and acknowledging your own experience at that moment, is, in fact, critical in the process of breaking free from your self-inflicted unkindness.

The most important discovery in freeing yourself from excessive thinking is recognizing that your thoughts are not you. You, and all of us, have what is essentially an out-of-order computer firing all day and all night inside your head. Sometimes, that out-of-order computer tells you interesting things or maybe helps you put together a grocery list, but for much of the time, it’s spewing out contents that are not particularly helpful and often harmful to you. That said, it behooves all of us to expand our awareness when it comes to our own thinking and start deciding for ourselves which thoughts we want to engage with and how we want to be treated inside our own minds.

The post Putting the Brakes on Overthinking appeared first on Nancy Colier.

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.