How do I stop my looping thoughts?
The cognitive-emotive loop that keeps you stuck and what to do about it.
I’m going to give you a flavor of the topics I’ll dive more deeply into here on Substack like emotional self-regulation, somatic coping skills and neuroscience tips to actively participate in changing and re-wiring the brain. I’m gathering extra resources for paid subscribers so from now until the end of November, everyone gets these appetizers before I turn on “upgrade to paid” for more in depth entrées!
Learning to be your own discerning interventionist when it comes to wrangling ruminating thoughts within your mind, is a pathway to feeling empowered. Not in control; but empowered to know what to do when. Let’s have a word witch etymological breakdown of discernment, shall we?
The word comes from latin discernere, and dis means “off, away” while cernere means “distinguish, separate, sift”. 1
To discern is to perceive, to make a choice, to be able to see from a zoomed-out perspective what would be the next move for any situation. It’s tricky here because it is an illusion that there is a right and a wrong move. This is reductionistic and a black and white way of thinking that separates and categorizes good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure. This is a very common block within the psyche.
This paradigm and way of thinking is within us all.
The ability to see that this paradigm is within you when you go to make a choice and run into a block, aka belief, is exercising greater clear seeing and discernment. It’s progress!
The tape running in the background of the mind is a set of beliefs that are comfortable and remaining unquestioned, serving as the brain’s default to look for evidence to support. So the belief running could be that you have bought into the illusion that there is only one right and one wrong answer and if you do not choose the right one, they you’re an idiot and all sorts of bad things will happen.
Ohh, do you feel the constriction in your body when reading that? We are so unintentionally harsh to ourselves as human beings.
No wonder we struggle with decision making. You are in a bind, a set-up. You’re in the illusion and the “work” now is to recognize and discern when this happens so that you bring the light of your awareness to the tapes running that you no longer support.
The tape I have learned to play, and continue to practice and learn and make progress with, is the tape of infinite potential through the portal of curiosity. Bathed in the warm waters of self-compassion that recognizes all parts of me are working for me to keep me safe and some are outdated but I will honor their origins and exercise present day effort to hardwire newer, gentler, softer tapes. In the honoring, is the alchemizing.
Healing always begins with awareness.
Awareness is where the excavation begins.
There are always an infinite amount of choices available to us when we come from the paradigm of curiosity and continual learning. I always tell my kids when making art, “there are no mistakes, just happy accidents”. One choice leads you this way, another leads you that way. Learning is a choice. To learn from and be changed by your experiences is how wisdom is accrued. Is how change happens.
In her book Stress-Proof by Mithu Storoni, MD, PhD, she highlights the use of cognitive appraisal to bolster emotional regulation. The emotional part of the brain hijacks cognitive processes when experiencing a stressful experience, like making a decision for example. Obviously, the emotional brain’s assessment is not a clear picture. She continues,
“Your confirmation bias intensifies your stress response. The emotional brain has a flaw—instead of forming a theory after looking at all the facts, it jumps to a theory shaped by its negative biases and changes the “facts” to fit its theory, adding further fuel to the fire”.
In a stressful moment, your body experiences a threat, the most primal part of your brain is doing it’s job as the security guard to ensure your survival. Then the emotional part of your brain engages and hijacks you further, shoring up biases, convincing you of supporting evidence and keeping looping thoughts engaged.
So what to do? How do you stop the looping thoughts?
In the moment, you do your very best to discern this happening. You close your eyes and feel the rise of your shoulders, the clenching of your jaw, the racing of your heart. You feel your eyes moving from side to side, thinking and searching, a desperate quest for certainty.
You discern to make the choice to take deep, slow breaths, holding the inhale and exhaling for as long as you can, slowing the heart rate. You intervene at the level of the body because at this primal level, threat has been registered and until the body feels safe, the mind will not feel safe. This is called “bottom-up hijacking” and is the paradigm of Somatic Psychology.
It takes a few deep breaths, a few minutes only, to signal safety in the body. This is the step to disrupt the looping, ruminating thoughts.
It begins with discernment and awareness.
It continues with your right effort to speak to the body in its language by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system and signaling safety.
Then, and only then, we have the capacity to reflect cognitively on what happened back there!
Dr. Mithu Storoni continues in Stress-Proof,
“Cognitive reappraisal is when you take a second glance at your situation after you have disengaged your emotional brain. You reexamine the evidence rationally and pay attention to subtle features you might have missed before. With practice you can teach yourself to “read” a situation differently and reduce its traumatic volume”.
Practice makes progress. There is no failure, only continual learning.
Deepening your capacity to witness the movie of your life and behavior helps foster space and distance to work with your inner complexity. To see, to make changes, to adapt, to grow.
I play tennis regularly and I love it. I witness myself and my own learning process in a granular way. It is very easy to play from the head, trying to remember the steps needed to prepare to hit. When I get stuck there, I lose contact with the feeling of my body, of my feet planted on the earth, preparing to move from the ground up. Breathing steadily in and out of the nose to keep my body calm and upright and in a state of flow between engaging and resting. Feeling the power that comes from a full unit turn of my hips and rotating completely from the core to follow through.
The power comes from staying connected within the body. Witnessing from the mind all the components of Self. Witnessing the mind and thoughts looping, witnessing the felt sensations and signals, witnessing the space that appears when breath becomes the bridge between stimlus and response.
What I hope you learned from reading this is the power of slowing things down in the moment and reflecting afterwards to garner the learning and insight to apply next time. To keep going, moment to moment. Practice makes progress.
Let’s release the paradigm of duality, right and wrong, good and bad.
Let’s embrace the paradigm of curiosity and infinite possibility and choice.
Who’s with me?
Let me know in the comments below and share with your friends.
Warmly,
Britta
*Source: Online Etymology Dictionary*