Pressing repeat

It's not unusual for the human mind to get hooked onto certain things. We find a song we like and play it until we groan every time the opening bars play. We find a food we love and eat it until we get bored of the taste.

No level of 'obsession' in this way is a good thing. You end up sick of the situation, or the thing, or the item. You get no variety in your diet or your playlists or your style of workout.

The same is true when we get our thoughts stuck on a loop.


Pressing repeat on certain thoughts or emotions, which often happens subconsciously, is not a healthy space for your head to be in.

Over the past couple of years I've been making more of a proactive effort to catch myself when I'm falling into old habits of letting thoughts repeat on a loop. It's been a huge focus throughout my treatments for anxiety over the last four or five years and something I've been working hard at.

Whenever I'm more stressed or more tired, those techniques can end up flying out the window and I find myself stuck in thought loops which are helping me in no way at all.


A couple of weeks ago, I was frustrated about a particular situation in my life, but instead of taking steps to change it, I trapped myself in a cycle of thinking about it over and over again. Talking about it over and over again. Ranting about it over and over again.

Once you're in that cycle, every single time you rant about the issue without doing anything about it, you end up more and more and more frustrated. Not only are you doing nothing to improve the situation, but you're actively making yourself feel even worse.


Every time I pressed repeat I would get more and more stressed. Once you're doing that about one problem, it very quickly filters out into other areas and you suddenly get very worked up about other issues that normally you could just brush aside.

It's not a healthy cycle and it's not a good place to be.


I had to really stop and tell myself the whole reason this was happening is because I was doing nothing to stop it. It was no longer about any of the external factors, it was now entirely about the way I was reacting to it and the fact I was doing nothing to alter it.

I made a list of the steps that needed to be taken to sort out the (now multiple) situations I was feeling stressed about, and I started to DO them.


Sometimes, that means getting out of your comfort zone or having awkward conversations, but the price of avoiding those things is even worse.

The only way to break that cycle is for YOU to take action and make that change.




Sophie x

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Writing fiction as a way to move forwards.

Clicking 'Reply'

The Reading List #7