Dealing with Obsessive Thought Patterns?
5 Ways to Free Yourself From Dark and Obsessive Thoughts excerpted from Therese Borchard
1. Rely on Other Brains
In the state of severe ruminations, your brain is toast. You can’t rely on your logic or any of the content that's streaming through your neurons, because it's all inaccurate. You need to rely on other brains to help you sort out the stuck thought and tease it apart until you arrive at the truth. Fortunately, I have a handful of friends who know the insanity of ruminations and have walked with me through this in the past. When I'm on the phone with them, I write down everything they say like a newspaper reporter, because I will need that information handy for when the thoughts come — and I can’t afford to bother them again. I have a journal filled with the reasonable logic of my friends, and sometimes (not always) accessing their truth calms me down as if I’m talking to them again. I try to trust them because I know I can’t trust my own brain.
2. Investigate the Thought
Here is a way of inquiring or investigating your thought with four simple questions:
It it true?
Can I absolutely know that it is true?
How do I react when I think that thought?
Who would I be without the thought?
Then you turn the thought around. You rewrite your statement as the opposite. If you said, “I am a failure,” your turnaround might be, “I am a success.” And you find three genuine, specific examples of how the turnaround is true in your life.
3. Visualize the Thoughts as Hiccups
Ruminations are symptoms of depression just as nausea or fatigue are symptoms of the flu. If my fever spiked or I developed a bad case of hiccups, I wouldn’t berate myself for those symptoms. Yet I feel totally at fault for my stuck thoughts, as if they are a weakness of my character, which further pushes me down the rabbit hole of despair. One of my friends recently yelled at me over the phone, “THEY ARE NOT YOUR FAULT!!” when I told him that all the mindfulness exercises I had been doing were making me feel even worse — as though I were creating the ruminations by not being able to let go or detach in the right way. He reminded me that when they reach a certain intensity — when they are making me hyperventilate over the phone to a friend as I was doing, or they totally disable me — mindfulness doesn’t work. At this point, I’m better off imagining them as physical symptoms of an illness and say, “Here they are again .…” rather than to constantly try to meditate them away or release them in the zen fashion that I would like.
4. Use a Mantra
“When my thoughts become intense,” a friend told me recently, “I will use a mantra as a kind of racket to hit the ball back.” Repeating a mantra helps her be prepared for the thoughts when they come.. A mantra can just be a simple phrase, like “Peace be with me.” Or “I am okay.” Or “This will pass.”
5. Do the Thing in Front of You
When I’m battling severe ruminations, my head is usually trapped in the past or in the future, fretting a decision I’ve made a month ago or worrying about something a week or a year from now that may never even come to be. The thoughts engulf me in a world that is not real and spin panic everywhere I look. What helps immensely is to concentrate only on the task in front of me. If I'm working, this means trying my best to craft a sentence that makes sense. If I’m with the kids, it means helping with their math problems or making a snack. Sometimes it helps to have an anchor to the present moment, such as concentrating on my breath or tuning into my senses.