Fuel for the fire

Why you cannot think your way out of a worry loop, and what actually sets you free.

You have heard a little of my story now. The parade of sticky thoughts, the worry loops that would not let go, the OCD that slithered through my mind. This piece is about the machinery, the mental tendencies and patterns, because many of them run in almost everyone, just at different volumes.

Let’s start with the thing nobody tells you. Rumination feels like problem-solving. That is what makes it so convincing. When my mind was looping, it felt like I was doing something. But it was emotionally painful and exhausting based on the topic my mind latched onto. If I could just think it through one more time, turn it over from one more angle, I would finally solve it and be free. So I’d keep digging. And every time I dug, the groove got deeper. With OCD related rumination it is not uncommon for the brain to conjure a “worse” thought to escape the pain of the previous one. It is clear that rumination often becomes its own kind of compulsion, and can be an escape in some way, from emotion, stress, and sensations. But it is not a helpful one.

A while back we wrote about how the mind behaves when it meets a question that has no final answer, the way it will circle endlessly, trying to close something that cannot be closed. (If you missed it, it is here: Mystery.) A worry loop is that same machinery or tendency turned on your own life. The question underneath it (Am I safe? Did I ruin it? What will they think?) is one the thinking mind can never fully settle, so it keeps reaching for a solution that was never on the table.

Here is what I did not understand then, and what I would give anything to have known. Digging around inside a worry loop is only fuel for the fire. The obsession does not shrink when you engage it. It grows. It gets bigger, more painful, more exaggerated, and the path it travels gets worn deeper with every pass. This is not only true of OCD. It is true of ordinary anxious thinking, of the replay of an argument, of the story about what they must think of you, or the endless search for a memory that may not even exist. The more you travel a loop, the more automatic it becomes. You are not “solving” the thought. You are practicing it, rehearsing it.

And here is the part that took me the longest to accept. Rumination is rarely about the content. It is a behavioral pattern, a habit the mind has learned, and the particular worry it lands on is almost beside the point. This is why you cannot win by solving the worry. Even if you resolved the exact thing you are chewing on today, the pattern would simply reach for something else to chew on. The rumination itself is like grinding your teeth. Take away one thing to gnaw on and it will find another. So try not to get pulled down into the details, the specific question, the particular fear. The content is only the bait. The pattern itself is really the thing to focus on.

And there is a cost to feeding it. The content you do land on wears the path deeper and deeper, until falling in becomes easier than staying out. Think of a well-worn path across a field. Every time your attention walks that path, it presses the grass down a little more. Walk it enough and it becomes the only path you can see. That is what a groove is. It is not a flaw in you. Every mind lays them down. But it does mean the way out will not be found along the same familiar route.

So if you cannot think your way out, what do you do? You change where your attention rests, and you do it together with the body, not the mind alone. This is where my own story changed. For weeks I sat with one hand on my heart and one on my belly and I breathed. I was not trying to “solve” anything. I was practicing placing my attention somewhere other than the loop, and letting my body lead the way there. Moving attention by itself, however, is not the only piece of the puzzle. It worked because I was also regulating my nervous system at the same time, through breath, through moving my body, through sound. I had learned how to travel the feedback loop between body and mind. There are other ways to do this, but those are the ones I have come to trust most. One of the most powerful questions I began to ask myself was this: Is the tension in your body driving the thoughts, or are the thoughts driving the tension in your body? Most of the time it turns out to be both, feeding each other in a circular route all their own. Eventually I began to notice how I hunched over and tightened through my solar plexus whenever I was being inundated by anxious ruminations or obsessive thinking. This realization was a gift, as it allowed me to read my own map. And slowly, without forcing it, a different pattern began to form.

There is a second tool that matters just as much, and it is learning to witness the thought instead of being its captive. When a loop begins, there is you, and there is the thought. Those are not the same thing, even though they can feel completely fused. We spent a whole series on exactly this not long ago, learning to tell attention, awareness, content, and thought apart. Learning to identify that awareness, the part that does the noticing, is separate from the thoughts, sensations, and feelings that pass through it. (See the series here.) For most of my life, the thought and I were one. The thought said danger, and then my experience was that I was in danger. But you can learn, in small moments, to take one step back and simply notice. There it is again. The loop is running. You do not have to argue with it or win against it. You just have to see it, and in the seeing there is already a tiny bit of space that was not there a second ago. That space is everything. That space is where your sovereignty lives. The space is where your healing begins.

I want to say something gently, because I know how this can land. If your mind loops, you are not broken and you are not doing life wrong. A looping mind is a human mind. I moved through some of the heaviest versions of it a person can, and I am here, writing to you, feeling more myself than I ever have. So please do not add a second loop on top of the first one, the one where you criticize yourself for looping. That one is also just fuel for the fire. Take off the mental boxing gloves and let the thoughts pass. They are not you, and you cannot force them out. You allow them to leave.

What actually helped me was simple yet very impactful and life changing. It was one hand on my heart. It was noticing my feet on the floor. It was catching the loop a half-second earlier than the day before and, instead of following it, returning my attention to my breath, again, and again, and again. None of it looked like much on any given day. But attention is trainable, the same way a groove is worn, and over time a new and gentler path formed until it became the one I could find without trying. It is simple, but it is not easy. At first the space you make lasts only a few seconds, and often you will not even catch it while it is happening. You notice it only afterward, once your attention has already sprung back to the thoughts, and you realize you were away from the loop for a breath or two. That still counts. That is the practice working. It asks for effort and persistence, and it slowly gives back more than it asks.

So here is your small experiment for this week, if you want one. You do not need to stop the loops. Instead, once, when you notice the loop running, name it. Say, quietly, there it is. Then move your attention to something more physical in the world. Your breath. Your feet upon the earth. Move your body and let your attention rest in the sensations. Feel the weight of your body in the chair. You are not trying to “win” against the thought. You are practicing a different path. Notice where the tension resides in your body, bring your attention there. Inhale… take in a little more air… hold… exhale and release from the place that holds tension, or really any muscle that will allow it. (A good place to start is by dropping the shoulders on the exhale.)

Good, now do it again. That is how the fire goes out. Not by fighting it. By slowly, patiently, refusing to keep feeding it.

Big Love,

Thomasina