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How negative thoughts spiral out of control
By Scott Fusco | October 5, 2007
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If you make a conscious effort to begin becoming more aware of your thoughts, you will notice many funny things happen.
What I want to talk about in this post I will call “thought spirals,” which is when you have a thought that continues to grow in intensity until it eventually spirals out of control.
So say that you have a negative thought like “This isn’t easy.” A few seconds later you might catch yourself having a thought like “This is hard.” Then you might catch yourself having a thought like “This is impossible.” Then “I can’t do this.” Then “I am no good at this.” Then “I am terrible at this.” And finally, the clincher, “I suck at life.”
These are what I am calling thought spirals. It is when you have a thought that continues to grow in intensity until it eventually completely boils over. If you look at the thought spiral above, it may be funny to note how you can go from something not being easy to you completely sucking at life in a matter of seconds or minutes.
This is a somewhat dramatic and comical example 
but bear with me. Your thought spirals may not be as severe as these, but your thoughts do spiral, perhaps just not as dramatically as in the example.
If you take a close look at the above example, you can see how our mind jumps from one thing to another. First, it complains about what we were doing, then it complains about our abilities in doing that task. So a thought that initially started as an observation about the difficulty of a task shifted into a thought of self-destruction about our potential. And finally the thought shifted from complaining about how we couldn’t do something to how we couldn’t do anything - e.g. “I suck at life.”
The most important observation to make about these kinds of thought spirals is that they are just an illusion of your mind. None of what you said to yourself was actually true. It is just a culmination of frustration and anger in the heat of the moment that ends up leading to more and more negative thoughts.
These negative thoughts will end up negatively affecting your emotions and your beliefs if you aren’t aware of their effect on you. So start making an effort to become aware, and that in itself will eliminate a lot of the damage that this type of thinking can do to you.
If you can step outside of your mind and just objectively watch it, you really see how nuts it is. It doesn’t stop going! One of the neat things about meditation is that you can really notice just how much your mind keeps going. If you have never tried meditation, try sitting quietly for 5 or 10 minutes without thinking.
I can almost guarantee you that you will have a lot of thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere. And no matter how hard you try to not think at all, it is almost like your mind has a mind of its own (no pun intended) and just keeps thinking! These are the thoughts of your unconscious mind. They keep thinking, whether or not we are aware of them. And they are just as damaging as your conscious thoughts while simultaneously being harder to detect.
This process can be incredibly funny or frustrating depending on how you choose to orient yourself. If you try to control your thoughts then you will be very frustrated. But if you just laugh at how crazy and relentless your mind is then you can really begin to transcend the effect that your mind has on your emotions.
For me, simply having the awareness of how crazy my brain can be allows me to laugh at the whole thing. Now that I know about thought spirals, I have the awareness to witness them happening while they are happening inside of me. And I don’t try to control it (because that would be trying to solve a problem from a frame of more resistance). Instead, I just observe it and laugh at it. In this way, I can really transcend the emotional effect that my mind has on me. It is almost like disconnecting your emotions from your mind. It’s possible if you play around with it.
Becoming aware of how this works grants you a lot of freedom. It is mental and emotional freedom - from yourself (or technically speaking, your mind)!
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Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Emotional Intelligence, Logic-Intelligence, Personal Development |
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