Hanging onto the reins of your racing brain

🚗 RUNNING ON FUMES: Letting the mental engine run out of gas & putter w/ permission, acceptance & forgiveness

The way out of the ruminative loop is not fighting fire with fire.

Rather, it’s about deploying the loving mix of permission, acceptance and forgiveness. To ourselves, to each other, and to reality itself.

If you find yourself trapped inside your own head too often, here are several alternatives to fighting fire with fire. They may seem counteractive, but they just might work.

Ruminating about being sore? Allow yourself to be tired, forgive your body for being what it is, and maybe you’ll stop dwelling on your feelings of fatigue and aching and release tension.

Stressing about how hard it is to concentrate? Let your mind spin for a while, have compassion for your racing brain that doesn’t know any better, and perhaps the snow globe of your mind will finally settle.

Worrying about what you might have done to deserve your current shitty experience? Allow yourself to conjure the worst case scenario about your own past behaviors, make yourself laugh at the irrationality of it all, and see if your blood pressure stabilizes.

Moaning about how passive and unmotivated you feel right now? Let yourself be so incredibly slothful and pathetic that you just disgust yourself into taking action, and maybe you’ll get out of bed.

Fretting about why you have problems that other people don’t have? Give yourself permission to share your current condition with five people closest to you, and watch how many of them make you feel less alone by saying they or someone they love suffers in the same way.

Analyzing recent events to try to understand why you are so depressed? Surrender to the fact that clarity and closure are illusions, accept your psychological limits and see if you can find peace hiding inside the uncertainty.

Again, it’s not a proven solution here, but when you’re hanging onto the reins of your racing brain, sometimes the best thing you can do is let the engine run out of gas and putter to a stop.

Otherwise, what we resist, persists.

Look, you’re not the only who can’t shut off thoughts about yourself.

Nobody actually wants to waste time rethinking things that are over and done with.

But sometimes our brain hijacks us.

And fighting fire with fire isn’t helpful. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
If it were easy for you to put unwanted thoughts out of your mind, what might become available to you?