Those with looping thoughts tend to come from perfectionist families, struggle with trauma, have anxiety disorders, or depressive symptoms. A looping thought is a coping mechanism. It is a subconscious tool to help a distressed individual escape from the present moment.
To understand how our thoughts, feelings and actions are connected, students are learning about. The Thought Loop. The Thought Loop is a visual representation of how we each have control over the things that happen in our lives and how we can influence positivity or negativity around us.
Where Does The Anxiety Spiral Begin? An anxiety spiral begins with stressful life events, long-term worries or even unpleasant physical situations or illness. The anxiety-prone mind may disproportionately focus on these thoughts, misinterpreting them as real danger rather than what they are – mere thoughts.
The trauma looping process of the brain misidentifying threatening stimuli can lead to chronic and inexplicable illness. Our thoughts and emotions, trusting these misinterpretations, emotionally charge these stimuli, resulting in anxiety, PTSD, or depression, which then further reinforces this trauma loop.
For a long time, psychologists believed that allowing yourself to go ahead and think about white bears was the only solution—eventually, since your brain wasn't on the lookout for these thoughts and actively trying to block them anymore, they would fade. But thoughts can be blocked without rebounding.
Put simply, the study suggests that the brains of OCD patients get stuck in a loop of “wrongness” that prevents sufferers from stopping behaviors even if they know they should.
OCD is often referred to as a “vicious” cycle because the obsessions and compulsions happen in a loop that can be extremely challenging to break. The longer you remain in the cycle, the more momentum and strength it gains, making it even more difficult to escape.
Write the thought loop down on paper. The act of forming letters engages the logical side of your brain. This helps get you out of the imaginative side of your brain where you can catastrophize a situation and make it much worse than the reality. Sometimes just writing it down is enough to stop the thought loop.
For many of us, we tend to get stuck on negative thinking. For some reason, our brains defer to the negative. According to the National Science Foundation, 80% of our thoughts are negative and 95% of our thoughts are repetitive.
According to research by Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University, a human being can have around 60,000 thoughts per day—and 90% of these are repetitive! These thoughts can contain a mixture of negative, positive and inquisitive thoughts.
“The American psychologist and philosopher William James said that thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Your thoughts alter your reality. The world which we live in, its quality and character is nothing but a reflection of our own minds.
Trauma is not physically held in the muscles or bones — instead, the need to protect oneself from perceived threats is stored in the memory and emotional centers of the brain, such as the hippocampus and amygdala. This activates the body whenever a situation reminds the person of the traumatic event(s).
