Obsessive Thoughts

How to deal with thinking in loops?

Dear mental health advocate,

Are you a person who keeps being stuck in the same thought loop? About something you just can’t move away from? Or you just keep repeating the same negative downward spiral in your brain? Well, it might just be that you are dealing with obsessive thoughts. These are more common than you’d maybe think. In today’s premium edition of the The Present Psychologist Paper I will take a deeper look at what it means to have a looping brain and how to deal with these obsessive thoughts.

Obsessive Thinking

Have you ever had a thought you really did not want to have, and then specifically one that barged right into your brain uninvited and then refused to get out? Maybe it was a very scary image, a worry not rooted in reality or even a question you could not stop replaying mentally. You tried to just push it away and distract yourself, or you simply told yourself to stop thinking about it. But the more you tried to silence it, the louder it got eventually and harder to push down.

Well, I would say… welcome to the very exhausting world of obsessive thoughts. It’s important to remember here that you are not broken, no, you are actually human. And if it feels like your mind is playing a lot of tricks on you, well I promise, you’re not the only one. As a psychologist, I have been confronted with a lot of people battling thoughts they never asked for (me included!). I’ve also dealt with intrusive loops in my own life which could best be described as thoughts that hit at 3AM like a horrible song stuck on repeat. That’s why with this article I wanted to do a deep dive into obsessive thinking: what it is, why it actually happens, and how you can begin to loosen its grip.

What are obsessive thoughts?