I yelled at my coach yesterday. I told her than every time I look at the news, I get upset. I told her that when I’m upset, I don’t follow through on my plans. She smiled. Not a big “I hear ya, sister” grin, but a half-smile. She wasn’t buying it. I tried to beat her to the punch.
“Uh, uh. No way I’m gonna sit in front of the TV and feel all THOSE feelings.”
“Forget that,” I said forcefully and loudly. Yeah. I was yelling.
“Sure, but you’re jumping to the worst-case scenario,” she said. “And that’s what’s driving the feelings and that is what’s keeping you from the results you want.”
I folded my arms over my chest.
She kept her poker face. It was game on, which meant she brought out the big guns. “You’re giving away all your power,” she said. “Which is fine. Is that what you want to do?”
Ok. So I’m not a medical professional or schooled in psychology. I’m an IT manager and a life coach. But one thing I know is this: I do not want to give up on anything I can control. I had to concede the match. By assuming that what I see on TV must generate the same feelings it always has before, I’m basically abdicating on myself. I -for sure – don’t want Wolf Blitzer and Bret Baier running my emotional show. Double true! So, I did me some research on ways thinking, the thing I rely on to get my work done and keep my life moving, can get itself sideways.
I’m a human and I have a brain. My brain does a lot of looping. Looping is one way of describing thoughts that come back over and over. Another way of saying it is – repetitive thinking. I’ve got a lot of it. Turns out, we all do.
Repetitive thinking isn’t good or bad. Like most things, it has two sides to it. After all, we’re pretty efficient creatures and if our brains have this behavior, I’d like to think it’s adaptive; it has its uses.
There are lots of types of repetitive thinking – rumination, worry, cognitive processing, emotional processing, solutioning, planning ahead, what-if thinking, level-setting expectations, worst-case analysis, reflection, self-criticism, post-mortems, goal setting, and day-dreaming. All of it involves us running scenarios or sentences over and over in our minds.
Not all of this is bad. In fact, when you look at the list, you can see why repetitive thinking might give a guy the edge. Planning ahead, risk mitigation, goal setting, thinking options through, picking up better health habits, recovering from depression, and getting through emotional trauma all come from this type of thinking.
You can also see how this type of thinking can cause us problems. Over-analysing, habitual worry, snowballing from small events to large future worse cases, self-judgment, negative self-talk and repeatedly triggering the body’s stress response system with our thinking are all linked to some pretty depressing outcomes. The list includes, you guessed it – depression, anxiety, and flat out poor physical health..
So how do we keep our positive patterns and reduce our negatives? Well, it turns out that positive outcomes from repetitive thinking are linked to our emotional state and the direction we guide our thinking in. Basically, the more you think about negative stuff, without giving it meaning and direction, the worse you feel. However, if you apply positive intent, have basic optimism about your ability to achieve your goal, and have a positive emotional state when you begin, repetitive thinking can predict a good outcome.
What?
Ok …. let’s get into the concrete examples here.
Say you work hard on a project, turn it in, and your boss changes something on every single gosh darn slide. You might engage in a bit of rumination, running the feedback he gave you through your thoughts several times. You might start to feel a bit down. Then you might think about the fact that you feel like crap. After about an hour of noticing your low energy and disappointment, you might beat yourself up a bit for letting your boss get to you like that. After a short break and a chat with a friend, where you have a candy bar and complain, returning to your desk, might bring you face to face with worry. What if you’re one step closer to getting fired? Or what if every project you do goes this way? How are you going to stand going through the whole year with this boss? By the time you get home, you’re not ready to listen to your spouse, not wanting to put in any more time on work and basically, good for nothing but ordering pizza and snapping through channels.
None of this sets you up for a great day at work tomorrow.
Let’s rewind. You work hard on a project but you know your boss has more experience. So you collaborate with your boss, ask his opinion and sure enough, he has something to add to every slide. You take it back to your desk and evaluate the suggestions, accepting some, and rejecting others. You have a call and discuss it. Of the rejections, you change your mind and keep a couple and throw out the rest. You turn the project in and engage in a bit of rumination. You wish you had thought of some of the changes yourself. You reflect on how you could have known to make them before your boss told you. For the ones you should have thought of, you make notes for next time. Of the ones you couldn’t have known, you tell yourself that’s why he’s the boss. By now, you’re exhausted and you feel it. You take a break, have a candy bar, and blow off some steam with your friend. Back at your desk, there’s a mountain of work still to do, but at least the presentation is off your plate and your job is safe for another day. By the time you get home, you’re tired but you’re glad to hear someone else’s troubles for a while. You let your spouse vent and then together, you decide to forget about fixing dinner. You get a pizza and put on some harmless feel-good show and watch together.
After a good night’s sleep, you’re ready to take on another day at work.
In both cases, the boss had input for every slide. In both cases, you work hard, are tired, and don’t make good choices about everything – indicating some stress and will-power fatigue. But in one case, the negative emotional tenor and the assumption that the boss’s input means something negative about yourself, cause the repetitive thinking to take on a depressing tone and gravitate towards less constructive ways of understanding. In the other, a more optimistic attitude – assuming the boss has good intentions, finding an explanation for why you didn’t know some things, and taking proactive measures for the future by trying to learn from the feedback, lead to a much better mental outcome.
The key here is to notice when you’re indulging in repetitive thinking. Notice the direction of the thinking. Notice your overall situation and emotional state.
After a long day at my stand-up desk, when I come out to cook dinner, I’m pretty low on mental resources. Turn on the news and let them rehash the same three issues over and over, and my brain might just pick up on the iterative loop of negative data. (Talk about repetitive!) Toss in a bit of repetitive thinking about how all this will play out over the next 80 days, and I’ve got myself a nice set up for a miserable night. Just maybe, I’ll yell at my coach about it.
Noticing that I’m tired when I leave my desk, mentally tired but physically sick of sitting still, I can predict that I’m going to do way better listening to a Ted talk than listening to the 24/7 cycle. Later, after a break, some exercise, some time with my dog and my husband, I’ll be a much better place to catch up on what happened in the world. Then I can use my brain to ruminate on how lucky I am, to reflect on what campaigns I might want to donate to and remind myself that I’m still on track, even if the talking heads are doing their best to convince me the rest of the world, is not.
If you want to work on noticing your thoughts and figuring out what and when to switch up the process, sign up for a free 25-minute session.
And that? Is just a better way to use our brains.
For more on repetitive thinking, check out this informative link “Watkins ER. Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychol Bull. 2008;134(2):163-206. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163″