Five tips
No more brooding: this is how you stop the merry-go-round of thoughts
Thoughts can be directed in a specific direction.
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The head does not and does not want to come to rest, revolving around the same fears and problems again and again without being asked. These tips will help break the thought loop.
It usually happens exactly when you actually want to close your eyes and let the day be day: the carousel of thoughts starts the engine and the wild ride begins. Suddenly carnival is on my mind. Problems and tasks begin to spin, fears and worries spread. Rest and sleep are out of the question. Especially in times when one bad news follows the other, brooding can become an exhausting permanent occupation. Five tips to help you break out of the thought loop and steer your thoughts in new directions.
1. The power of positive thoughts
Our thoughts have a major impact on how we perceive and act in the world. A conscious confrontation and a “reversal” of the thinking mechanism can help to escape the rumination trap. This is based, among other things, on the law of attraction, also known as the resonance phenomenon, which assumes that inner states are reflected on the outside. So if you think in the morning that you can’t do the job, you won’t be able to do it either. Experts therefore recommend avoiding thoughts that paint a negative picture of the outcome of a situation.
2. Just say “no”.
And that and that and that and that. Some days the to-do list keeps getting longer and longer. But if the head is already working at the limit, maybe even hurting, it is important to listen to it. Instead of shouldering or being saddled with more work, it can be a blessing to try the little word “no”.
3. The fake smile
If you collapse into a heap of misery, let your shoulders and the corners of your mouth sag, you quickly feel miserable. This is not a truism, it is actually a scientific fact. Just pulling up the corners of your mouth can trigger positive feelings, as Australian scientists found out in a study. So the fake smile has a bad reputation, completely unjustifiably. “If you tell your muscles you’re happy, then you are happy,” lead researcher Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos said in Experimental Psychology.
4. Banish thoughts on paper
Falling asleep doesn’t work because the thought carousel is doing a few extra laps as an encore? If brooding keeps you from sleeping again, good advice is expensive. Instead of taking your worries and needs to bed with you, it can help to write down problems and pending tasks beforehand and to put your thoughts on paper. So the thoughts are out of the head, but they are not forgotten. The discussion of the problems is only paused.
5. Curb the flood of stimuli
What we experience during the day is processed at night. This also applies to the messages we receive via various channels. This flood can become a stress test and also significantly reduce the quality of sleep. Due to increasing digitization, the flood of bad news is not only a problem from a psychotherapeutic point of view because of the current war, psychotherapist Franca Cerutti recently explained to the star. She recommended radically decimating media consumption “in order to get out of it healthy”.
Swell: study on optimism, Experimental Psychology