Stopping Thoughts is a No Go Go

By Tony Bates, JD, AM, LCSW

What’s it like to be alone with your thoughts? For some of us, it can be a pretty scary time. Whether we’re trying to get back to sleep at 3 a.m., trying to sit down and focus on a school or work assignment, or just waiting in line at the DMV, our mind tends to give us a lot to think about. Take Josh, from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”: in this clip he’s just sitting down to complete a boring task at work. As soon as he starts, we see his mind start to make connections to negative events in the past, and then it quickly starts to spiral from there. 

One moment he’s thinking “the sun is bright” and next his mind jumps to “I barely passed lifeguard school” and “that’s why that kid almost died in that pool.” Yikes! Josh reacts with a very understandable “no no no no no no no” in response to these “bad thoughts,” but they just keep coming.
What’s happening to poor Josh happens to most of us at some point in our lives. Our mind notices something relatively neutral (the sun, in Josh’s case) but it starts to form connections and those connections can lead to some dark places. The latest scientific research provides an explanation for why this happens: our minds are built for problem-solving, and we’ve all learned from a young age to use language to solve those problems. We form connections (sun-lifeguard-failure) based on our past history, and our mind starts spinning to try to solve the problem. Trouble is, those attempts at problem-solving can often take the form of self-criticism or lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, or shame. 

We can sometimes stop those thoughts, but our attempts to do so are usually like trying to hold a beach ball under the water at Josh’s pool: at some point, that ball’s going to pop right back up. Paradoxically, research shows that the more we try to resist thoughts, the more they are going to show up! Try it for yourself: for the next 10 seconds, do everything in your power to NOT think about a pink elephant with big floppy pink ears. How’d that go?

So this brilliant ability we have to solve problems and make connections can also come back to burn us at inopportune times. (…like the sunburn we might get at Josh’s pool. See how easy we can relate things? I can do this all day.) And given our mind’s propensity for comparison, prediction, rumination, and storytelling, it’s really easy to fall in the trap of buying into our thoughts and taking them very seriously. Our friend Josh finishes his thought spiral with “if I can’t even hit the gym, how will I ever be a good father.” Ouch! Josh could use some mental sunscreen. 

If you’re finding that stopping thoughts isn’t a workable option, one alternative is to practice relating to that thought in new ways. A simple technique is to notice when you’re having a thought and to simply make a mental note that that happened. Instead of getting caught up in trying to pop his thought bubbles, Josh might instead say “oh, I’m noticing I’m having the thought that I failed lifeguard school” and turn his attention back to his work project. This can help transform the thought from a problem that must be solved and responded to—to simply an experience we’re having in the moment, which we can choose to respond to only if it’s helpful. Dropping the struggle to control in those moments can be challenging and counterintuitive, but it’s worth trying out the next time you notice control strategies aren’t working.