Your brain is not helping you when it looks for reasons.
Think back to the last unpleasant thing that happened to you. How did you respond?
If you’re like me, you probably spent a long time afterwards reviewing the whole sequence of events that led up to the thing, looking for what you could have done differently to avoid it. If only you had handled things differently, everything would have turned out fine!
This is your brain racing to try to keep you safe, the function it was evolutionarily shaped to do. Looking for patterns in the environment that could indicate threat and devising ways to avoid those threats kept our ancestors alive so that they could reproduce and eventually create us.
But sometimes instead of keeping us safe, the brain is trying to justify your actions. The brain is exceptional at constructing stories that flow logically to the conclusion we want; in other words, it is rationalizing, not rational. And in that process, it finds somebody else to blame and a story to justify that blame.
I have moments like this _all_the_time_. I will get angry at my wife or kids, and my brain will dutifully come up with all the reasons why I am right and they are wrong. And it will keep circling back and replaying the story it came up with so I get even angrier. It becomes a self-perpetuating delusion my brain is using to justify its current state.
The funny thing is that I know how to break the cycle – let the anger go. The body will process the fight-or-flight hormones of adrenaline and cortisol in about 90 seconds, and then there’s nothing to explain and the stories are revealed to be what they always were, a story I made up to justify the emotional state I was in. And yet when I’m in that moment, it’s so hard to stop my brain from racing, even though I know it’s making me anxious and unhappy.
You might think that reviewing the events that led to your current state is necessary to keep you safe and to learn. But our brain’s ruminations are a homeostatic mechanism to ensure that we don’t have to change our behavior. The brain is finding a way to not take responsibility for the situation and instead blame somebody else. We are unconsciously giving away our responsibility to do something different to potentially get a different outcome (You Have A Choice!).
So when you notice yourself ruminating about something that happened, especially if you are stewing in strong emotions, stop. Just stop. Go do something that helps you turn off your brain and get you into your body: go for a walk, go to the gym, play with a young child, etc. And when you return to the topic, you might find that your brain has gotten unhooked from its unhelpful replay loop and can actually find a new way forward.
How do you free yourself when you notice yourself stuck in a loop?