Intellectual Rabbit Holes

[mvillarreal]

Hi, everyone. A lot of my intrusive thoughts are intellectual rabbit holes I go down about deep questions like, is religion helpful to living a good life? Is forgiveness always possible? What happens after death? Is there a God? How do we draw the lines between healthy and harmful intercultural borrowing? Things like that. I obsess and obsess about these questions and can't focus on anything else. How do I get my mind off of these questions so I can stop building my whole life around them?

[greenpigeon]

Hey mvillarreal. For me i find there is no way to just simply stop thinking about these things, you have to find a way of making them appear less often. Now i do still sometime struggle with rumination, however keeping myself constantly busy and distracted helps me so much( obviously a healthy amount) . I find it helps to be around people because you have no decision over when people interrupt your intrusive thoughts, meaning you won't be able to complete the thought, meaning it goes away.hopes this helps and that you are well

[THL1 in reply to greenpigeon]

Hi mvillarreal

I see rumination as a form of mental compulsion. There is a fear underlying it that the brain wants us to pay a lot of attention to and rumination appears in some way logical ie if I can figure this out somehow the fear will dissipate. The problem is that rumination is a mental compulsion that ultimately doesn’t lead to ‘figuring it out’. It may lead to some temporary relief but ultimately results in sending reinforcing signals to the brain that the original fear is really important and the brain in turn sends an even stronger message back that again you have to somehow ‘figure it out’. Thus a classic OCD vicious cycle gets established gets established.

I think you have to somehow learn to become aware of the fears/questions but not engage with them. You can have them in awareness without turning attention to them and eventually they will move on of their own accord.

I too have a fear of dying, particularly a fear of there being an afterlife in which I will be subject to eternal physical and emotional suffering (I can think of many examples of seemingly intolerable suffering some people experience in this world as templates that a ‘non-benovelent’ God/god could use on me for eternity).

Intellectually I understand that some of this stems from my childhood family trauma, compounded by growing up in a strict Catholic culture.

However if I try to intellectualise the fear, ruminate about it, look for its origins or imagining different ways I might cope, this just perpetuates the cycle as above.

I somehow have to avoid ruminating about it, accepting that it’s a mathematical possibility, that I can’t control in this life and some focus on the things I can control in this life to get as much out of my time on earth as I can.

I think it’s the classical OCD theme of learning to live with uncertainty.

It’s not easy. The fears re-surface frequently and I have to make a real effort not to ruminate/intellectualise as this might provide temporary relief/distraction but ultimately worsens the situation. If you don’t engage, the brain becomes less anxious and then when the fears arise again they are less intense and therefore easier to become aware of without getting attached to. That is the goal. Not easy though.

Good luck

[pumpkinbard0503]

When I struggle with ruminating thoughts, it usually focuses on other's opinions. I try to take in too much at once and worry about a "right answer." I don't know if these questions will ever go away, and I don't think they are bad questions, but I think there is a way for us to live with them. What i'm working on now (to varying degrees of success) is reminding myself that the "answers" to those questions are my answers, which are allowed to flex and change alongside me, like an annoying little dog or something. These questions aren't me, they're just around. Fill you life with things you DO know: your passions, your favorite activities or foods or people. When I feel like I don't know the answers to anything, I make a list. "Things that make me feel like me." I might procede to list: looking at cool birds, listening to music on the bus, that one french dip at browns social house, etc. Therapists are always telling us to do grounding excercises when our bodies feel in crisis mode, I think the same can work for our thoughts. I hope that made some bit of sense.