When life changes, your brain craves certainty and gets stuck in negative thought loops called mind worms. Mel Robbins explains why major transitions leave you in gray, uncertain space, triggering anxiety and the feeling that you've lost control.
I want to read to you, uh, from chapter 3 of your book. Most of us know what it's like to get caught in a negative mental spiral. Any number of things can trigger these unrelenting, suffocating loops, but the catalyst is typically a change in our lives. Our new anxieties, regrets, and uncertainties can take on a life of their own and become a bigger challenge to deal with than the change itself. These thoughts become like mind worms nestling in our psyches, hijacking our attention and stoking our biggest fears. What's wrong with me? How could I not have seen this coming? How could they do that to me? What's going to happen? Let's talk about what to do when you are stuck in a mental spiral.
So we talked about how our brains aren't wired to like uncertainty.
We want what's called cognitive closure. Cognitive closure?
Yes. What is that? What that means is we want black and white answers, clear, definitive answers.
Yeah, I want the possible self that I'm hoping for and the possible self that I expected. I don't want any of this stuff in between.
Exactly. Okay. But guess what? When a big change happens and we climb out from the rubble, there's no black and white. It's all gray. And that makes us feel so much anxiety. Certainly makes me feel anxiety. I don't like being out of control. And when you're in the throes of change, all you feel is out of control. So what does our mind do?
I don't know. Well, it starts spiraling, but why does it do that? It's so not helpful.
Exactly. It starts spiraling because it's trying to regain control in the way that it knows how, which is we think, maybe I can outthink this problem, but it's fool's gold. You think, if I could just figure out let's say you're navigating a breakup. If I could just figure out why he stopped loving me, then I can finally move on and enter another relationship. If I can just figure out all the ways that I can keep my family safe, then I can actually move on peacefully. If I can analyze every mistake I've made in the past and every regret I possibly have, then I'll never make those regrets in the future. So we have this false sense that we're actually making progress on the problems and challenges we're facing. But we're actually just looping over the same negative thoughts over and over again. Because a lot of questions in life don't actually have answers, but our brains, they don't, they haven't caught up to that wisdom yet.
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