Shari B. Kaplan explains how chronic stress makes your brain loop on urgent thoughts. Try bilateral exercises, mindful walking with sensory focus, or ask yourself if something really needs immediate action. Manual intervention helps reset the pattern.
If you have had chronic or traumatic stress, then the salience network can kind of work on overdrive. So there are different bilateral exercises you can do. Going for a walk and thinking things through, even by just staying present as you're walking and acknowledge the trees, the birds, the sidewalk, how your feet feel on the ground, and getting in the moment that way. And then thinking about a situation that your brain and body might be saying is really urgent and ask yourself the questions, is this something that needs to be taken care of right now? So when your salience network is working on overdrive, we have to manually intervene and start getting it back on track. So there is a repatterning process and you might need to work with another clinician in order to get patterning down pat. But this is just for those of you out there who aren't quite sure why your brain keeps looping and why you can't calm it down. This could be one of those reasons, and I hope a few of these tools could be helpful to you.
