#mind looping

Imagine you have a song stuck in your head. Cool. That happens to everyone. 

But, imagine it’s literally taking up all of your thoughts. Sometimes it’s just a part of the song, and it plays over and over in your head. 50% of the time it’s normal, 50% of the time it’s distorted. The song slows down so you can overanalyze it 15 times. The song plays so many times it starts to speed up and you get frustrated that you can’t keep up so you can’t focus on it. You don’t want to focus on it, but it’s forcing you to. 

It’s playing over and over and - shit. Fuck. You forgot a part. You start to feel anxious and panicky and a little sick to your stomach. You have to get away from everything and shut off the world for a minute so you can remember it. Sometimes you can’t remember it, and you feel sick until you can look up the words. You look up the words about 20 times a day, so you can keep the song fresh in your mind so you don’t have to worry about forgetting parts and feeling sick. You don’t want to look up the words, and it makes you feel ashamed and like you’re not trying hard enough to fight this. You are, but it’s just hard to overcome these things sometimes. But you are fighting so hard.

Some days are better than others. Most days you give yourself a constant headache and constant forehead/eye pain, and you have trouble physically focusing on things. Your eyes and head are exhausted from this stupid song. Some days, though, the song is weighing so heavily on your mind that you are shaky, have no appetite and are a little bit sick.

That’s mind looping.

Now, imagine you’re going about your day. You’re at your job, just doing the things you normally do, and you see an old lady. Your brain automatically thinks, “She is very old. I wonder if she’ll get in a car accident on the way home and die a horrific death. She’ll probably hit head on and completely obliterate herself.” (This is fairly tame, but I wanted to keep this politically correct.) You stop yourself. What the fuck? Why did I think that? I don’t actually think that. Am I a horrible person? Am I a psychopath?

You lose sleep because you’re worried you’re all these awful things. You stop considering yourself a good person. You try to keep everyone you love happy and safe in order to combat these things that keep invading your head. You don’t want to have these terrible thoughts.

It’s a bad explanation, but those are intrusive thoughts. They don’t signify that anyone is dangerous at all, they’re just unwanted thoughts that invade someone’s mind. They could be violent, sexual, them doing something to someone, someone doing something to them, them witnessing something, etc.