Stressful Mind Habits – Dead-end thoughts

When were under stress it’s easy to develop some habits that further fuel the cycle. Some of these types of thoughts, I call “Dead End” thoughts.

This pattern is where you allow yourself to go down a path of thought, that you’ve probably been down many times before.

That might be around some plans that you have for the future, or some project or other.

So you think your way through the various steps of what has to happen, but then you get to a point where you can’t progress…

Maybe something has to change or time has to pass by before you can actually progress, but for some reason you find yourself going through the same steps that you are familiar with in the same way that you have many times before.

It’s like driving down a cul-de-sac or dead end road, knowing that you can’t get through, but you drive down anyway, only to reverse back up, to then drive down another one.

This pattern is almost like “mental chewing gum”, just something you do to keep your mind busy, or to remind yourself of how you’d like things to be at some point in the future.

When the mind is constantly busy, it creates more low level stress and drains the energy.

These mind habits might just appear as small things… but when we work on these “small things” we can start to gain some influence over our stress levels.