Look around you.  Notice how much of your life is affected by negative spinning thoughts in response to the stresses of daily life.  If there is a genuine crisis, these spinning thoughts and the world they race through can become very intense indeed. Chronic pain is a major additional stress.

Look at our society.  How much cultural behavior is driven by attitudes that are also repetitive and negative?  They have been passed down for many generations.

The strategies of suffering, suppressing, and masking are not effective in solving obsessive thinking.  Over time, the circuits strengthen. Talking about your problems will often just reinforce and add complexity to these irrational thinking patterns. “Postive thinking” is another way of suppressing negative thinking.  A re-programming process is your only alternative.

Our brains are programmable and you can take charge of your own programming.  There are three aspects of reprogramming:

• Awareness of the pattern of thinking
• Detatchment (de-energizing)
• Creation of a functional alternative circuit

The basic principle of reprogramming is to use the same methods that caused the circuits to initially form.  When a thought is associated with any physical sensation, a neurological connection is made.  For example, if you stepped out in front of a car and were almost hit, it was the thought that you might be struck that caused your heart to race.  There is now an intense connection between that thought and a physicial sensation that will not be forgotten.  The most well known example of association is the classic experiment on Pavlov’s dogs.

There are many ways to develop new and more functional neurological pathways.  Thoughts can be associated with feel, sound, music, visualization, art, etc.  However I will repeatedly point out that writing down your negative thoughts is the foundation.  It is concrete, and you are associating these thoughts with vision and feel. There is now a physical distance between you and the thought. There are also other effective methods such as visualization and meditation that are more advanced techniques.

The results of reprogramming can be amazing. Holt’s Winning Run is a particularly spectacular one.

BF