7 Ways to Get Unstuck

By Therese Borchard

Brain hiccups. We all get a case of them now and then. For some they are fleeting and all a person has to do is to take a deep breath, visualize their departure, and poof! They’re gone. Not so easy for the rest of us. If I counted up the moments I spent trying to escape the broken record of my thoughts, it would be – no kidding – at least a decade of my life. Here are some techniques I’ve been using lately to catch the cycle of nonsense and return to the moment, or, more realistically, at least be able to engage in what I’m doing enough to fool everyone that I’m really paying attention and not running numbers in my head.

Therese Borchard is the author of Beyond Blue and can be reached at www.thereseborchard.com.

Throw Out the Garbage

In “What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming OCD,” author Dawn Huebner, Ph.D., offers a useful analogy for those of us who need to read kids’ books to understand our neurosis.

Think of your brain like a garbage pail, which needs to sort what gets thrown away and what stays. Then literally draw the trashcan and the thoughts that are floating around inside. Circle the things that are worth keeping (or thinking about), put an X over the things that should be discarded (don’t justify the brain power), and mark with a question mark those things that you’re not sure about. I’m going to add a fourth category: a place of purgatory for the thoughts that you know are important but can stop obsessing about. Example: I have a decision floating in my neural passageways for which I have already run the numbers 245 times and flipped 15 coins (10 heads, 5 tails – but I still don’t know). It’s time to put that baby to rest by simply moving it over to the “to sort later” pile.

Put on the Earphones

You most likely have had the pleasure of going into a coffee shop looking forward to a moment of solitary bliss, and a mom and her three kids sit next to you, the littlest one hanging out at your table and the mom thinking it’s adorable. Then the guy behind you gets on his phone and thinks everyone in the place wants to hear his conversation with his boss on the latest sales numbers. The volume on my Pandora hits maximum. That’s what you want to do to the annoying noise within the coffee shop of your head. You don’t need to hear a screaming kid who is apparently adorable when he screams or a salesman announcing his last numbers. You want peace and quiet, if only for that half-hour. So get yourself some imaginary headphones and turn up the volume.