Your Head is a Jungle (Looping Negative Thoughts)

Self-help article: worry, rumination, negative thoughts, ADHD, inattentive ADHD, repetitive thoughts, obsessive thoughts

You know how negative thoughts aren't just one-off events? They tend to loop, replay, and echo, much like a bird's call repeating endlessly. While it might feel like an inherent part of life, try zooming out for a moment. Imagine if we were like ants, observed by highly intelligent aliens peering into our minds, not from our first-person perspective, but from a detached, bird's-eye view. What would they witness? Patterns.

Understanding the Pinball Machine of Your Mind

Just as a leopard can't change its spots, we often feel stuck with our inherent thought patterns. But what if we could? One way to understand how our thoughts operate is to picture an old-school pinball arcade machine. Our mental wanderings are like that pinball, constantly being shuttled back and forth in the same directions, triggered by the same flippers. It feels incredibly compelling to keep that pinball in motion, scoring more points. The thing is, we are the pinball! We just often don't even realise it. Unless you're actively experimenting with new ideas, thoughts, and experiences, you will likely keep repeating the same mental loops, perpetually stuck on that neon-lit board. It sounds a bit like something out of Black Mirror, doesn't it?

The idea of ceasing to play is akin to the mindfulness state that many in the West strive for, attempting to catch up with Eastern philosophies. We hear about getting in our five minutes of mindfulness, which often dwindles to one, eventually becoming just another buzzword. Perhaps it should be mind-less instead? In essence, this is about ceasing to entertain every thought, letting them go as they complete their cycles. You become that observer from above, recognising the patterns, upgrading from a first-person shooter to a third-person perspective, just like gameplay where you get to see and control your character from the outside. The challenge, however, is that living in our first-person view tends to validate our thoughts, making everything feel intensely real, despite neuroscience and millennia-old Eastern wisdom suggesting otherwise. And, of course, we can't forget the wise words of Alan Watts. You might be thinking, "If my thoughts aren't real, then who am I?"

The Symphony of Your Stressful Thoughts

Imagine sitting at a piano and hitting a few keys, even if you can't read music. Let's say you manage to create a little melody that doesn't sound half bad. Each key in that melody is like a specific thought, which we typically experience as a vague mishmash of thought, feeling, and image replay. When making music, each new note needs to harmonise with the last, right? This is similar to how a first thought can trigger a related, yet distinct, second thought, just like individual musical notes making up the full melody.

Consider a stressful day at work. That memory might cue up more stressful thoughts, perhaps about your home life, and then something entirely different. Before you know it, we are playing a full mental symphony of stress. This is your train of thought, a series of linked thoughts that seem to pull each other along. The resulting melody is the sum total of those individual notes. Similarly, when we think, we are usually executing individual thoughts strung together to form a kind of thought linkage, hence the term train of thought.

If something has happened to you and you find yourself in a negative headspace, you will naturally gravitate towards negative thoughts. Sometimes these are the same ones looping on repeat like a broken record, while others trigger unrelated thoughts. Initially, this usually doesn't take over. But with time and practice, it can become a habit as we build a stronger, reinforcing neural network of these thoughts, which we come to know as worry and rumination.

It's different when we're young. We tend to bounce back relatively quickly from what feel like world-ending setbacks…a grazed knee, a fallen ice cream, a parent yelling. While these might send us into the emotional equivalent of an adult mental breakdown, we recover nonetheless! This is because even though we feel the raw intensity of emotion (think of a snotty, screaming toddler), we haven't yet acquired the words to label that rawness. Our prefrontal cortex, crucial for adult development, isn't fully functioning.

While logic and reasoning are undeniably important, when our prefrontal reasoning brain receives "screams and cries" from our feeling-oriented right brain, the left brain simply parrots it back in the form of thoughts like, "You're useless," "You always mess things up," or "No one cares." At this point, it stops being logic and becomes belief. This is how emotions morph into narratives, almost like a kind of gaslighting yourself.

Over time, if we habitually ponder life while feeling anxious, low, or mentally murky, we start stringing together more and more negative thoughts, like beads on a very moody necklace. If those hypothetical aliens were to observe our inner world, they wouldn't see a tidy, well edited film with a popcorn worthy story. Instead, they would probably witness a jittery slideshow, random snapshots and blurry flashes of thought, feeling, memory, and noise, more static than signal.

The Predictable Sequences of Our Minds

Imagine neon lights flashing in sequences, over and over. This is also like a thought flashing up. When we produce a chain of thoughts, strung together to form a narrative we tell ourselves, it's akin to Morse code. Only, instead of dot dot dot, it's "she's smiling at you" leading to "it's derisive," then "people laugh at you," and finally, "memories of bullying summoned."

If you pivot your perspective, thoughts are essentially sequences…structured and predictable, like a mental soundtrack where the same chords keep playing on repeat. Perhaps to those alien observers, this is exactly how they perceive our messy human mental world, or even that of AI. They might peer down their gigantic, super-advanced telescopes and see billions of blinking Morse codes, or even melodies if they appreciate musical aesthetics.

From our internal perspective, these thoughts feel more or less like reality. But from an external viewpoint? They're just loops. Just as we hear seagulls squawk, a repetitive noise that means something nuanced in their little seagull minds, to us, just a racket. For many though, this isn't a one off occurrence, instead becoming the backbone of their inner narrative, solidifying a self imposed reality rinsed and repeated. Literally like hitting those same old keys on the piano and expecting a different melody or reaction from the audience.

People's perception will far more readily change when they hear a melody that echoes the confident you. A capable, strong, forward-driven individual. This is like learning to play the piano a bit better, and reading music is like getting to know your mind and how it works. Imagine what you would be able to do if you were a fully trained pianist. That's true freedom! You could improvise, play at will with spontaneity, avoid musical ruts. Right now, we are often playing the same old low, de-tuned keys. I know that better than anyone, trust me.

The Anatomy of Our Negative Thoughts: Emotional Tone

These loops are not just random noise, they are actually tied together by something deeper, namely emotional tone. While this might sound a bit wishy-washy, let me explain. Our brains naturally string together thoughts that feel the same, and it is not always logical. A small embarrassment today can suddenly connect with something from five years ago. So different events, same negative emotional undertone.

Research supports this. When in a negative headspace, our brains are more likely to recall other emotionally similar memories, becoming more rigid and less flexible in the process, even if they're unrelated in context (Tyng et al., 2017; Joormann & Gotlib, 2007). This emotional tone acts like a thread, weaving together a patchwork of gloom from different corners of your memory.

This spiral often becomes automatic. Ironically, the brain is attempting to protect us, scanning for threats and preparing for worst-case scenarios. Remember, we are governed by survival instincts that made sense when saber-toothed tigers were a real concern. But now? It mostly just traps us in anxious thought loops that simply do not serve us, almost like constant small alarms. Almost as if running outdated mental software, still scanning for tigers when all we encounter are awkward conversations and unanswered texts.

Your Thoughts Are Melodies, Not Facts

As a musician, I started producing music at age 15 using digital software called Fruity Loops (yes, that's its real name, and no, it's not just a cereal brand!). Through years of building melodies in this software, literally "painting" bars across the screen to create loops and the like, I've developed a visual way of thinking about sound, as many digital music producers can attest. There is so much you can do with software like FL or LogicPro (another type of music software). Anyway, it got me thinking, what if our thoughts were like melodies?

Each belief, each memory, each self-judgment is just a note in a longer sequence, metaphorically speaking. The ones that hurt? Maybe stuck in a minor key, a flat, dissonant loop that feels unresolved and dragging. The empowering part? You are not the song, you are the composer!

We composers do not just let music happen. We shape it, adding pauses, shift rhythms, change keys, rewriting, remixing. It begins with noticing the pattern first. You might find yourself saying, "There's that anxious de-tuned chord again," or “Here comes the low hum of self-doubt.”…Perhaps fear sounds to you as it does to me, those classic sinister strings you hear in the horror movies, right before something is about to make you jump out of your skin. Recall Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho movie scene. Knife, shower, a bloody hand, horror. Maybe a little dramatic but you catch my drift.

Here's an interesting (by my standards) musical take on some CBT: naming it interrupts the loop. Then, try to shift it. Add a new musical note, like curiosity. Drop in a harmony, like self-compassion. Introduce a lighter instrument, something playful or hopeful.

To me, negative thoughts often conjure the image of sunken, sad violins, bringing to mind that familiar get the violins out cliché. But what about you? What do your joyful thoughts sound like? What melody would you compose for contentment, or meaning, or even awe? And for the record, my idea of a positive tune is definitely not Pharrell Williams' Happy. That on loop would be my personal hell. I'm more of a techno head, though these days I compose in all sorts of styles. Don't judge me. I started off only enjoying trance music! Ah, I remember the first time music truly spoke to me, when I felt a rush of something real, unlike the drab radio songs endlessly churned out. Those day trips in the car with my grandparents, listening to country music, The Carpenters, or Cheer Up Sleepy Jean, were definitely not my idea of music at the time, I wasn’t best pleased. But now, I do have a soft spot for Sleepy Jean for nostalgic reasons. Funny how life works.

Changing the Score

You have probably heard the phrase change the record, when someone is being repetitive. That's precisely what we’re talking about here. To me, negative thoughts tend to reside in low, minor keys, heavy and claustrophobic. Positive ones, conversely, are more open, higher-pitched, brighter, and spacious. You don't need to fake happiness, but you can create space for other melodies to emerge. That's the sound of progress.

The more you practice hearing and reshaping your thought patterns (and seeing them for what they are - just a flickering Morse code or a fleeting melody), the easier it becomes to break out of the loop. Because, like me, you realise from that bird's-eye perspective that it's literally all it is. It's not reality, nor is it other people's perception of you. So, instead of passively playing the same old tune, start composing your inner life. You don't have to live to the sound of someone else's old, sad song; write something new. Remember, you have the power to shift the rhythm and change the key.

How to Write Better Melodies: Better Thoughts

So, how do you begin composing better mental melodies? Think like a musician.

Great composers don't just wing it. They listen, replaying or pinpointing where things fall out of tune. What's your mental chorus, the line that keeps coming back? What's the first note that sets off the rest? Once you catch it, try changing just one note at a time. For example, what triggered you to lie awake all night, spiralling into negative doom? Was it a snarky comment, or perhaps a backhanded compliment? Hours later, it's 3 AM, and now you're replaying a perceived failure from several years ago.

Cheesy, maybe. But after years of living with a mind that looped the same negative tracks on repeat, I can tell you this stuff matters. As I mentioned earlier, this tendency often worsens with age, as we practice worrying habits until they become almost etched into our brains. I see this becoming even more prevalent as our reptilian brain tries to keep pace with our rapidly changing environment, which constantly bombards us with information, strengthening insecurity through comparison culture, and weakening inner resilience and compassion. In clinical terms, this style of thinking is called perseverative. It's the mind's habit of getting stuck, and it's a defining feature of anxiety and depression, both mild and severe. That's why I'm sharing this. I've both conducted and published research in this field, and if it helped me, it can help you too. Hang in there.

If you'd like more on how to be at peace with your thoughts, you might find this YouTube video featuring GGGamer - Alok Kanojia insightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW8QBembzRQ&t=877s

References

• Tyng, C. M., Amin, H. U., Saad, M. N. M., & Malik, A. S. (2017). The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1454–1454. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454

  
  

• Joormann, J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2007). Selective attention to emotional faces following recovery from depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116(1), 80–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.116.1.80