Spiral thinking—those endless loops of worry, doubt and negativity—can feel inescapable. Something that can start as an innocent thought can turn your whole day around the more you fixate on it, believing it to be true even if it came from a lie.
But as Jennie Allen, author, speaker and founder of IF:Gathering, shared with RELEVANT, there are practical, scientifically-backed ways to break free.
Here’s how you can start reclaiming your thoughts and, ultimately, your life:
1. Start with a Mind Map
The first step to overcoming spiral thinking is simply paying attention to your thoughts. “The most helpful work I found was really more in the neuroscience world,” Allen says. “What they encourage you to do, and what I encourage you to do in Get Out of Your Head, is to start with a mind map. Just list out what it is you thought about today.”
Once you see all your thoughts laid out, patterns begin to emerge. “You start to see these one or two or three themes emerge, which is then it feels like you can get your hands around it and start to do the work,” she explains.
That work involves identifying lies you’ve been believing—whether about yourself, your relationships or your future—and confronting them with truth.
2. Identify the Lies and Replace Them with Truth
Allen emphasizes that change doesn’t come from simply trying to feel better. It comes from intentional, consistent effort to confront falsehoods with truth.
“How do we ever go from believing a lie to believing the truth? We have to know what the truth is, and we have to know what’s a lie,” she says.
She suggests asking yourself three key questions:
- What lie have I been believing?
- What does God’s Word say about this?
- What truth could set me free from this lie?
Changing your mindset is a process. “In the same way that our negative thoughts have been regular and consistent, we have to put those [positive] thoughts in regularly,” Allen explains.
3. Understand the Science of Your Thoughts
Why is spiral thinking so common? Allen points to the neuroscience behind our thought patterns: “We have anywhere from 9,000 to 60,000 thoughts in a day. Of those thoughts, 85 percent of those thoughts, for most humans, are negative. And about 95 percent of our thoughts are repetitive from the day before.”
This means most of us are stuck in a loop, replaying the same negative thoughts day after day. But there’s hope.
“As much as our brains are shaped by negative thoughts, our brains are also shaped by positive thoughts,” Allen says. “Those positive thoughts are just as powerful and more interrupting the negative ones.”
4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Community
One of the most powerful ways to interrupt spiral thinking is to share your struggles with someone you trust.
“Isolation is probably the greatest enemy to our minds,” Allen says. Reflecting on her own experience, she adds, “I walked through [an] eighteen-month season of doubt. When I look back at that season, that season then was spent alone in the dark with the devil. He just told me whatever he wanted, and I never told anybody.”
The turning point came when she began to open up. “The biggest start to my freedom was when I started saying: this is what I’ve been feeling, this is what I’ve been thinking about,” Allen explains. By sharing her thoughts, she allowed others to speak truth and encouragement into her life.
5. Curate Your Inputs
Finally, Allen urges us to evaluate what we’re consuming. “We’ve got to realize that our inputs are shaping our lives. Our quality of life is shaped by what we think about,” she says.
This doesn’t mean you need to eliminate every stressor, but it does mean being intentional about what you allow into your mind—whether that’s the media you consume, the conversations you engage in, or the spaces you inhabit.
Breaking free from spiral thinking takes effort, but it’s possible. As Allen puts it: “I just wanted to grab everybody by the shoulders and say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to live this way.’”
By noticing your thoughts, identifying the lies, surrounding yourself with community and being mindful of your inputs, you can start to interrupt those destructive patterns and find freedom.