34. From Chaos to Clarity: Hacks for Managing the ZILLIONS of Racing Thoughts after Divorce

How often do your thoughts spiral out of control? 

Our minds are incredibly active at the best of times, with an estimated 60 to 80 thousand thoughts per day, but after divorce, it can feel like this is at least trebled right? Which leaves us bloody exhausted. 

In this episode, we explore practical techniques to help you regain control of your mind amidst the chaos of divorce. From understanding the science behind racing thoughts to implementing some different ways to frame the thoughts, we provide actionable steps to quiet the mental noise and find peace within.

Whether you're struggling to make sense of intrusive thoughts about the past or feeling anxious about an uncertain future, this episode offers valuable insights and tools to help you navigate the turbulent waters of divorce with greater resilience and clarity.


Please do let me know if the episode helps,

Loads of love

Sarah x 


🌸

THE DIVORCE BOOK CLUB
 
https://patreon.com/thedivorcebookclub

FREE Guide to the 10 MUST read divorce books after divorce

https://thedivorcebookclub.com/free-resources/

INSTAGRAM

https://www.instagram.com/thedivorcechapter

Chapters

• 0:00 The exhaustion of the 60-80,000 thoughts a day
• 6:11 Detaching from our thoughts.... because we are not our thoughts
• 8:01 Awareness of the litter.... and chucking it in the bin
• 11:29 Sack the sh**ty committee
• 12:12 Past, present or future thoughts
• 14:34 Zooming in and zooming out with a new lens
• 15:46 Anchors for grounding and the Alphabet game
• 20:38 Repetition to help it stick

Transcript

00:01

Hola how are we? So, as I seem to do lately, I'm starting with a question, because it gets our heads into what we're going to be talking about, doesn't it? So the question, How often do your thoughts completely spiral out of control? You know, those racing thoughts, where you just get one, then another one and another five sweep in and throw you completely, and you just cannot think straight at all. Going through a divorce, I can pretty much imagine it's fairly often. I remember my early days post separation, it was fucking constant. Mostly thoughts, like, I just don't understand what the fuck is going on? Was it because I did... insert any number of verbs and adjectives that actually had fuck all to do with anything. Where is he? Who's he with? What's he doing? Does he still love me? What did he mean when he said, again, insert any bullshit that has left his lying lips? How the fuck am I supposed to do life alone? How can he throw everything away? What about me? What about the kids? What about the dog? What about the car? Etc, etc. On and on. The thoughts, go round and round, it is just completely exhausting. Now, there is a reason why it's so exhausting. It may not frickin help, but there is a reason. And that's because of the estimated 60 to 80,000 thoughts we are supposed to have a day, I will never understand how the bods work that shit out. I mean, how do they count the thoughts? Or how do they know the thoughts to be able to count them, I'll never get it, I'll never get it anyway. These 10s of 1000s of thoughts. Only around four to 5% of them are in the conscious thinking logical part of the brain. The other 95% are in our subconscious, and I've done a whole other episode before on subconscious thinking. So do go back and check it out. It was quite an early one. But these 5% or so in our conscious aware brain actually take up around 95% of our brains energy. So the much higher number of subconscious thoughts chug away in the background, like running software that actually take very little power. It's those conscious thoughts that take all of the energy. Think of it like a laptop, like when it's just on standby, it still got all the shit running in the background, keeping it going. But it stays pretty well charged. But when you spend the day actively working on it, that battery drains super bloody quickly. And our brains work much the same way. It's why when we're learning something new, it's so damn tiring. Think back to a time when you learned something like a new language or when you were learning to drive. That shit took some serious physical energy. Why? Because it was using a lot of brain energy. And given we know just how closely the brain and the body functions together. It's not surprising. It's all so damn exhausting. And unfortunately, even though it's not something we are choosing to learn, we don't want to fucking learn it. We are being forced to learn to be on our own, forced to learn that we're not fucking married anymore. And learning that shit. Making Sense of that shit in the first place. Takes some serious, serious power. It's new and it's scary. So it's all we can bloody think about on a conscious level. It's not like this shit is on autopilot yet. It's a natural response to something new and major in your life. So first off, stop beating yourself up about it because it's natural feeling like this, it is natural. There is nothing wrong with you. In fact, you're functioning exactly as you should. But living in this constant friggin loop of thought after thought after thought, racing around your head like a bloody Grand Prix is not helpful, even if it is natural, right? 

05:10

So the first thing to know is that these thoughts are not you. You are not your thoughts. Yes, they're in your head. But they are not you. You have the thoughts, but they are not you. You've got an arm, right? Does that make you an arm? You've got an ear, but you're not an ear. Just because we have thoughts does not make us our thoughts. So we need to find a way to detach from these thoughts, detach from the meaning we're giving them and free up some of the energy we're using on them. Even your subconscious thoughts that are the software running you in the background, they're not you either, they've likely come from a combination of what you've seen, heard and experienced throughout your entire lifetime. But particularly as a young child, you learned about relationships from watching them, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, then later in living them, teenage crushes and all. And all of that has shaped our thoughts and beliefs about relationships now. But the fact that you can step back and observe your thoughts, think about your thoughts, as a separate entity, trying to analyse your thoughts even means they're not you, we just need a bit of a software update. Right? So now we've established that our thoughts are not actually us, how else can we start to step back and detach a bit from them, not let them take over everything. 

07:00

The first step is always becoming aware of your thoughts. They're going on whether you like it or not, whether you're aware of it or not. Remember those 60 to 80,000 of the fuckers? They're happening. And if we want to be able to step back, observe them work out how to detach from them, we need to be aware of them in the first place and stage an intervention on ourselves on our thoughts. So a couple of ways at the outset that might be helpful to see your thoughts in a different way once you become aware of them, and then can help you start to detach from them when they are not the thoughts you need. Because if you can step back from the thoughts and see them as detached from you, as separate from you, it kinda gives you another way of managing them. So imagine this, because we love an analogy, right? Helps us think so imagine you are walking down the street. And suddenly out of nowhere, an empty crisp packet hits you in the face. And you realise that all around you. There is literally so much litter, so much rubbish. It's everywhere. It almost feels a bit like it's following you, every person you walk past gives you another bit of rubbish, another bit of litter, you might pick up one bit and put it in the bin. But before you know it, there's another bit, it's multiplied. It's coming at you from every direction. And suddenly, you're picking up all this litter being given all this litter and you're juggling it, right. Now, in real life. If this were to happen, would you just keep on taking every single piece of litter that comes at you, that's given to you,  would you pick every bit up, carry on with you. So one way to detach is to think of each unhelpful thought as a piece of litter a piece of rubbish, visualise it, so you're thinking, Where is he? That's an empty crisp packet. The thought if only I'd done blah, blah, blah. That's a crushed empty can of diet coke, visualise it and then imagine a giant bin or even better, a skip. See yourself chucking that piece of litter in the bin. Chuck that thought in the bin as a piece of rubbish. Say out loud if you want to. That's not helpful. You don't need it. I don't need you thank you, say out loud think it out loud. You know what I mean when I say think it out loud, thinking it out loud in your head. Thoughts only become something that means something because of what you have made it mean the meaning you've attached to it. So if you can start to see it as having no meaning that is of use to you, see it as unhelpful see it as unnecessary. Visualise chucking it away, like a piece of rubbish that's unhelpful. It can help clean up your thoughts a bit. 

10:28

Sometimes when there are zillions of thoughts racing around, another way to think of them is naming them the shitty committee. They're just a bunch of do gooders who think that they know better. But remember, you are the CEO of you and your life, no bloody shitty committee has overriding control. You do. So ack 'em, they're completely bloody useless. These are a couple of ways to pause the thinking process and bring awareness to the racing thoughts, seeing them in a different way. And recognising that they're just not helpful. They're not helpful at all. 

11:11

Another thing to try and detach your thoughts and reroute them, to what is helpful for you, is to focus on what's happening right now. Because often, our thoughts are actually rooted in another place in time. So bear with me here, and I'll try and explain right. Now thoughts about what has or hasn't happened, what someone has done or not done, what we've said or not said, they're all in the past tense, they all focus on the past, right? It's gone. It has or hasn't happened. And it's now in the past. And getting stuck in these kinds of thoughts around the past, are often where we start to ruminate and become depressed. Then there are thoughts like, what is going to happen? Will we get back together? How do I live without him and such like are thoughts rooted in the future and specifically a fear of the future of the unknown. And so these kinds of thoughts are, where we start to get a whole heap of anxiety, as opposed to depression. Right now, Lao Tzu? I never know if I pronounced that right. L A O T Z U, Lao Tzu, was an ancient Chinese philosopher in 500 BC or something. There's a whole heap of studies and work that's emerged from Lao Tzu. But one saying, here's that fits really well with this is he said, If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you're at peace, you are living in the present. Now, these racing kind of thoughts in the earlier days of separation are more likely to be future facing thoughts and fears, right? Probably interspersed with what happened in the past as well. But a lot of it is the unknown. We have no idea what the fuck is going on, and we're living in fear. So anxiety is sky high. 

13:33

So to try and help you see this in another way, I want you to think for a minute about taking a photo. If you stand too far away, you can't see what you're trying to snap the shot of. But if you go in too close, though, it's all blurry. We've either zoomed in too close or not zoomed in enough. And in order to get the right focus, to take the shot, it's standing in between and starting with a new focus. It's like when you're zoomed in, it's so in depth, that it's blurry, and his foggy completely foggy, there's no clarity. But when we're zoomed out, there's so much going on, it's impossible to focus, and we need to reset that focus. And in our thoughts when there's so much going on, and it's impossible to see we need to try and look at things through a different lens. For us going through these crazy racing thoughts. The best lens to bring some clarity is the lens of the here and now. 

14:45

What are ways we can do that? Now I've talked before about creating an anchor. There is the anchor where we spend time thinking about a calmer moment, visualising a situation where you felt amazing or or visualising a scene that means calm and peace to you. And then whilst thinking about this scene, press your thumb and finger together. And then every time we become aware that the thoughts have started to go out of control, we press the same finger and thumb together to trigger into your mind, the calmer picture, it's like an anchor grounding you into the present. Another anchor you could do is listen to a song whilst you're visualising the happy, peaceful scene, and then that song becomes your trigger anchor point. But it's a lot easier to use your fingers because you've always got them with you, you know what I mean? And now another way to intervene in the racing thoughts with an anchor of sorts, is to push your thumb against each of your four fingers in turn. And when you press each finger, you say a word, leading to a four word affirmation or saying to ground you and which to refocus the present and calm the mind. So one often used is, I can do this. So you push your thumb against your forefinger and say, I, then the thumb pressed to the middle finger and say can, then the thumb to the ring finger saying do and finally the thumb to the little finger and say this, I can do this with each finger in turn, and repeat. Until the thoughts have calmed. I can do this. Similarly, we've talked before about the power of breathing to bring the focus back to the present. Breathing in for for holding for six or seven, then exhaling for eight seconds, the longer outburst triggers the parasympathetic nervous system into believing you're safe. And when our anxious thoughts are racing through fear, it's because our brain has essentially told our nervous system, we're not safe. So breathing in this way, tricks ourselves into calm and safety. Or another way to refocus and detach from the anxious thoughts is the alphabet game. Now I'm sure we've all played this game over the years in one format or another where you pick a theme, and you have to find something for every letter of the alphabet. So So you have a team of girls names, which is quite topical for me as my fifth grandchild is due imminently. And she's a girl, number four girl. So A Amelie B, Bella, C, Charlotte, D Daisy, etc, etc. It works by causing an intervention to the racing thoughts and refocusing on the here and now to kick anxiety in the butt, or chuck it in the trash as though it's litter. And one more for you is to actually schedule worry time. Often we get a zillion more racing thoughts by worrying about the racing thoughts. And so actually scheduling time to let all the crazy thoughts run free. enables us to pause when outside of the worry time and go. No No, no, no, no, no, no, this is not scheduled for now. Thanks. It allows us space to have the worry time, get the thoughts out. And then say, right, we're done. Done. We move on with our day, we're done. Good time to do it. It can be the end of the day. Actually, that can be quite helpful too, especially at bedtime and getting to sleep because the mind is racing is a problem schedule 10 minutes with a timer. And that's all the time you're allowed. Any other crazy racing thoughts outside of that you go no bu bu bu bu bu bu. It's not the worry time now. That's for worry time, and you move on. And of course, there's also even meditations especially for worry time there's a meditation for everything. Check out the Insight Timer app for some good freebies on that. Always on meditation, there's tonnes on there. Or good old journaling as always to brain dump the unhelpful thoughts. 

19:37

Now, I know a lot of this stuff I talk about here can seem like I'm saying the same old shit over and over again, giving you different variations of similar techniques and whatnot. But it's because we know that brains work with repetition and building new neural pathways and new ways of thinking. So Saying the same kinds of things in different ways what I'm hoping from that is that something I say in one particular way can stick for you. So I hope if you are having racing intrusive thoughts throughout an after your divorce or anytime actually that you find this helpful in some way today, do please let me know and please please please leave a review even if you've done it before. It really does help the podcast to grow and reach the earbuds of those who need it. There are also some journal prompts on www.thedivorcebookclub.com to help you make sense of shit too even when you can't stop thinking about the ex, links in the show notes as always. So whether you're thinking about unwanted thoughts as litter to chuck away or zooming in and out of focus to concentrate on the here and now, whether it's telling the shitty committee how fucking unhelpful they are, or scheduling time to engage with the fuckers hopefully some of the tips and ideas talked about today will help you, I really do hope so. So that is it from me from this week. Thank you as always for tuning in. It honestly means the world to me, I say it all the time, but it's because it's true. I will be back in your beautiful earbuds again next week. So until then, sending you so much love for me