You Can't Think Your Way Out of a Spiral (Here's Why)
If you've ever spiralled over something small and then spiralled about the fact that you're spiralling, this one's for you.
Here are a just few of the things I've spiralled about this year:
Why isn't anyone replying to my text in the group chat - does everyone hate me now??
Why is everyone looking at me - am I overdressed or underdressed?
I haven't been to the gym in a while - what if this is just my life now and I'm a lazy slob?
What if I'm not a good person???
Among many more - spiralling sucks and honestly sometimes feels like you're never gonna get out of it no matter how hard you try.
Why you can't think your way out of it
There's a reason for that. It's not that you're not smart enough, or that you're not strong enough: You literally cannot think your way out of a spiral. And there's neuroscience to back this up.
(Disclaimer - I'm going to oversimplify this a lot. I'll link some of the studies below if you want the in-depth version.)
When you're in that overthinking spiral, it's because your nervous system has sensed a threat. If you're spiralling about everyone hating you, the "danger" your body is responding to is loneliness - being cut off from your people. The thing is, your body can't really tell the difference between that and being chased by a lion. Same biological process, same fight/flight/freeze response.
When you're in that state, your brain focuses on keeping you alive, not on being logical. It deprioritises rational thought, not because anything is wrong with you, but because in that moment, survival has outranked reasoning. That's the whole system working exactly as designed.
Which means you can't reason your way out of it. You have to regulate your way out first…
How to regulate your way out
Okay, so you know you can't think your way out of a spiral. So what actually gets you out?
Before you read on, I really want you to know that not every tool works for every nervous system and this doesn't mean you're doing the technique wrong! The point isn't finding the "right" one, it's finding the one that works for you. Some of these will feel silly the first time. Do them anyway. Regulation isn't about believing it'll work, it's about giving your body the signal that the danger has passed, and that might take a couple of tries.
5-4-3-2-1 Grounding
I've written a whole post on this one, so I won't repeat myself here - [link]. Short version: it pulls your attention out of your head and into your senses, which is exactly where it needs to be when you're spiralling.
Progressive muscle relaxation
Tense a muscle group hard for a few seconds, then release. Start at your feet, work your way up. It sounds too simple to do anything, but the release is the point. Your body learns what "not tense" feels like again, which is easy to forget when you've been braced for a while without noticing.
Cold water
Splash your face, run your wrists under cold water, or hold an ice cube. This one's blunt but effective. It's hard to keep spiralling when your body is dealing with "that's cold" instead.
A colour walk
Go outside, pick a colour and see how many things of that colour you can find. It sounds oddly specific, but that's the point. It'll give your overactive brain a small, achievable task, and gets you moving and outside at the same time, which does its own quiet work.
Shake it out
If you've gone still (frozen, numb, stuck) movement matters more than grounding does. Thirty seconds of shaking out your arms and legs, dancing, jumping jacks or even just standing up and moving around the room, can be enough to shift the state.
You'll know it's working when something in you loosens, even slightly. Your shoulders drop. Your breath goes deeper without you forcing it. The thought spiral doesn't necessarily stop, but it gets quieter, like it's happening a few rooms away instead of right behind your eyes. That's your body telling you it's safe enough now to hand the wheel back to your brain.
One honest caveat: these tools are for the everyday spirals: The group chat, the outfit, the "am I a bad person" 2am spiral. If this is happening most days, if nothing seems to touch it, or if it's tipping into panic attacks or thoughts that scare you, that's not a "try harder with the colour walk" problem. That's worth bringing to a therapist or your GP. Regulation tools are genuinely useful, but they're not a substitute for support when your nervous system needs more than a reset.
You're not broken
I spiral too. About the group chat, about whether I've said something weird in a group setting, about whether I'm actually good at any of this. It doesn't matter that I understand the neuroscience: Knowing why it happens doesn't make it not happen. We're all human after all.
But here's what I remind myself, and what I say to clients almost every time this comes up: wow, your body was really working overtime to keep you alive there.
It sounds like a joke, but I mean it. Somewhere in your nervous system, a very old, very loyal part of your brain looked at "everyone's ignoring my text" and decided this was worth treating like a threat to your survival. It got that wrong, in the sense that you're not actually in danger. But it wasn't wrong to try - it's just doing the only job it knows how to do, and it's not going to stop doing that job because you asked it nicely.
So the next time you're three hours deep into a spiral, hating yourself for not being able to snap out of it, remember you're not broken, and you're not weak. The part of your brain responsible for logic and reasoning was never offline because something's wrong with you. It went quiet because your body decided survival came first. That's not a flaw. That's just what brains do.
And here's the part that's important to understand: this isn't fixed. Every time you regulate - every time you do a 5-4-3-2-1, or a colour walk, or breathe through it instead of white-knuckling your way to the other side - you're not just getting through that spiral. You're showing your nervous system, again, that it's safe to come back down. Over time, that adds up. Spiralling doesn't just feel less awful to be in, it tends to happen less often, and it tends to pass faster when it does.
You're not stuck with the brain you have right now forever. You're just building trust with it, one regulated moment at a time.
Once you're back online, once your body feels safe enough to hand the wheel back, that's when the real work can start: sorting through what was actually true from what your spiralling brain convinced you was true in the moment. But that's a post for another day.
For now, just this: you don't owe yourself perfect logic in the middle of a threat response. You just owe yourself a little patience while you wait for it to pass.
A little further reading, if you want it:
Arnsten, A.F.T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Arnsten, A.F.T., Raskind, M.A., Taylor, F.B., & Connor, D.F. (2014). The effects of stress exposure on prefrontal cortex: Translating basic research into successful treatments for PTSD. Neurobiology of Stress, 1, 89–99.
