121. Negative Thought Spirals: 5 Ways to Stay Calm and Focused
As an interior designer, you're no stranger to the ups and downs of running a business. But even beyond the typical peaks and valleys, it's easy to get caught up ruminating on something a client said or did, or beating yourself up over a mistake you made. Before you know it, you're completely absorbed in this loop of negative thinking.
In this episode, I'm diving into how to recognize when you're caught in a negative thought spiral and practical strategies to break free from it. By learning to manage your mind in these moments, you can cultivate a greater sense of calm, confidence, and focus in your work and life.
Join me as I share five powerful techniques to stop negative thought spirals in their tracks. You'll learn how to separate yourself from your thoughts, ground yourself in the present moment, and find new perspectives that empower you to take action. With practice, you can develop your inner coach and take control of your mental and emotional wellbeing as a design business owner.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why negative thought spirals happen and how they pretend to be useful.
How to recognize the physical and emotional signs that you're stuck in a negative thought loop.
The difference between facts and stories, and why separating them is key to breaking free from spirals.
How to use your senses to ground yourself in the present moment and stop ruminating on the past or future.
Why finding new perspectives and contradicting your negative thoughts can help you disprove the stories you're telling yourself.
How to "close the loop" on negative thought spirals by identifying your underlying concerns and focusing on what you can control.
Why developing your ability to redirect your thoughts is essential to your effectiveness and wellbeing as a business owner.
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118. Enough Chances to Succeed: Staying Committed to Pursuing Your Goals
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 121. In this one, we're gonna talk about how to stop those negative thought spirals that can really derail your day. When you're in the interior design business, you probably know there can be some real high highs and low lows. And just even outside of those peaks and valleys, the running of the day-to-day operations of your company, it's easy to hit a snag, fall short of your own expectations, and find yourself ruminating on something a client said or did or something that you said or did too. And it completely absorbs you.
So today we're gonna dive into how to recognize when you're in those negative thought spirals and how to put a stop to them so that you can start feeling more calm, confident, focused, and really have the ability to tap into your inner coach when these moment happens, instead of letting that inner critic catastrophizing part of you run the show.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to be here with you today as always, and really looking forward to talking about today's topic of negative thought spirals. It's something that's been coming up a lot in my private coaching conversations and thought it would be really helpful to bring it here to the podcast.
And on a personal note, I've been reflecting on something really fun that I got to do this week. And that was lead a live workshop at Blended Blue, which is this incredible multi-line showroom in Minneapolis. And I had such a great time working with the designers there and sharing my work with them and also being able to coach them live.
And also what was really neat about this experience was that Blended Blue was a showroom that I used to source from when I was a practicing designer for my projects and even for my own home. And after the owner and I had talked about doing this, I was remembering, oh yeah, and actually the very first like professional brand photos that I had done, some of them were actually taken in her showroom.
And the showroom has since moved and has expanded and grown, but I was pulling up these photos and oh my gosh, it was so neat to see that younger version of me who was like really stepping into that next level of creating my design business. It was when I had engaged someone for branding work and was getting my first professional website. I felt so full circle being in that space and also then several of my local clients came to the presentation and to the workshop so I got to meet with them live in person, it was just a really, really lovely experience and an opportunity to reflect on all that has changed since then.
As I mentioned, what we're gonna talk about today with those negative thought spirals has been coming up a lot in coaching with my private clients. And of course, this is something that comes up for me too. It was especially strong before we left for our winter break trip and definitely had to tap into these tools myself. So I thought I'd bring it to the podcast because I think we've all been in one of those thought patterns where it just loops and loops and loops. And typically when we're in a looping pattern like that, it is not a super positive mindset.
So today what I wanna talk about is what do you do when you're in one of those negative thought spirals, and then also how to get out of it and work with yourself when you find yourself there. Instead of buying into the spiral and really continue to go down that thought path, how do we get ourselves out of that moment and recenter in ourselves?
Of course, these types of thought patterns can definitely happen in your personal life. And then of course, it's going to happen in the context of being an interior design business owner. There is so much that you come up against during the day. There are so many relational dynamics that you're navigating. You are stretching yourself and bumping up against possibly high expectations. Well, let's be honest, you are bumping up against high expectations if you are listening to this show. Perfectionistic tendencies, challenges that you're just gonna encounter with this particular line of work, right, there's lots of opportunities to encounter those circumstances that could trigger one of these negative thought spirals.
Before we dive into why these happen, or how to get out of them, let's just make sure we're on the same page. So when I talk about a negative thought spiral, it's really those negative thought patterns, the negatively framed narrative or story that starts running through your head with persistence and often increasing intensity.
When I was thinking about talking about this topic for the show, the visual that came to mind was one of those things you'll often see them like they're kind of like a way to collect money in a public space. You'll put the coin in, it's like a big funnel, and kids love to do this. We have one of these at our zoo. So you put the penny or whatever kind of coin in the little slot, and then it starts rolling around the rim of this essentially giant funnel. And as it rolls and rolls, it's picking up speed, the circumference that it's traveling is getting smaller and smaller and it just gets going and going and going. And the loop becomes tighter, it becomes faster, the distance around the eventual hole gets smaller. And then right before the penny drops into that hole where they're collecting the money, the penny is almost like vibrating. It's like really, really rolling and really, really circling.
And when I think about these negative thought spirals, that's really the image that comes to mind is that it's like can be running in the background, but as it goes, it's like the intensity, the velocity, the persistence, it just increases inside the brain. And that's really what I'm talking about with these negative thought spirals, because we can have passing thoughts, we have passing thoughts all the time. And we might have one like, oops, mess that up. And if you listen to the episode where I was talking about totally forgetting to get salad for salad night, you know, I had that thought of, oh, shoot, you know, and I was frustrated, but I can move on from that.
Or you can have the thought, oops, messed that up. And then it grows and it intensifies and it builds and it becomes this huge thing inside our brain. Where we're going really from a casual, oh, well, I'm not gonna do that again, or I'm gonna try not to do that again, to I can't believe you did this. This is gonna be so awful. Everything is ruined. I always do this and so on. You can see that contrast of those two ways of thinking and the pattern that develops, pattern that maybe develops from the initial thought. These looping sentences, because thoughts are just the sentences that are running through our brain, can be about outside circumstances. There might be a project misstep or an upset client, and then you start to catastrophize, assuming the worst possible outcomes. And let me just say, if this is you, and tend to go to worst possible outcome, worst case scenario, definitely go back and listen to episode 76 where I talk about that topic also through the lens of best case scenarios.
You're imagining what is the worst possible outcome. You're taking it way far on the extreme or you're overgeneralizing taking one event that's happened or one little thing and making it mean something about everything. It becomes this like blanket assumption about what would be true in every circumstance.
And then sometimes these negative thoughts spirals, instead of looping on the bad outcomes that could come or we feel certain will happen from an outside circumstance, like something that's gonna happen outside of us, you then turn them on yourself, criticizing your performance, your worth as a designer or a person. Thinking maybe that you can read people's minds and just know they're thinking something unfavorable about you or maybe even just preemptively expecting you will fail or disappoint in some way.
So it can be about those outside things or it can become internal. There's lots of ways these negative thought spirals show up and with increased awareness from becoming the watcher of your thoughts, whether that's through journaling, through self coaching, reflecting with a coach like myself, meditation, you're really gonna start to recognize your patterns.
Even as I'm giving you these examples, you might have something that's popping up for you and going, oh, yeah, that is one that's on repeat. That's because often each of us have our own go to negative thoughts we tend to loop on the ones that feel very automatic and instantaneous when we bump up against certain things.
Most people also have circumstances that they tend to loop on, whether it be money, people being upset or thinking certain things about them, mistakes being made, things not being good enough. So just good to know what are your go-to's that you tend to loop on? Because awareness is always going to be the first step towards reducing these negative thought spirals and changing the way that you are thinking.
As you note how you experience these thought loops or the frequency or the types, you might be wondering, why on earth do I get trapped in these, right? Logically, we can take a step back and see that they consume so much mental energy and they take up actual time because of the internal distracted state we enter, or even possibly being so consumed by these thoughts that you feel frozen in inaction. So we can see this is not useful, and yet we continue to do it.
What's really happening here is that your brain is trying to help you, whether that's from trying to make sense of a situation or find a solution or give you a sense of control. We love control, don't we? It's believing that replaying these events or scenes can somehow prevent it from happening again. Except that when we're in this heightened emotional state, the protective part of us, the one that's trying to solve and gain control, the part that's looping, often ends up creating additional stress.
The thing with these negative thought spirals is that the pattern really only pretends to be useful. What actually ends up happening is that by looping on the thought, you're reinforcing the belief and you're strengthening the neural pathways associated with those thoughts so that they become stronger and more persistent and you're creating more heightened emotional state in the body, which of course is ramping you up to fight, flee or freeze in a protective way.
So you're not actually solving anything because the thing with a spiral, if you think about the visual of a spiral, is that it never ends. And that's where you come in to take responsibility for your mental wellbeing in this way and lead yourself as your inner coach, instead of buying in to the thoughts and buying in to the story as true.
Because not only do these negative thought spirals feel really unpleasant, they can be so disruptive, taking you out of what you're doing both in that tangible sense of not being able to effectively execute tasks, but also taking you out of the present moment. That feeling of being there, being somewhere, doing something, but not really being there. Whether that's in your work or your home life. I think we've all experienced that from time to time. You're either not thinking as clearly or you've just checked out.
One of the things that I think is interesting that I see with clients is that sometimes these negative thought spirals are actually being used to create urgency and pressure to do in the business. So take a moment and just check in.
We've talked a lot about the looping on the internal and the external, kind of from a worry or anxiety place, but also where are you trying to use these negative thought spirals to create urgency and pressure for yourself because you're believing that that gets you into action where you're possibly repeating to yourself, I'm so busy, I'm so overwhelmed, I have so much to do, I'm never going to get this done. Because you're telling yourself in the back of your brain, maybe not consciously, but maybe out loud, who knows, you're telling yourself you work well under pressure. And so you're trying to use a negative thought spiral to get you moving.
But what I want you to know is that you are actually making yourself less effective. So if there's any part of you that thinks this negative thought spiral is necessary during your day, I encourage you to question that. I'm gonna repeat what I said before, and that is that the loops pretend to be necessary and helpful. So you have to remind yourself that they simply are not. And these spirals are unlikely to stop on your own. So you have to take care when your brain leads you down that path.
One of the things that I think is tricky about these negative thought spirals is that often you're hearing these thought loops in your own voice. So you don't even think to question them. It's just you inside your head reporting the truth. But here's the real truth. You are not your thoughts, and just because you think it does not mean it's true.
And that leads us to talking about how do you stop these negative thought spirals so that you can get out of your head and out of your own way. Before we dive into those strategies, I do want to put a quick pin in that and say that when I say stop these negative thought spirals, it's not as absolute as that.
Based on our brain's negativity bias and it's concerned with looking for danger to protect us I don't believe we ever really get to the point where we don't have these negative thought loops pop up however through coaching and practice because these are tools you're going to have to practice. We can lessen the frequency and intensity overall. And also we can lessen the amount that we latch on and get carried away with these spirals. We can hop off the spiral more quickly and really develop our internal resources so that when they do occur, they're less disruptive and our response helps to soothe rather than strengthen the loop.
Now I wanna talk about some specific strategies for stopping these negative thought spirals. Of course this is going to start with awareness. You have to notice that you're in a thought spiral and get curious about what thoughts are looping. Essentially what are you telling yourself?
So sometimes we don't notice the thoughts first, we notice the experience in our body. So typically if you are walking around holding your breath, if your shoulders are up in your ear, if you're feeling really tense and buzzy, that's a great chance to pause and just think, all right, I noticed that I am feeling this heightened emotional state. Could I possibly be in a thought loop? So that's always where we're going to start. We have to recognize and know that that is something that we're experiencing.
If you're aware of the sentences going through your brain, creating that loop, the first strategy that you can try is to create some separation between you as the thinker and the thoughts themselves, because those are two separate things.
One of the visuals I like for this is to think about that you, the person having the thought is the sky, and then the thoughts are the clouds. As we know, clouds will shift, change their shape, they will move along the sky, and thoughts are really just those optional sentences that our brain uses to produce meaning of the world. And so we can just picture those thoughts as the clouds floating through our awareness and practice releasing them, letting them go and allowing them to pass by.
So that's a great visual to start with when you are very aware of those specific sentences that you're telling yourself is to visualize those thoughts passing by as a cloud and just imagine letting the breeze take them away.
The second strategy I wanna give you is to practice separating facts from story. There are the indisputable facts of circumstances that we interact with and things that happen. And then there's the story that we tell ourselves about those facts. Your negative thought spiral will absolutely be a story. So when you notice you're in one, take a pause and you can write out what is happening. That can be a great additional strategy to this of brain dumping what those thoughts spirals are and then pausing and saying, okay, what are the actual facts of what happened or I said what someone else did. Getting factual and moving away from the story gives you that space that you need to again, separate yourself as the thinker from the thoughts.
I find separating facts from story can be especially useful if you tend to catastrophize or overgeneralize in your thought patterns. An example of this would be if you're telling yourself, maybe, "I always mess up" or "it's never good enough". What are the facts? I mean, did you have a typo in an order? Did you forget to follow up on a drawing set and maybe now something is delayed by two days, you want to get very clear with what actually happened.
The third technique you can try is to ground yourself with your senses. And that involves bringing yourself into the present moment. Thought spirals, often associated with anxiety, worry, and fear, they exist in the past and the future. So if you're in the present moment, you can't be in the past or the future, meaning it's harder to stay in the loop if you're in the here and now.
And one of the ways that you can do this is by using your senses, is to bring yourself right into the moment that you are in right here, right now, noticing perhaps the sensations in your body, even rubbing your hands together, rubbing the thumb against the index finger, just create that sense of sensation for yourself. You can feel the ground beneath you, or maybe the seat of the chair supporting you. Maybe it's feeling your breath in the chest, rising and falling.
And you can also use your eyes and ears. That's another great strategy of looking maybe at the detail of something in the room. Maybe you light a candle and watch the flame or listen for subtle sounds, especially if they're soothing sounds. Bring yourself back into the present moment, and that will help ground you and take you out of the spiral.
The fourth strategy I'll share is to disprove your thoughts. So if you have that awareness of what you're telling yourself, "this is going to be awful" or wherever that brain is going. Remember thoughts are made up sentences and because they're made up, you can make up something else or you can find other perspectives, right?
It's just the brain trying to make sense of the world through assigning meaning and making assumptions. So if your brain has jumped to one conclusion, work to contradict it, find another perspective and prove yourself wrong. One of my favorite questions to ask is, how could I be wrong about this? If I'm telling myself, this is going to end horribly, how could I be wrong about that? What else could happen? What else could be true? What am I not seeing right now? What am I not seeing right now that could be helpful for me to consider?
When I think about the strategy of disproving your thoughts, I kind of think of it as like putting the thought in a jar and you're just shaking it up pretty vigorously. And that's gonna crumble. Often we just see when we're in that loop and we take a step out of it and we think, what are the other perspectives? How could I be wrong? What else could be true? The belief starts to disintegrate because we start to notice that there isn't just that one truth that we're telling ourselves.
And the fifth strategy that I wanna give you here is to close the loop. Thought spirals left to their own devices are like that penny spinning in the funnel that I described earlier. They're just gonna keep going round and round and round. So instead of having a spiral, which never ends, you need to create a loop. If you're drawing a loop or like a circle on a page, you put the pen on the page and you start doing that arc and eventually it ends. You get to the point where you have put the pen down originally, you have met that point again and you pick up your pen and you are done. You have the circle on the page. It is a complete loop. You do not keep going with it.
So take some time when you're having the spiral to really understand what the underlying concern is and acknowledge your brain's protective pattern. And then look for where you have control so you can make a plan. Often with the thought spirals, we are stuck in the problem instead of moving to the solution. So you're maybe worried about a presentation and how it's going to go bad and thinking about what you might say, what you might do, what the client's reaction might be. Okay, that's fine.
Our brains are gonna bring that up and we can step outside of it and say, all right, so what's my underlying concern here? That maybe I'm gonna miss the mark on the presentation, that maybe I'm gonna come across maybe not as confident as I want. Okay, so what could I do about that? Maybe how could I prepare? Or is there a clarifying question that I really need to ask the client to understand what it is they're looking for so that I can show up at this presentation and feel like I have a really great solution.
When we're in a spiral, our brains telling us that we don't have control, that we don't have influence. And so this is your opportunity to put a pause in that spiral and look for what could be a concrete next step I could take instead of just living in the land of maybes and what ifs, because when you're in the land of maybes and what ifs, those are going to keep you swirling.
Those are the ones that I wanna share with you. And I think what you've probably picked up on is that there's the opportunity to pause. We have to slow down our thinking and regulate ourselves in these moments when the spirals are present. That is how you get out of them. And I shared five great techniques with you. And of course, there's lots more.
And when I'm working with a private client who has these types of persistent thought patterns, we test and customize what works for them. But these are all really great starting points for you. And I really encourage you to give one of them at least a try. Test it out. See if it works. See what you might want to test again and keep going.
Remember, these thought spirals have been go tos for years and years. And because you've repeated them so many times and bought into the story so many times over the years, it's likely gonna take repetition and practice to settle your mind and disrupt that conditioning.
It really is one of these things though that you're gonna have to practice on yourself. It's kind of like learning to ride a bike. You could read all the books and listen to all the podcasts about how to ride a bike, but until you get on the bike and start trying to pedal and find your balance, you will not truly know how to do this.
And of course, that is why it's so, so helpful to have the support of a coach. And if that's something that you'd like support with, absolutely get on my wait list for private coaching. You can just go to desicresswell.com/coaching and add your name. But you can also work on being your own inner coach. You can take one of these tools that I've shared with you today and give them a try. Treat them like a little experiment you're running. There's no pressure to get it right or feel immediate relief, but just keep experimenting. Because this is so so worth it for the mental freedom and clarity that you are going to open up for yourself when you step outside of the spiral.
You're going to feel so much calmer, more confident, and it's also really empowering to know that you have the ability to redirect your mental and emotional experience day to day. Of course, feeling better is a huge benefit, but also you're just gonna be so much more effective as the leader and CEO of your business.
Often I see designers giving these thought loops credit for helping you maybe ward off bad things or having a certain level of performance, but really the distress is holding you back. You have been successful, not because you worried and catastrophized and were so, so harsh on yourself, but you were successful in spite of these internal obstacles your brain was throwing up. And so that means when you develop a different relationship with your thinking and have the ability to step outside of these patterns, there is so much more possibility that will open up to you.
You're going to be more efficient, more effective, be able to think more strategically, manage your time better, be more present in your relationships. I mean, the list goes on and on. So give one of these a try today, and I'd love to hear how it goes. You can always email me if you're on my newsletter list, simply reply, or you can send me an Instagram DM @desicreswell.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Make sure you're following or subscribe to the show so that you don't miss an episode. This is also one of the key ways that you can support the show because when you subscribe or follow it lets the podcast platforms know that designers are loving the content and it brings it to the forefront when others are searching. Until we talk next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
So today we're gonna dive into how to recognize when you're in those negative thought spirals and how to put a stop to them so that you can start feeling more calm, confident, focused, and really have the ability to tap into your inner coach when these moment happens, instead of letting that inner critic catastrophizing part of you run the show.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to be here with you today as always, and really looking forward to talking about today's topic of negative thought spirals. It's something that's been coming up a lot in my private coaching conversations and thought it would be really helpful to bring it here to the podcast.
And on a personal note, I've been reflecting on something really fun that I got to do this week. And that was lead a live workshop at Blended Blue, which is this incredible multi-line showroom in Minneapolis. And I had such a great time working with the designers there and sharing my work with them and also being able to coach them live.
And also what was really neat about this experience was that Blended Blue was a showroom that I used to source from when I was a practicing designer for my projects and even for my own home. And after the owner and I had talked about doing this, I was remembering, oh yeah, and actually the very first like professional brand photos that I had done, some of them were actually taken in her showroom.
And the showroom has since moved and has expanded and grown, but I was pulling up these photos and oh my gosh, it was so neat to see that younger version of me who was like really stepping into that next level of creating my design business. It was when I had engaged someone for branding work and was getting my first professional website. I felt so full circle being in that space and also then several of my local clients came to the presentation and to the workshop so I got to meet with them live in person, it was just a really, really lovely experience and an opportunity to reflect on all that has changed since then.
As I mentioned, what we're gonna talk about today with those negative thought spirals has been coming up a lot in coaching with my private clients. And of course, this is something that comes up for me too. It was especially strong before we left for our winter break trip and definitely had to tap into these tools myself. So I thought I'd bring it to the podcast because I think we've all been in one of those thought patterns where it just loops and loops and loops. And typically when we're in a looping pattern like that, it is not a super positive mindset.
So today what I wanna talk about is what do you do when you're in one of those negative thought spirals, and then also how to get out of it and work with yourself when you find yourself there. Instead of buying into the spiral and really continue to go down that thought path, how do we get ourselves out of that moment and recenter in ourselves?
Of course, these types of thought patterns can definitely happen in your personal life. And then of course, it's going to happen in the context of being an interior design business owner. There is so much that you come up against during the day. There are so many relational dynamics that you're navigating. You are stretching yourself and bumping up against possibly high expectations. Well, let's be honest, you are bumping up against high expectations if you are listening to this show. Perfectionistic tendencies, challenges that you're just gonna encounter with this particular line of work, right, there's lots of opportunities to encounter those circumstances that could trigger one of these negative thought spirals.
Before we dive into why these happen, or how to get out of them, let's just make sure we're on the same page. So when I talk about a negative thought spiral, it's really those negative thought patterns, the negatively framed narrative or story that starts running through your head with persistence and often increasing intensity.
When I was thinking about talking about this topic for the show, the visual that came to mind was one of those things you'll often see them like they're kind of like a way to collect money in a public space. You'll put the coin in, it's like a big funnel, and kids love to do this. We have one of these at our zoo. So you put the penny or whatever kind of coin in the little slot, and then it starts rolling around the rim of this essentially giant funnel. And as it rolls and rolls, it's picking up speed, the circumference that it's traveling is getting smaller and smaller and it just gets going and going and going. And the loop becomes tighter, it becomes faster, the distance around the eventual hole gets smaller. And then right before the penny drops into that hole where they're collecting the money, the penny is almost like vibrating. It's like really, really rolling and really, really circling.
And when I think about these negative thought spirals, that's really the image that comes to mind is that it's like can be running in the background, but as it goes, it's like the intensity, the velocity, the persistence, it just increases inside the brain. And that's really what I'm talking about with these negative thought spirals, because we can have passing thoughts, we have passing thoughts all the time. And we might have one like, oops, mess that up. And if you listen to the episode where I was talking about totally forgetting to get salad for salad night, you know, I had that thought of, oh, shoot, you know, and I was frustrated, but I can move on from that.
Or you can have the thought, oops, messed that up. And then it grows and it intensifies and it builds and it becomes this huge thing inside our brain. Where we're going really from a casual, oh, well, I'm not gonna do that again, or I'm gonna try not to do that again, to I can't believe you did this. This is gonna be so awful. Everything is ruined. I always do this and so on. You can see that contrast of those two ways of thinking and the pattern that develops, pattern that maybe develops from the initial thought. These looping sentences, because thoughts are just the sentences that are running through our brain, can be about outside circumstances. There might be a project misstep or an upset client, and then you start to catastrophize, assuming the worst possible outcomes. And let me just say, if this is you, and tend to go to worst possible outcome, worst case scenario, definitely go back and listen to episode 76 where I talk about that topic also through the lens of best case scenarios.
You're imagining what is the worst possible outcome. You're taking it way far on the extreme or you're overgeneralizing taking one event that's happened or one little thing and making it mean something about everything. It becomes this like blanket assumption about what would be true in every circumstance.
And then sometimes these negative thoughts spirals, instead of looping on the bad outcomes that could come or we feel certain will happen from an outside circumstance, like something that's gonna happen outside of us, you then turn them on yourself, criticizing your performance, your worth as a designer or a person. Thinking maybe that you can read people's minds and just know they're thinking something unfavorable about you or maybe even just preemptively expecting you will fail or disappoint in some way.
So it can be about those outside things or it can become internal. There's lots of ways these negative thought spirals show up and with increased awareness from becoming the watcher of your thoughts, whether that's through journaling, through self coaching, reflecting with a coach like myself, meditation, you're really gonna start to recognize your patterns.
Even as I'm giving you these examples, you might have something that's popping up for you and going, oh, yeah, that is one that's on repeat. That's because often each of us have our own go to negative thoughts we tend to loop on the ones that feel very automatic and instantaneous when we bump up against certain things.
Most people also have circumstances that they tend to loop on, whether it be money, people being upset or thinking certain things about them, mistakes being made, things not being good enough. So just good to know what are your go-to's that you tend to loop on? Because awareness is always going to be the first step towards reducing these negative thought spirals and changing the way that you are thinking.
As you note how you experience these thought loops or the frequency or the types, you might be wondering, why on earth do I get trapped in these, right? Logically, we can take a step back and see that they consume so much mental energy and they take up actual time because of the internal distracted state we enter, or even possibly being so consumed by these thoughts that you feel frozen in inaction. So we can see this is not useful, and yet we continue to do it.
What's really happening here is that your brain is trying to help you, whether that's from trying to make sense of a situation or find a solution or give you a sense of control. We love control, don't we? It's believing that replaying these events or scenes can somehow prevent it from happening again. Except that when we're in this heightened emotional state, the protective part of us, the one that's trying to solve and gain control, the part that's looping, often ends up creating additional stress.
The thing with these negative thought spirals is that the pattern really only pretends to be useful. What actually ends up happening is that by looping on the thought, you're reinforcing the belief and you're strengthening the neural pathways associated with those thoughts so that they become stronger and more persistent and you're creating more heightened emotional state in the body, which of course is ramping you up to fight, flee or freeze in a protective way.
So you're not actually solving anything because the thing with a spiral, if you think about the visual of a spiral, is that it never ends. And that's where you come in to take responsibility for your mental wellbeing in this way and lead yourself as your inner coach, instead of buying in to the thoughts and buying in to the story as true.
Because not only do these negative thought spirals feel really unpleasant, they can be so disruptive, taking you out of what you're doing both in that tangible sense of not being able to effectively execute tasks, but also taking you out of the present moment. That feeling of being there, being somewhere, doing something, but not really being there. Whether that's in your work or your home life. I think we've all experienced that from time to time. You're either not thinking as clearly or you've just checked out.
One of the things that I think is interesting that I see with clients is that sometimes these negative thought spirals are actually being used to create urgency and pressure to do in the business. So take a moment and just check in.
We've talked a lot about the looping on the internal and the external, kind of from a worry or anxiety place, but also where are you trying to use these negative thought spirals to create urgency and pressure for yourself because you're believing that that gets you into action where you're possibly repeating to yourself, I'm so busy, I'm so overwhelmed, I have so much to do, I'm never going to get this done. Because you're telling yourself in the back of your brain, maybe not consciously, but maybe out loud, who knows, you're telling yourself you work well under pressure. And so you're trying to use a negative thought spiral to get you moving.
But what I want you to know is that you are actually making yourself less effective. So if there's any part of you that thinks this negative thought spiral is necessary during your day, I encourage you to question that. I'm gonna repeat what I said before, and that is that the loops pretend to be necessary and helpful. So you have to remind yourself that they simply are not. And these spirals are unlikely to stop on your own. So you have to take care when your brain leads you down that path.
One of the things that I think is tricky about these negative thought spirals is that often you're hearing these thought loops in your own voice. So you don't even think to question them. It's just you inside your head reporting the truth. But here's the real truth. You are not your thoughts, and just because you think it does not mean it's true.
And that leads us to talking about how do you stop these negative thought spirals so that you can get out of your head and out of your own way. Before we dive into those strategies, I do want to put a quick pin in that and say that when I say stop these negative thought spirals, it's not as absolute as that.
Based on our brain's negativity bias and it's concerned with looking for danger to protect us I don't believe we ever really get to the point where we don't have these negative thought loops pop up however through coaching and practice because these are tools you're going to have to practice. We can lessen the frequency and intensity overall. And also we can lessen the amount that we latch on and get carried away with these spirals. We can hop off the spiral more quickly and really develop our internal resources so that when they do occur, they're less disruptive and our response helps to soothe rather than strengthen the loop.
Now I wanna talk about some specific strategies for stopping these negative thought spirals. Of course this is going to start with awareness. You have to notice that you're in a thought spiral and get curious about what thoughts are looping. Essentially what are you telling yourself?
So sometimes we don't notice the thoughts first, we notice the experience in our body. So typically if you are walking around holding your breath, if your shoulders are up in your ear, if you're feeling really tense and buzzy, that's a great chance to pause and just think, all right, I noticed that I am feeling this heightened emotional state. Could I possibly be in a thought loop? So that's always where we're going to start. We have to recognize and know that that is something that we're experiencing.
If you're aware of the sentences going through your brain, creating that loop, the first strategy that you can try is to create some separation between you as the thinker and the thoughts themselves, because those are two separate things.
One of the visuals I like for this is to think about that you, the person having the thought is the sky, and then the thoughts are the clouds. As we know, clouds will shift, change their shape, they will move along the sky, and thoughts are really just those optional sentences that our brain uses to produce meaning of the world. And so we can just picture those thoughts as the clouds floating through our awareness and practice releasing them, letting them go and allowing them to pass by.
So that's a great visual to start with when you are very aware of those specific sentences that you're telling yourself is to visualize those thoughts passing by as a cloud and just imagine letting the breeze take them away.
The second strategy I wanna give you is to practice separating facts from story. There are the indisputable facts of circumstances that we interact with and things that happen. And then there's the story that we tell ourselves about those facts. Your negative thought spiral will absolutely be a story. So when you notice you're in one, take a pause and you can write out what is happening. That can be a great additional strategy to this of brain dumping what those thoughts spirals are and then pausing and saying, okay, what are the actual facts of what happened or I said what someone else did. Getting factual and moving away from the story gives you that space that you need to again, separate yourself as the thinker from the thoughts.
I find separating facts from story can be especially useful if you tend to catastrophize or overgeneralize in your thought patterns. An example of this would be if you're telling yourself, maybe, "I always mess up" or "it's never good enough". What are the facts? I mean, did you have a typo in an order? Did you forget to follow up on a drawing set and maybe now something is delayed by two days, you want to get very clear with what actually happened.
The third technique you can try is to ground yourself with your senses. And that involves bringing yourself into the present moment. Thought spirals, often associated with anxiety, worry, and fear, they exist in the past and the future. So if you're in the present moment, you can't be in the past or the future, meaning it's harder to stay in the loop if you're in the here and now.
And one of the ways that you can do this is by using your senses, is to bring yourself right into the moment that you are in right here, right now, noticing perhaps the sensations in your body, even rubbing your hands together, rubbing the thumb against the index finger, just create that sense of sensation for yourself. You can feel the ground beneath you, or maybe the seat of the chair supporting you. Maybe it's feeling your breath in the chest, rising and falling.
And you can also use your eyes and ears. That's another great strategy of looking maybe at the detail of something in the room. Maybe you light a candle and watch the flame or listen for subtle sounds, especially if they're soothing sounds. Bring yourself back into the present moment, and that will help ground you and take you out of the spiral.
The fourth strategy I'll share is to disprove your thoughts. So if you have that awareness of what you're telling yourself, "this is going to be awful" or wherever that brain is going. Remember thoughts are made up sentences and because they're made up, you can make up something else or you can find other perspectives, right?
It's just the brain trying to make sense of the world through assigning meaning and making assumptions. So if your brain has jumped to one conclusion, work to contradict it, find another perspective and prove yourself wrong. One of my favorite questions to ask is, how could I be wrong about this? If I'm telling myself, this is going to end horribly, how could I be wrong about that? What else could happen? What else could be true? What am I not seeing right now? What am I not seeing right now that could be helpful for me to consider?
When I think about the strategy of disproving your thoughts, I kind of think of it as like putting the thought in a jar and you're just shaking it up pretty vigorously. And that's gonna crumble. Often we just see when we're in that loop and we take a step out of it and we think, what are the other perspectives? How could I be wrong? What else could be true? The belief starts to disintegrate because we start to notice that there isn't just that one truth that we're telling ourselves.
And the fifth strategy that I wanna give you here is to close the loop. Thought spirals left to their own devices are like that penny spinning in the funnel that I described earlier. They're just gonna keep going round and round and round. So instead of having a spiral, which never ends, you need to create a loop. If you're drawing a loop or like a circle on a page, you put the pen on the page and you start doing that arc and eventually it ends. You get to the point where you have put the pen down originally, you have met that point again and you pick up your pen and you are done. You have the circle on the page. It is a complete loop. You do not keep going with it.
So take some time when you're having the spiral to really understand what the underlying concern is and acknowledge your brain's protective pattern. And then look for where you have control so you can make a plan. Often with the thought spirals, we are stuck in the problem instead of moving to the solution. So you're maybe worried about a presentation and how it's going to go bad and thinking about what you might say, what you might do, what the client's reaction might be. Okay, that's fine.
Our brains are gonna bring that up and we can step outside of it and say, all right, so what's my underlying concern here? That maybe I'm gonna miss the mark on the presentation, that maybe I'm gonna come across maybe not as confident as I want. Okay, so what could I do about that? Maybe how could I prepare? Or is there a clarifying question that I really need to ask the client to understand what it is they're looking for so that I can show up at this presentation and feel like I have a really great solution.
When we're in a spiral, our brains telling us that we don't have control, that we don't have influence. And so this is your opportunity to put a pause in that spiral and look for what could be a concrete next step I could take instead of just living in the land of maybes and what ifs, because when you're in the land of maybes and what ifs, those are going to keep you swirling.
Those are the ones that I wanna share with you. And I think what you've probably picked up on is that there's the opportunity to pause. We have to slow down our thinking and regulate ourselves in these moments when the spirals are present. That is how you get out of them. And I shared five great techniques with you. And of course, there's lots more.
And when I'm working with a private client who has these types of persistent thought patterns, we test and customize what works for them. But these are all really great starting points for you. And I really encourage you to give one of them at least a try. Test it out. See if it works. See what you might want to test again and keep going.
Remember, these thought spirals have been go tos for years and years. And because you've repeated them so many times and bought into the story so many times over the years, it's likely gonna take repetition and practice to settle your mind and disrupt that conditioning.
It really is one of these things though that you're gonna have to practice on yourself. It's kind of like learning to ride a bike. You could read all the books and listen to all the podcasts about how to ride a bike, but until you get on the bike and start trying to pedal and find your balance, you will not truly know how to do this.
And of course, that is why it's so, so helpful to have the support of a coach. And if that's something that you'd like support with, absolutely get on my wait list for private coaching. You can just go to desicresswell.com/coaching and add your name. But you can also work on being your own inner coach. You can take one of these tools that I've shared with you today and give them a try. Treat them like a little experiment you're running. There's no pressure to get it right or feel immediate relief, but just keep experimenting. Because this is so so worth it for the mental freedom and clarity that you are going to open up for yourself when you step outside of the spiral.
You're going to feel so much calmer, more confident, and it's also really empowering to know that you have the ability to redirect your mental and emotional experience day to day. Of course, feeling better is a huge benefit, but also you're just gonna be so much more effective as the leader and CEO of your business.
Often I see designers giving these thought loops credit for helping you maybe ward off bad things or having a certain level of performance, but really the distress is holding you back. You have been successful, not because you worried and catastrophized and were so, so harsh on yourself, but you were successful in spite of these internal obstacles your brain was throwing up. And so that means when you develop a different relationship with your thinking and have the ability to step outside of these patterns, there is so much more possibility that will open up to you.
You're going to be more efficient, more effective, be able to think more strategically, manage your time better, be more present in your relationships. I mean, the list goes on and on. So give one of these a try today, and I'd love to hear how it goes. You can always email me if you're on my newsletter list, simply reply, or you can send me an Instagram DM @desicreswell.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Make sure you're following or subscribe to the show so that you don't miss an episode. This is also one of the key ways that you can support the show because when you subscribe or follow it lets the podcast platforms know that designers are loving the content and it brings it to the forefront when others are searching. Until we talk next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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