Originally Posted by
hopeful4 
These people take up way too much room in my head, I am frustrated about that.
What do you do when you find yourself in that bad loop of hearing all those negative, soul-robbing thoughts running through your mind over & over & over?
Reprogramming is hard - I sometimes had to verbalize out loud "NO - I'm going to think about x,y, z instead" or purposely distract myself with anything - singing, tv, reading, whatever. I found it helpful to have a mantra ready-to-go so that I didn't have to think hard about what to tell myself - "He is no longer my problem" or something off the wall & ridiculous like a sing-songy rhyme or whatever. If my focus is on *him* I need to bring it back to *me*.
Another great tool is to schedule it for later - mentally giving yourself permission to put this problem back on the shelf & agree to think about it at [whatever convenient] time (rarely do I actually do this, generally that time comes & goes & I've moved on with my day & the world has continued to revolve)..... OR setting a time limit on letting yourself think about it now - ok, I'm going to give myself 10 mins on this & then I have to move on & pick it back up later if I need to. (I never do)
At first I thought that whole scheduling this was nuts, until it worked! (stung originally suggested it to me years ago) The more you do stuff like this, the easier it gets & the less traction you lose every time something catches you off guard.
