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Re: figuring things out, for me, it’s pretty rare that I’m able to resolve anything from _within_ the loop. It's only when I switch to another context and then switch back to it that I'm able to finally stop the looping. I can think of a few reasons why this works: there's evidence of brains doing "background processing" when asleep or occupied with something else, which I find especially fascinating. Sometimes I'm sure it's because there's something that would provide an "exit condition" if I could just see it, but there's some heuristic active in the present state that's causing that line of thinking to be skipped over and/or zapped of enough salience for the brain to consider it worth chewing on. Maybe in order to return to something the brain has to perform some sort of "bootstrapping" in order to "re-render" whatever ideational substance is involved, and somewhere in that bootstrapping process there's an exit condition that is absent from within the loop, I don't know. I would also defend to the death that not all brain-loops are actually "resolvable" in any meaningful way. For example (stretching the meaning of “rumination” here), I have music going on in my head 24/7. Always. Most of the time they're in the form of short-ish loops, so they repeat a lot. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible - it can actually be really nice sometimes to "overhear" what's playing and join in, because I can help drive the musical procession forward, since the part of my thinking self that’s aware and has free will can focus on the music, innovate on what’s playing, lead the music around, change the song, etc. But unfortunately, the musical homunculus squatting in my head who's always awake is also never satisfied with a particular song coming to a close - try as I might to resolve a looping refrain by bringing the song to a close, the goddamn "Achy Breaky Heart" fanatic I never invited into my inner world in the first place just presses play again. Finishing the song does nothing! Here, there is no _resolution_; there is only _substitution_. At this point, if I don't just refuse to give up, I now find myself forced to trawl through my catalog of catchy songs to put on, so that the worst DJ ever, who has no ability to read the room, might hear what _I'm_ playing and decide to join _me_, before I can find any relief. It feels incredibly stupid when the current time is a very wide-awake 4am and it's at that point where you just have to say _fuck this, this isn't working, I'll never drift off to sleep with this asshole (yourself) playing this crap I didn't pick (well, actually, you did) on repeat_, so now you have to try to think of _other_ songs that get stuck in your head so that you can try playing them in your head to yourself until one of them "takes," in order to stop yourself from annoying the shit out of yourself and keeping yourself awake - all because you can't ask yourself to just stop (because you won't listen)! - but also (and this is my point here) because there's nothing that actually _resolves_ a musical "thought" in such a way that makes it "invalid," "irrelevant," "solved," etc. and thereby any less likely to just cue up again. Oftentimes isn't not even a song - it's a jingle. A fucking jingle!!! Similarly, I've had unresolvable brain-loops deriving from weed paranoia, where I _cannot_ reason with the lizard part of my brain in any way whatsoever. The only thing that works is distraction. This is main reason why weed is just not for me - I hate having to will myself to distraction because any sense of presence is too unsettling. |