Perseverance: Stuck in a Loop
Sometimes my brain gets stuck.
On a thought. On a word. On a song.
It keeps repeating it over and over. It might be something that someone said to me that irritated me, or that I disagreed with. It might be the words to a poem. Or a news item. (Politics, anyone?)
I was so puzzled by my lack of ability to ‘move on’ that I asked a cognitive therapist about it.
“Can you explain something to me?” I asked.
“Sometimes my brain gets stuck on a thought. It won’t move on. Someone calls on the phone and I keep repeating what they told me over, and over, and over. All day long. It’s really annoying.”
She said that type of repetition had a name.
Perseverance!
Perseverance is when the brain keeps repeating things, like a record stuck in a scratch or a groove. It keeps going over the same information, caught in a loop, not wanting to switch tasks or move on.
She went on to explain that stopping one task and transitioning to another required a high level of cognitive work. That it was the level of executive functioning right before multi-tasking. She said that to stop A and start B was no easy job. That it was something a brain could be taught.
I was flabbergasted.
Stopping a task was difficult? Transitioning? Moving on to another task?
I’d always taken it for granted that my brain could stop, that it could move on, and that it could switch from task to task seamlessly.
She said it was like when a mother gave a child at a playground a warning. The mother would say, “Five more minutes, then we’re leaving.” Followed by, “Two minutes left. Do last things you want to.” And then, “Okay. Final minute. Get ready to leave now.”
That children needed to learn how to stop an activity was news to me. So was the fact that it was something a brain could be taught. I’d never thought about stopping or switching tasks as something that had to be learned.
My brain was acting like a toddler when her mother wasn’t paying attention to her. She was yelling at me, “Mom! Mom! ... Mom!!”
The therapist said that I could learn how to transition my brain out of the perseverance loop. I might think of it like getting off the ride. Or like taking off one hat and putting on another. My brain was in the process of learning that it had multiple roles. It could stop. It could shift.
She asked me to talk to my own brain.
To teach it like I would a child. To tell it what I expected it to do.
“Okay brain,” I could say. “We are going to shift now. I want you to stop ... we are shifting now ... we are going to change focus to ...”
The past few months I’ve been perfecting my “brain talk.”
Somedays I talk to it like it’s a child. Other days like it’s a girlfriend.
I thank my brain for the information she’s giving me. Then I tell her it’s time to move on.
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s good information to know. Now, we are going to switch tasks. Now I want you to ...”
Refocusing has been a real key.
If I just go for a walk or bike ride, I find myself back in the same loop again.
But if I give my brain another task, it willingly complies. I might say, “We’re going for a walk, and I want you to name every tree, flower and plant that you see along the way.” Then my brain is happy to focus on that new thing and it seems to forget what it was looping over. I might ask it to play number games, alphabet games, remember a specific person or time. It doesn’t really matter. My brain just wants to be busy doing something.
My job these days is to pay attention to my brain.
What a weird thing! I’ve lived with this old brain all my life. And I’m just beginning to realize that it is a stranger to me as much as I am a stranger to it. I’m becoming an explorer, an investigator of the marvelous, mysterious gray matter that exists within my own skull.
As William James so powerfully said, “If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”
Thanks for reading along!
Love always,
Jill