Confessing Our Obsessing
By: Nicole Johnson
Recently I heard a woman lament, “I don’t have a drinking problem, I have a thinking problem!” I understand this completely and often live there myself, but what occurred to me is the distinct and important difference between thinking and obsessing:
To Obsess—to think or worry about something constantly or compulsively.
To Think—to use the mind to consider ideas and make judgments.
Thinking is like laying down a railroad track, using your mind to lay the ground-work for ideas and judgments to move forward on. Obsessing is like running on a hamster wheel—spending time and energy like you’re really going somewhere, while in reality it’s just not possible.
Thinking is a constructive process that should be moving us toward a destination and providing the comfort that we are making progress, even if we’re not “there” yet. Obsessing, on the other hand, is circular in motion and drains our energy. It wears us out without bringing us any closer to a solution.
We obsess over different things. Maybe we can’t stop thinking about the past, about all the things we’ve done wrong, or fear we’ve done wrong, or about how much we think we’ve messed up. We have the unique ability to replay thoughts like movies in our heads, or flip through them in our minds like snapshots in a photo album. Or we even rehearse what we “should” have said like old lines in a script that we run over and over. But this is not thinking, this is obsessing, and it is counter productive to finding real solutions.
Have you ever seen a dog in a big yard that only runs on one little path? The whole yard is open to him to run and play, but he always runs in the same place and never veers off it. The first few times he ran that way, he created a trail and now it is just made it deeper and deeper by his constant running. Obsessing is the same pattern. It’s limiting and it is not productive. It carves grooves in our minds that allow the tired scripts to keep running without taking us anywhere new.
Real thinking never calls to mind all the wrongs. It might take them into account in order to recognize patterns, but if we are thinking, we are seeking to move past our “past” and forward in freedom toward our goals.
Obsessing over the past or over a current problem does not lead us up or out of it. In fact, it does just the opposite. It drags us down and might even lead to despair if we are consumed by our own thoughts and feelings. The cycle might begin by thinking, why does this keep happening… nothing is ever going to change…too much has gone wrong. There is no hope… I might as well give up… all is lost. But real thinking counters these thoughts with the truth: The past is the past. I have the chance to make good decisions today. What is the best next step?
It’s time to start confessing our obsessing, and get off the hamster wheel. We can start building the track forward with good constructive thinking about our biggest problems. If we can learn to recognize when we are thinking vs. when we are churning and obsessing, we can stop it from sapping our valuable energy--energy that would definitely be better spent elsewhere, perhaps with our kids.
© 2006 Fresh Brewed Life, Inc.
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