Upward Spiral: Rescuing Yourself from Negative Feedback Loops
Free Falling
Sometimes it seems like everything is going downhill. You feel reactive and out of control, seemingly unable to stop the cycle of self-sabotage. Why does this happen, and how can you hit the breaks?
While downward spirals often seem to come out of nowhere, they always have a trigger. It can start with anything, really: a difficult situation, a poor night of sleep, a thought that casts doubt on your self-worth. Whatever happened, all you know is that you don’t like this feeling and that it isn’t going away.
Before you know it, you might start to self-medicate in ways that don’t serve you. While this may lead to a passing moment of relief, it inevitably brings you further down. You begin to feel increasingly out of control, feeling as though you are drifting away from your dreams, goals, and self.
At some point, the reason you started spiraling becomes irrelevant. Yet, you feel stuck and now believe that this is just how things are. More harmfully, you might believe that this is
who you are. The longer you stay in this state, the harder it is to face the consequences and your feelings.
While bad days are inevitable, downward spirals aren’t. So, when we catch ourselves slipping away, what can we do?
Reversing the Cycle
Our thoughts, feelings, actions, and circumstances are interconnected, forming a feedback loop. This is what turns a single negative event into a vicious cycle. The reverse is also true, and this is the key to stopping harmful patterns. If a negative occurrence triggered the downward spiral, it’s time to get out of it with a positive action. That can be something small, whether it’s going for a walk, calling a friend, or tidying your space.
We often tell ourselves that we’ll start doing better when we feel better, but this belief is not based on how we actually operate. While our emotions influence our behavior, our behavior informs our emotions. That means that you have to start acting in accordance with how you want to feel instead of how you feel in the moment. Do something positive, and trust that your feelings will follow. You can even do this out of curiosity, approaching it like an experiment. If you aren’t happy with your current results, it’s worth trying something new.
Once you take one small step, you start to feel better, in a beneficial way this time. You start to feel motivated to move on to the next task, and this new, positive mood renders you less reliant on negative patterns. Next thing you know, you’re not on a downward spiral but an upward one.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
We have to gain some distance from our mental narratives to spot a downward spiral, let alone stop one. Especially if it’s been going on for a while, you’ve probably become attached to a certain story in your head. You might even identify as a certain kind of person because of it.
The truth is that raw reality is not made up of stories. We’re the ones who attribute meaning to the things that happen. It’s also important to remember that no action, thought, incident, or feeling is who you are. Your identity and habits are malleable. It’s up to you whether you change them intentionally or not.
It can help to explicitly examine your beliefs in this area through self-reflective writing. You might try asking yourself:
- What is the story I’m telling myself right now?
- How would I describe myself? Is that how a friend would describe me?
- How am I feeling right now? What am I doing to fix that? Is it actually helping?
- What do I want most in life? Do I think that’s within reach? Why or why not?
Our beliefs can seem glaringly false under scrutiny, but until we raise them to the light, they feel like the truth. We can’t necessarily stop ourselves from having a mental narrative; however, we can be aware of it and alter it when it isn’t serving us. Yet, while doing this kind of inner work helps, the transformation happens when we start taking different actions. This allows us to actually disprove negative beliefs and confirm positive ones.
Reaching Out
We don’t have to do this alone. Letting someone know what’s happening can go a long way. Seeing a compassionate, outside perspective is like a shortcut to altering your beliefs and mental narrative. Joining a support group or simply reaching out to a friend can be that first step in an upward spiral.
Our inner lives, external circumstances, and the actions that bridge them together inevitably create a feedback loop. This can be for better or for worse. By realizing this, we can take the same pattern that keeps us stuck and flips it on its head. However you may feel at the moment, it’s possible to turn things around. It all starts with a single step.
