You know that feeling when your brain simply won’t shut up? When the same thoughts circle endlessly, keeping you awake at 3am? When you analyse every conversation, every decision, every bloody breath until you’re completely paralysed by your own mind?
And you’re constantly asking yourself how to stop overthinking.
That’s not a character flaw.
It’s not weakness.
And it’s definitely not something you have to live with forever.
Those patterns you call “overthinking” are mental loops – survival systems that outlived their purpose years ago.
They’re not who you are.
They’re machinery running in the background of your mind. And you can learn to cut the power.
I didn’t figure this out in therapy or from a textbook. I learnt it by living inside these loops for years. Three suicide attempts. A psychiatric ward. Rock bottom taught me what no academic theory could: these patterns aren’t permanent fixtures.
They’re programmes you can reprogram.
This isn’t about positive thinking or mindset hacks.
This is about recognising the wiring underneath your chaos so you can finally stop running the same destructive programmes.
What Are Mental Loops?
Mental loops are repetitive thought patterns that keep you stuck in the same emotional and behavioural cycles.
They’re your brain’s attempt to solve problems. But they’ve become the problem.
Think of them like a broken record player. The needle gets stuck in the same groove, playing the same few seconds over and over until someone lifts it and moves it forward.
Except in your mind, no one’s coming to move the needle. You have to do it yourself.
These loops usually start as protective mechanisms. The Inner Critic Loop might have developed to help you avoid mistakes. The People Pleasing Loop might have kept you safe in an unpredictable household.
But what protected you then is now imprisoning you.
The key to learning how to stop overthinking isn’t to fight these patterns.
It’s to recognise them, understand their function, and then consciously choose to break the cycle.
Through years of studying these patterns in myself and others, I’ve identified 15 specific mental loops that keep people trapped in overthinking cycles.
Let me show you the three most destructive ones.
Learn more about mental patterns and how they control your behavior.
The Comparison Loop
The Pattern:
You’re measuring your behind-the-scenes chaos against everyone else’s carefully curated highlight reel. And social media?
That’s your self-torture device of choice.
You’re competing in a race where everyone else appears to be photoshopped to perfection.
The Comparison Loop destroys your sense of self-worth by constantly measuring your life against others.
You scroll through social media and see everyone else’s success, happiness, and perfect moments.
Meanwhile, you’re intimately familiar with your own struggles, failures, and messy reality.
It’s a completely distorted comparison. You’re comparing their public persona to your private struggles.
No wonder you always feel like you’re falling short.
This pattern steals your joy by making every single achievement feel insignificant compared to what others have accomplished.
It breeds resentment toward people who should be completely irrelevant to your journey.
And it keeps you focused on external validation instead of internal fulfilment.
You end up feeling like a perpetual failure in a game where the rules keep changing and you never actually know the real score.
You recognise this loop when:
- You find yourself stalking someone’s Instagram and feeling progressively worse about your own life.
- When someone else’s success makes you question your own worth.
- When you can’t enjoy your own victories because you’re too busy looking at what everyone else is doing.
- Their win feels like your loss.
- Their happiness highlights your struggles.
- Their perfect life makes yours look rubbish by comparison.
But here’s what you’re missing:
You’re not seeing their reality.
You’re seeing their performance.
And you’re judging your entire existence against someone else’s carefully edited showreel.
The Not Enough Loop
The Pattern:
No matter how much you do, it never feels like enough. The goalpost keeps moving.
You’re running a race with no finish line.
The Not Enough Loop traps you in a cycle where no accomplishment ever feels sufficient.
- You finish a productive day and immediately think “I should have done more.”
- You complete projects successfully but fixate on the minor flaws.
- You achieve goals only to instantly move the goalposts higher.
- You never allow yourself to celebrate or feel satisfied. You’re constantly exhausted, chasing an impossible standard that keeps shifting.
This pattern destroys your ability to enjoy your achievements.
It creates chronic stress and burnout.
It strains your relationships because you’re never truly present, you’re always mentally chasing the next thing.
And it leads straight to depression from feeling perpetually behind.
The deeper truth? “Enough” isn’t a destination you reach someday.
It’s a decision you make right now.
You know you’re in this loop when:
You accomplish something significant and your first thought isn’t pride or satisfaction, but what you should tackle next.
When people praise your work, you deflect or minimise it.
When you set a goal and achieve it, you immediately raise the bar higher instead of pausing to acknowledge what you’ve actually done.
Nothing ever counts.
Nothing ever feels like it matters.
You’re always behind, always inadequate, always failing at invisible standards that keep changing.
The Inner Critic Loop
The Pattern:
You analyse every move, every word, every breath.
That voice in your head isn’t truth, it’s old programming from people who aren’t even in your life anymore.
The Inner Critic Loop runs a constant commentary on everything you do, say, and think.
- It replays embarrassing moments from years ago.
- It predicts social rejection before you’ve even spoken.
- It maintains impossibly high standards that ensure you’ll always fall short.
This voice masquerades as helpful feedback, but it actually sabotages your confidence.
It prevents you from taking risks or trying new things.
It keeps you small and safe by convincing you that criticism from yourself is better than criticism from others.
Here’s the thing, that voice sounds like your mother’s disappointment, your father’s impossibly high standards, or that teacher who made you feel stupid when you were eight.
But you’ve internalised it so completely that you think it’s your own wisdom.
It’s not.
It’s someone else’s fear running your life.
This loop shows up when:
You replay conversations obsessing over what you “should have” said.
When you avoid opportunities because you’re certain you’ll fail.
When you can’t accept compliments because your inner critic immediately lists all the reasons the person is wrong about you.
You’re constantly prosecuting yourself for crimes you haven’t even committed yet.
Discover how to stop negative thoughts completely.
The Other 12 Mental Loops
The patterns don’t stop there. The complete system includes:
- The Spiral Loop – When awareness becomes drowning in analysis
- The Anticipation Loop – Living in imaginary future disasters
- The Panic Loop – Bracing for bad news even during good times
- The Vanishing Loop – Disappearing for others while neglecting yourself
- The “I’m Fine” Loop – Performing okay-ness while breaking inside
- The Over-Giving Loop – Buying love with exhaustion
- The Good Girl Loop – Staying small to avoid conflict
- The Analysis Paralysis Loop – Thinking instead of acting
- The Perfectionist Procrastination Loop – Avoiding action until conditions are perfect (see how to overcome perfectionism)
- The Collapse Loop – Controlling everything until you can’t
- The Busy Badge Loop – Wearing exhaustion as identity
- The Mask Loop – Performing a character instead of being yourself
Each of these loops has its own specific pattern, its own way of hijacking your mental energy, and its own method for breaking free.
How to Stop Negative Thoughts: The Recognition Method
Learning how to stop overthinking starts with recognition. You can’t break a pattern you don’t see running.
Most people try to fight their thoughts or replace negative thoughts with positive ones. This doesn’t work because you’re still engaging with the loop. It’s like trying to win an argument with a recording, the recording doesn’t care about your logical points.
Instead, you need to recognize when you’re in a loop, name it, and then consciously choose to step out of it.
The basic method:
- Catch it – Notice you’re in a repetitive thought pattern
- Name it – “This is the Inner Critic Loop” or “I’m in Comparison mode”
- Reality check – Ask what this pattern is actually costing you
- Take action – Do something physical to interrupt the mental cycle
The key is interrupting the pattern with action, not more thinking. When you’re stuck in your head, the solution is to get into your body.
Combined with meditation practice, this method becomes even more powerful.
Reframing Negative Thoughts vs. Breaking Loops
Most advice about challenging negative thoughts focuses on reframing, finding a more positive way to think about the situation.
But reframing keeps you engaged with the thought content.
You’re still playing the game.
Loop breaking is different.
It’s not about changing what you think, it’s about changing your relationship with thinking itself.
When you’re caught in the Comparison Loop, you don’t need to convince yourself that you’re better than the person you’re comparing yourself to.
You need to recognise that you’re comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel, and that this comparison serves absolutely no useful purpose.
When the Inner Critic starts its commentary, you don’t need to argue with it or prove it wrong.
You need to recognise that this voice isn’t your wisdom, it’s old programming that’s outlived its usefulness.
The goal isn’t to have perfect thoughts.
It’s to stop being controlled by imperfect ones.
When Loops Run Together
The most destructive patterns happen when multiple loops combine and reinforce each other.
The Not Enough Loop feeds the Comparison Loop, you never feel like you’ve done enough, so you look at what others are doing, which makes you feel even more behind, which drives you to work harder without any satisfaction.
The Inner Critic Loop strengthens the Good Girl Loop, the critic tells you that speaking up will result in rejection, so you stay quiet and small, which gives the critic more evidence that you’re not worthy of being heard.
The Perfectionist Procrastination Loop creates the Analysis Paralysis Loop, you won’t start until conditions are perfect, so you analyse and research endlessly, which delays starting, which makes you feel like a failure, which makes you want conditions to be even more perfect before you begin.
It’s a brilliant system for keeping you completely stuck.
But here’s the good news, breaking one loop often weakens the others.
When you stop comparing yourself to others, the Not Enough Loop loses some of its power.
When you start taking imperfect action, both perfectionism and analysis paralysis begin to fade.
Read about the 10 questions people ask most about overthinking.
Your Next Steps
You don’t have to be perfect at breaking loops.
You just have to be willing to see them.
Start by paying attention to your thoughts for one week.
Don’t try to change anything, just notice.
When you catch yourself in a repetitive mental pattern, simply observe it. “Interesting, I’m doing that thing again.”
Awareness is the first step to freedom.
Once you can see the loops running, you can begin to interrupt them.
The complete Loop Breaker method includes specific strategies for each of the 15 patterns, reality checks that reveal the true cost of staying stuck, and emergency exits for when you catch yourself mid-loop.
Because recognising the pattern is just the beginning, breaking it is where real life starts.
The life you want is on the other side of these patterns.
One loop at a time.
One choice at a time.
One real moment at a time.
Read more about my journey through these patterns.