Why do we get caught up in our own thoughts?
A racing mind can feel as if your brain has taken control of you and never takes a break.
The same worry keeps going round and round in your head. You analyze conversations, imagine everything that could go wrong—or what has already gone wrong—and what disasters that might lead to—and you try to figure out a solution. But the more you think about it, the more stuck you may feel.
Does that sound familiar?
Everyone experiences a flurry of thoughts from time to time, but for some people, it has become such a big part of their daily lives that they truly suffer as a result, and it can get in the way of a healthy and functional daily life.
In this case, many people seek professional help—for example, from a psychologist.
I have previously worked in various other fields, and as a result, I have also used a wide range of approaches to help people who suffer from racing thoughts. And I have to say that I have never encountered an approach as easy and effective as the 3P approach.
There’s nothing you have to do here—no exercises to do every day, no thoughts to rewrite. There’s simply an understanding to be built through information and curiosity.
In a 3P-based approach to racing thoughts, the goal is not to stop the thoughts or replace them with more positive ones. There is no “thought hygiene” here. Instead, we are curious to understand how thoughts work and how we have freedom in relation to our engagement with them.
Thoughts arise all the time. Some are helpful; others are not. The problem is rarely that the thoughts are there—but that we come to believe they tell the truth. We end up confusing them with reality and treating them as such.
Have you noticed that the same problems often seem less serious after a good night’s sleep? Or that your partner—who just a little while ago was the light of your life and your better half—can suddenly seem like the biggest idiot, and you might start to have serious doubts about the relationship?
It’s extremely rare that the situation or your partner has actually changed. What has changed are your thoughts—and thus the lens through which you perceive reality.
Have you also noticed that your racing thoughts are always about something that isn’t part of your “now”? Racing thoughts are always about something that has happened, could have happened, might happen, or is happening somewhere other than where you are.
In other words: A flurry of thoughts always revolves around an imaginary reality that your creative mind has just created, and which you then try to deal with by thinking even more—often in the hope of finding a solution, an answer that can bring you peace.
But the only thing causing the unease is that you—completely innocently—ended up taking those thoughts (fantasy as reality) seriously.
We cannot resolve a disturbance caused by a tank by adding more tanks.
As I pointed out earlier, our thoughts can make everything and nothing seem problematic, and make it look like the most important thing in the world… only to then drop it entirely, declare it unimportant or completely perfect, and instead focus on a newly invented problem that suddenly seems like the most important thing.
But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the way our thoughts are making it seem right now. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should take those thoughts seriously, view them as information about reality and the truth, and then engage in an inner dialogue, switch to “solution mode,” and try to figure it out.
If we allow our thoughts (and thus the lens through which we view reality) to flow freely, we will find that they are constantly changing, and that there are not nearly as many “problems” to deal with as it may seem.
Once we realize this, it becomes easier not to let a whirlwind of thoughts control our lives.
Peace of mind doesn’t come about because we think our way into it. It arises when we allow our thoughts to take their own course.
But before we can let our thoughts run their course, before we can stop taking them seriously, there are a few things we need to look at. There are aspects of the design that we need to understand. And that is the focus of a 3P-based psychological program.