2026 July 7 No more "What if" thought loops

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about breaking the what if loop. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

This week we're talking about breaking the what if loop — breaking that cycle of replaying and second-guessing old decisions. We're particularly at risk for this when we've had big changes in our lives and start to feel uncertain about what's coming next.

Maybe I should have stayed where I lived. Maybe I should have taken the other job that was offered. Maybe I should have retired when they first told me. There are a million maybes that can come to mind, and that's exactly one of the root causes of the issue.

So why do we even get caught up in that cycle? Remember how we've talked about how our mind loves certainty and dislikes unfamiliar situations. Let me clarify that a little. Not every new situation is totally unfamiliar. Say you go out to a club and you like it. The next time you go to a different club, there's enough familiarity to the situation — your mind is pretty comfortable, it recognizes what's going on.

Now let's change that a little. Maybe the next club you go to is very different from the first one — a different culture, a different language, a different kind of dance, a different kind of music, whatever. Now your mind finds itself in a situation where too much has changed, and it starts looking for reasons not to repeat that experience, and also to check whether it kept you safe. Maybe you felt like you made a mistake dancing, and then you heard someone laughing. Chances are you immediately assumed they were laughing at you because of the way you were dancing. Even if that wasn't the case — even if it wasn't a bunch of people pointing at you and laughing — since you weren't already confident, you were uncomfortable in the whole situation, and even the smallest suggestion made you interpret it in a negative way.

This has a couple of lasting effects. First, your brain no longer treats clubs in general as good or safe places to go. And often you'll find yourself reliving that experience and coming up with all sorts of reasons why you shouldn't have gone, or shouldn't have danced, or how everyone thought you were a fool, or how they were probably still talking about you. Your mind has a great way of just building things up. Even if the reality is that the person you heard laughing had their back to you and was laughing at a good joke somebody told, you've already created this negative memory. And it gets worse: since the situation never really existed the way you imagined it, there's no way to fix it. So you sit and ruminate about it, going over it again and again.

This happens for a few reasons. First, your brain is searching for an answer so it can close out that episode and go back to keeping you calm and safe, reducing your stress. But the constant searching keeps bringing the situation back to mind, which actually increases your stress — which upsets your brain, which then searches even harder for a solution, and around and around the circle it goes.

But the big underlying factor in all of this is that your brain loves certainty and safety. So it's trying to discover what the perfect set of actions would have been so you wouldn't have been exposed to needless stress. And that's where the two big fallacies lie. It doesn't matter if you're thinking about a bad night out, mulling over what comes next after getting laid off, or trying to figure out how you're going to afford both food and housing — your brain fundamentally works on very simple principles. It wants to keep you safe and alive, which equates to no stress. And it always wants to make the perfect decisions, which implies reviewing any imperfect ones.

Unfortunately, these simple principles are totally unobtainable. Life always has uncertainty, and a decision that seems good in retrospect may not have even been practical or plausible at the time you were making it. Time also has a way of shaping our memory of situations, so that some alternate action may now seem like the perfect choice — but you have no idea how it would really have worked out at the time. So you can end up blaming yourself for not choosing an outcome that never could have happened anyway, while also bemoaning the needless stress you brought on yourself, when in reality there is no stress-free path through life.

I've mentioned before that I have a book in my library called The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal, PhD. The reality is that we were actually designed to function pretty well under stress — not continual stress, not repeated excessive stress, but stress helps us focus and respond to situations. It's pretty normal stuff. Thinking that life should be stress-free is unrealistic, and that just adds to the stress we create for ourselves by trying to second-guess our past actions.

So now that we're in the present and ruminating about our past decisions, what can we do about it? There are actually many things that help. Naturally, if the ruminations are excessive or overpowering, seek counseling as needed. If you're totally consumed by something, you should get past that point with help. But if it's just these constant, recurring, somewhat negative thoughts, one thing to do is name them. Whatever name is meaningful to you — "my bad job choice in 2023," or "my getting married on the first date," or whatever — tie that situation to an easily remembered name. Now, when that thought pops up, you know what you're dealing with. And if you realize there are actually multiple recurring thoughts, name each one of them, and start to really notice when they come around. Then schedule when you'll give them time in your life — a certain time of day, only in a certain place — somehow constrain them so that you're controlling when you allow your own time to focus on them.

Thoughts like that often arise when there's nothing else going on. We've talked about the importance of maintaining or expanding social interactions and relationships as we age, and this is one of the reasons why. If you're with other people or involved in other activities, you're far less likely to be interrupted by second-guessing previous decisions. Part of being active is being mindful of what it is you're doing, who you're doing it with, and what positive emotions you're feeling. Remember, if we go through life on automatic, we're likely to overlook all the little good things that happen throughout our day. That just gives our negative thoughts more material to work with. If we remember the good moments, no matter how small, then suddenly some of those bad past decisions don't seem quite as bad, because there are still bright spots in our day.

Another mental shift is to admit that we cannot change the past, and just move on. I realize those are easy words to say and often difficult to implement. But again, if it's really that difficult to get past something, talk to a professional and get some guidance. You have to realize there's nothing you, or I, or anybody can do to change what's happened in the past. As I say, classic relativity doesn't allow us to move backwards in time, no matter how much we may want to. What's in the past is beyond reach. So the proactive approach is to learn from our past and then improve our future. Now we've not only improved ourselves, we have a better future to look forward to.

Related to doing things with other people are physical activities. There's a lot more to say about motion and health, both mental and physical, but movement and physical activity are natural mood boosters. By really engaging with your physical surroundings, you're again filling your mind with sources for other thoughts, and that helps suppress the emptiness that can allow negative self-talk and rumination to begin.

These and other simple tricks are useful to help keep you looking forward, instead of falling into the trap of thinking how good things could have been. This is a serious trap, especially as we age, because that's simply our minds creating a situation that is truly pure fantasy. It's based on the assumption that whatever we did, if we had just done something different, if we had just looked for the better choice, if we hadn't done that — what we did do probably would have been better. And that usually isn't the case. It almost always isn't the case. We're not fools as we go through life. We work with the material we have, the decisions we see in front of us. And the fact that we're still here probably means we made a lot of really good choices. We can't evaluate what never happened. So our mind just creates a fantasy in its quest to make us feel calm, while inadvertently increasing our stress even longer and harder.

So I hope you found these tips useful. Remember: look forward, look at the things available to you, and look at the things you can control. All those little tips for blocking out negative thoughts are useful in their own right, just for bringing more positive thoughts and experiences into our lives. Stay active. Look for the good. Remember that the only thing we can change is the future.

Remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Please check out UKR7.com — that's a list of places that help people in Ukraine — and WCK.org, World Central Kitchen. Those are both international sites for local charities that are always looking for help. And even just a simple smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, subscribe, and hit that like button. And if not, please drop me a comment as to what else you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.