Help for when life leaves you ‘loopy’

Loops.

You’re a hamster in a wheel going round and round and round and round and … (Makes me dizzy even thinking about it.)

You’re a Hot Wheels racecar burning down the track when … “Whoa …” around you go in a 360 … Only, you’re a Hot Wheels racecar owned by Sid Phillips from Toy Story fame. He likes to inflict punishment, so you go “Whoa …” and … “Whoa …” and “Whoa …” and … because he’s put in a dozen loops.

Maybe not a loop like those, but you’re out on the tennis court (I was going to use pickleball but then realized I have no clue what the rules of pickleball are). You’re down in your stance, ready to take the serve when you begin to think about that drip coming from the faucet in your sink. And how you need to get home and fix it. “Drip … drip … drip …” “Ace!” Your doubles partner: “Dude! Get your head in the game!”

Or you’re standing in line at Starbucks waiting your time. Your mind begins to drift … “Can I take your order?” You: “I’ll have a half gallon of sheetrock mud, a gallon of Sherwin Williams white primer, half gallon of Valspar hot pink, some masking tape and a couple of paint rollers …”

Loops.

Here’s a neat story to illustrate where this is headed. When Mozart lived at home with his father, Leopold, he enjoyed playing a trick on his dear daddy-o. If he came home and found him fast asleep on the couch, he would set it in motion. He would go over to the family’s piano and loudly play a rising scale of notes. Only, he would stop one note short of completing the scale. Satisfied he would head upstairs and listen. And listen. As predicted, eventually he would hear his father stir from the couch, make his way to the piano and finish the last note. His dad was stuck in a loop.

Psychologists say we all have that tendency. They call it the “Zeigarnik” effect. It is when uncompleted tasks pop into our heads over and over and over again. You want to test it? Listen to a random song and shut it off halfway through. The song, they say, will pop into your head periodically throughout the day – an “ear worm” – until you play it until the end. (“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. Open your eyes, look up to the sky and see. I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy. Because I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low. Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me. Mama, just killed a man …” Go ahead. Walk away from it. I dare you.)

Loops.

I am at work but I am well aware what waits for me at home is a bathroom vanity that has to be put together, a bathroom faucet that has to be installed, bathroom walls that have to be painted, bathroom tile that has to be installed, a new toilet that has to be installed. (Because my wife thought it would be a great idea if she and her husband, who couldn’t install a battery into a flashlight without poking his eye out with the spring, renovate their bathroom. Her: “We’ll save a ton of money.” Me: “Yeah, and we’ll have a bathroom that looks like a Picasso painting.”)

And the opposite. I am at home but fully aware of a hundred things – most importantly the fact we are getting a new insert machine for sales flyers and it’s going to require more outlets, tubing for vacuum, et cetera, etc.

Loops.

We all get stuck in them. Why your mind may even have wondered as you tried to read this to the point where you started thinking about some of things you need to do at work or home, or both, and now you’re stuck in some loops.

Loops.

According to psychologists, on any given day we might have a dozen, “dozens”, maybe hundreds – emails create the worst, per them, but we already knew that – stuck in our head. They’re obviously not a good thing. They, per neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin, cause three things to happen specifically. One, they make it impossible for us to be “fully present”. Two, when we fail to clear our head of open loops, eventually we are bound to drop the ball and forget something. Then we’ll have to deal with the stress and anxiety of that, which is the third thing. The anxiety and stress they cause.

Here’s the great news. (I could have just led with this, but where would be the fun in that?) You don’t actually have to close all of your loops to find peace. According to psychologist Roy Baumeister and others, the trick is you have to place them in a trusted system “outside” of your mind. This can be as simple as writing them on a pad of paper – I write all of mine on my weekly/monthly planning calendar; it seems to work pretty well – or using an app designed for that specific purpose.

This can be more involved, such as setting priorities for each, but the main thing is to get started and get them out of your head. Per them: Write down as many as you can think of, then do as many of the less-than-two-minute ones as you can immediately.

The latter is for the instant gratification and to signal your brain what’s coming: “I’m getting off this hamster wheel! See you, Sid! And I’ll have a mocha cookie crumble Starbucks person.”