Break Free from the Mental Echo Chamber Loop

Many years ago, my wife and I started a new business. She was the support team, and I was the creative. Not knowing what we were doing but trying to figure it out, we built it up to a $20,000 per month income over a four-year period. That was huge for a young couple with six kids, living in a potato patch in Idaho.

Then, the owner of the company that we were closely associated with was caught embezzling and the lawsuits against him took him down, we also ended up losing our business, and our employees and going into bankruptcy.

I felt like I had also disappeared when all the “external success”?disappeared. Where was the success that I craved and even became addicted to? Where was that optimistic, creative, person? Where had he gone and who was the person that was left behind? This struggle went on for over nine years.

I spent nine years, in essence, looping through how wrong it was that we had lost this business—I spent nine years feeling sorry for myself—and I spent nine years more short-tempered than I wanted to be, but unable to stop myself from that behavior.

As I now reflect on that time through the lens of neuroscience, I realize that I had unknowingly checked into a mental extended stay location that I call “the Echo Chamber”.

The echo chamber is built of looping thoughts that move us nowhere.?And it’s born of how the brain works.?Because our mind is a prediction machine that focuses on safety and predictability, it often will predict something as unsafe or unpredictable to keep us parked in “no action.” No action, and short-fused tempers, were preferable to my brain than action, and potential failure.?Hence:?overthinking and looping.

To stop the looping, I had to ask myself why I was looping—why wasn’t I able to just move on??And there was an answer to that—my father, a lack of self-confidence due to how I grew up, an arrogance that at times tried to paper over an insecurity—all of these things were solvable, but it was easier for my brain to loop on the injustices done to me than the opportunities that still awaited me.

But once I was able to stop the looping I was also able to start telling myself a different story: I am still capable, I’m still excited about what there is still left to do, I’m still energetic and want to contribute—and those stories—how I see my contributing, not, how I see myself failing or looping on past failures—created a base to start new businesses, start growing again.

Our brains are the seedbed of the unlimited or the deathbed of the undone.