Reddit, how do you stop yourself from driving yourself crazy with a negative thought you can't get out of your head?

I'd been suicidal for years... Intrusive thoughts about killing myself when subjected to the smallest stress. This is what helped me.

  • dispassionately observing the thoughts. Like 'now I'm wanting to kill myself. Im feeling awful.' That helps you move on from that thought a tiny bit, because it is not as scary. And you're not actively resisting it. So it fights back less to stay in your mind.

  • write the thoughts down. I spent HOURS every day going over how terrified I was of a difficult conversation. When I wrote down 'I'm scared to talk to Megan because she always makes it unpleasant', I could go on to the next step. 'I think I'll text her instead, she doesn't deserve the courtesy of a face to face'.

  • set aside an hour a day to just worry. You're not allowed to worry outside of that hour. Find a place that's slightly uncomfortable, sit down, put devices away, and just worry. This helped me greatly, helped me feel freer, and more proactive about solving my issues. Often, the issues with worries are, we don't give enough active thought to them, so they dominate our passive thinking.

  • with the help of a therapist, try figuring out why you have those thoughts, what's the common factor. For me, it turned out, I worried about the future. Every time I wanted to kill myself, it was because I didn't want to face the future. Just knowing that helped me. So I could go from 'oh no I messed this code up, I want to slit my wrists' to 'oh, I'm scared I'll get fired' to 'no, this isn't so grave, take an extra hour this evening to fix it. If you can't, ask for help'.

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