How to Stop Obsessing About Someone
In this episode, we’re tackling the challenging topic of obsessive thinking about someone and how to break free from that mental loop that causes suffering.
We’ll explore different approaches, including Byron Katie’s The Work as a top-down method for challenging your thoughts, somatic tools to discharge anxiety from the body as a bottom-up approach, as well as the broader work of addressing the insecurities and wounds that often fuel obsessive thinking.
By addressing your thoughts, calming your body, and working through your deeper emotional wounds, you can find peace and clarity in your relationships.
How to Stop Obsessing About Someone: Breaking the Cycle of Rumination
Obsessing over someone, whether due to romantic interest, rejection, or any other interaction, can be draining and counterproductive. For those with anxious attachment styles or heightened anxiety levels, these obsessive thoughts can feel overwhelming and inescapable. However, learning to manage and diffuse this cycle of rumination can significantly improve emotional well-being and mental clarity.
Recognising the Cycle of Obsession
Understanding the nature of obsessive thinking is the first step towards breaking free from it. Often, these thoughts stem from feelings of anxiety or insecurity, leading us to fixate on people or situations in an attempt to process or resolve those emotions. Whether it’s a minor social interaction or a significant relationship dynamic, these thoughts pull our energy and focus, often exacerbating feelings of stress and anxiety.
Questioning the Validity of Your Thoughts
One effective technique to combat obsessive thinking is drawn from Byron Katie's "The Work," which involves four crucial questions:
Is it true?
Can you be absolutely certain that it’s true?
How do you react when you believe this thought?
Who would you be without the thought?
By applying these questions to your obsessive thoughts, you can create a mental and emotional distance. Questioning the veracity of your thoughts helps dismantle the power they hold over you, allowing you to see them as transient and not necessarily reflective of reality.
Shifting from Victim to Empowered Observer
Obsessive thoughts can often make us feel like helpless victims of our own minds. Shifting perspective from a powerless participant to an empowered observer of your thoughts can be incredibly liberating. Visualising thoughts as clouds passing by can help to reduce their intensity, and rather than engaging deeply with them, learning to witness them impassively can break the cycle of obsession.
Addressing Underlying Anxiety
Obsessive thoughts are frequently a manifestation of underlying anxiety, which is a bodily experience more than a purely cognitive one. Recognising this connection can be a game-changer. Anxiety often places us in a heightened state of fight or flight, leading to a faster-paced, more intense thought process.
Physical activities like brisk walks, runs, or even simply shaking out your limbs can help discharge this anxious energy from your body. By addressing the physical root of anxiety, you can reduce the mental swirl of obsessive thoughts.
Cultivating Self-Compassion and Healing
At the heart of many obsessive thoughts lies a wound—whether it’s a sense of unworthiness, fear of rejection, or some deep-seated insecurity. Healing these wounds involves a longer, ongoing process of cultivating self-compassion and working towards greater emotional security.
When you feel secure in yourself and possess a robust sense of self-worth, the need to obsessively analyse others' behaviours diminishes. This doesn’t happen overnight but is a gradual shift resulting from consistent inner work and self-reflection.
Integrating Tools and Practices
Combining both cognitive and somatic approaches can offer a holistic way to manage obsessive thinking. Using the questioning technique from Byron Katie along with physical activities to manage anxiety creates a well-rounded strategy. Ensuring that you have these tools readily available provides quick access to self-regulation whenever obsessive thoughts start creeping in.
The Role of Greater Emotional Security
Over time, developing emotional security naturally reduces the tendency to obsess. When we are clear in who we are and compassionate towards ourselves and others, the stories of victim and villain lose their appeal. We begin to see situations with more nuance and less black-and-white thinking.
Emotional security fosters a balanced approach to relationships and interactions. Confidence in oneself makes the ‘need’ to obsess over others less pressing, freeing up mental and emotional space for healthier engagement.
Conclusion
Breaking free from obsessive thinking is a multi-faceted process, involving both cognitive reframing and addressing underlying anxiety. By questioning the validity of your thoughts, tending to your body's signals of stress, and working towards greater emotional security, you can significantly reduce the grip of obsession and rumination on your life. In time, this holistic approach can lead to a more balanced, peaceful, and empowered state of being.
Questions for Discussion & Reflection
Do you often find yourself feeling imprisoned by your own thoughts? Reflect on the ways in which this impacts your daily life and overall well-being.
How do you react when you start to believe thoughts that cause you suffering? Consider how you typically respond emotionally and behaviourally to these thoughts.
Have you tried the 4 questions by Byron Katie from this episode? What insights did you gain from exploring whether your thoughts are true and how you'd feel without them?
When you notice yourself obsessing about a person or situation, what physical sensations do you experience in your body? How might this relate to your anxiety levels?
What are your current go-to strategies for self-soothing when you are feeling anxious? Reflect on which methods have been most effective for you and why.
How does the idea of being the observer of your thoughts, rather than experiencing them as absolute truth, resonate with you? How might this perspective shift affect your relationship with your thoughts?
Reflect on a recent experience where you felt rejected or hurt. How did your pre-existing insecurities play a role in magnifying this feeling?
How might moving your body in times of stress or anxiety help to alleviate obsessive thinking? Consider the types of physical activities you enjoy and how you can incorporate them into your routine.
In what ways do you find yourself making victim stories about situations or people in your life? What do you notice about the patterns these stories follow?
How does compassion for yourself and others influence your tendency to ruminate? Reflect on the role self-compassion plays in interrupting negative thought cycles.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00]:
In today's episode, we're talking about how to stop the endless cycles of obsessing and ruminating about someone or something. So if you're someone with anxious attachment or any sort of level of anxiety, which I think will capture a significant chunk of my listeners, I think this is gonna be a really helpful episode. I'm gonna be sharing a few reframes and techniques, things that I use regularly that allow me to feel free from the thoughts that's been around in my head. And I think that the more we can release ourselves from this attachment to our thoughts as truth, the more peace we have in our lives, the more control we have over our emotions, and the way that we respond and react to things in our lives, is an incredibly valuable thing to practice and hone our capacity for observing our thoughts, being the witness of our thoughts rather than experiencing them as true and all encompassing. So often I hear from people who more or less feel like their thoughts are in control and they are at the mercy of them. This sense of I can't, I can't do anything about it.
[00:01:15]:
I can't help it feeling like a really helpless victim of their own thoughts, almost like they're imprisoned by their thoughts. And I think that's a very common experience and one that can really create a lot of suffering in our lives. And so today's episode, I'm gonna be sharing a few different ways that you can interrupt those cycles and really step into a more empowered place, one of agency, where you are the observer of your thoughts and you don't have to pay so much attention to them. And it doesn't feel like your thoughts are running the show, which I think is very liberating to reach a place where you can watch your thoughts float by like a cloud in the sky rather than feeling like it's this big, heavy, true thing that you have to obsess on. And particularly, I think when you're obsessing about someone else, again, that can feel quite crazy making, I think. And whether it's someone who you're interested in romantically or someone who rejected you, we can so easily make ourselves the victim. And I think it's very juicy and seductive to make ourselves the victim of a situation. And the stories that spring from that are incredibly tempting and can really draw us in, but inevitably keep us stuck in a mode that is not really conducive to our well-being.
[00:02:39]:
So I'm gonna be talking about that today. Now before I do, I just wanted to share, you may have heard me say last week or seen on Instagram that I am holding a retreat here in Australia, in beautiful Byron Bay, in May 2025, so May next year. We've secured the most incredible venue, we went and visited this place last month, and it is just amazing. It's gonna be 3 days, 3 nights, packed with workshops, lots of connection, like minded people in really the most beautiful setting. So if that appeals to you, early bird registration is now open. You can apply by heading directly to my website, or there will also be a link in the show notes. There are a limited number of early bird spots, a number of which have already been taken, so definitely don't delay if you are wanting to join us. I would apply sooner rather than later.
[00:03:30]:
Second announcement, in a similar vein, very excited to share that I'm also holding a 2 day weekend workshop in Sydney at the end of November, so 30th November, 1st December, so that's just a daytime thing on a Saturday and a Sunday. Again, I'll pop all the details in the show notes. If you'd like to come along for a weekend workshop with me, I would love to see you there as well. For any Sydneysiders or folks who want to come to Sydney, check that out as well. Okay, so let's talk about how to stop obsessing about someone or something. Now, I think it's important to say at the outset that when we are obsessing about someone or something and this is so broad in its application because as I said in the introduction, it could be a person who rejected us, it could be an interaction at the coffee shop and we start obsessing over whether we said something weird and the other person thought we were a freak. It could be the person who cuts us off in traffic. It could be something really big in our relationship.
[00:04:27]:
It could be a family dynamic. It could be something about work. There's just so many different arenas in our life from the very minor to the very major where our thoughts can run wild and tell stories and lead us to swirl around in obsession and rumination in a way that's really unhealthy and draining and counterproductive. And it really does pull our emotion and our energy in the direction of all of those things, anxiety and stress and shame sometimes worry these emotions that take up a lot of space within us and prevent us from feeling well and being able to show up as our most confident authentic selves because we're so knee deep in all of that thinking. I recently saw a quote which I forget who it was from, but it was to the effect of, most every spiritual tradition could be boiled down to the practice of letting go. And I think that that's very true and maybe in our modern Western world, we pay so much attention to our thoughts and we can be very individually focused and it all feels very big and important. Whereas a lot of spiritual traditions, Eastern traditions have recognized the mind as being very unreliable and our thoughts as being just like mindless, endless chatter that will often, if we believe those thoughts, leave us feeling worse off. So I just wanted to sort of frame the conversation there.
[00:06:05]:
And what I wanted to offer you as a first tool is not actually from me, but from Byron Katie, if if you've been in one of my programs in the past couple of months, you might've heard me speak about this. I've been really revisiting Byron Katie's work since re encountering it in another book that I was reading. But she has these 4 questions that she puts to people when they notice that their thoughts are causing them suffering. So again, this is very broad in its application, but, you know, an example might be, my partner is so selfish and he doesn't care about me. Right? I do everything. My partner doesn't pull his weight. He just doesn't care about me at all. If he cared about me, you know, he would do x y zed thing.
[00:06:52]:
So that kind of story that we tell ourselves that again is so seductive and we can really, if we allow it to just run amok inside us, it is so powerful and so persuasive and inevitably alters our emotional state in a negative way. So her 4 questions are, the first one is, is it true? Just simply yes, no, is it true? So this question of my partner doesn't care about me, is it true? Now you might say, yes, it's true. Okay. The second question is, can you be absolutely certain that it's true? And usually even if you've been confident at question 1, that it's true, you might start to falter a little on question 2, because absolute certainty, particularly when it's about someone else's emotional state or something. So often our stories are, no one cares about me or I'm not good enough or no one's ever gonna love me or people can't be trusted. These big sweeping generalizations and judgments that we make. And when we ask this follow-up question of, can you be absolutely certain that it's true? That's a very high threshold. And we start to realize, okay, maybe maybe I can't quite assert total absolute certainty about the truth of this thought.
[00:08:03]:
So going back to the example of my partner doesn't care about me, you might say, okay, I can't be absolutely certain that it's true. Then the third question is how do you react when you believe the thought? So what does it do to me to believe this thought? Who do I become? What does it do to my body? What does it do to my emotional state? So, again, when I believe that my partner doesn't care about me, how do I react when I believe that? Maybe I get really angry and hurt and rejected, and I start protesting or feeling sorry for myself, or becoming resentful and indignant and all of these things really righteous. That's what it does to me to believe this thing. How do I react when I believe that? Maybe I lash out at them, maybe I get really passive aggressive. All of these things that flow from me believing this thought, this judgment that my partner doesn't care about me. And the 4th question, which is so beautiful, is who would I be without the thought? Right? Who would I be without the thought that my partner doesn't care about me? If I were to just sort of take that off, pluck that out from my mind and put it to the side, who would I be? What would be possible for me if I were to let go of that thought and not be carrying it around? And almost invariably for me at least, when I ask those 3rd and 4th questions, the lightness that I feel in my being is almost instantaneous, I feel the shift. How do I react when I believe the thought and who would I be without it? Is a really, really powerful circuit break for me at least. So these four questions from Byron Katie's The Work to me are a really very powerful way to shift out of obsessing and ruminating.
[00:09:43]:
Because that obsession of rumination, it needs a circuit break. It needs something to interrupt it because otherwise it's like a whirlpool that just sucks you deeper and deeper. Because the thought affects how we feel in the body and how we feel in the body reinforces the thought and so on and so forth, and we just keep spiraling. So having these questions that you can reach for and being really familiar with them and just going, wait, I need to check myself here. I need to interrupt this pattern and run myself through this. It just frees up so much space and so much possibility in a way that for me at least is very, very liberating. So that's the first thing that I want to offer you insofar as stopping this cycle of obsession and rumination. The next key piece is recognizing that oftentimes obsession and rumination being stuck in your head overthinking is a function of anxiety and anxiety is a body experience.
[00:10:41]:
Right? So as much as all of those obsessive thoughts appear to arise as our thinking mind, and so we try and solve them from that place. And granted, running through those 4 questions is a top down approach that is using more cognitive entry point to shift our thoughts. Another way to look at it, and you can use these alongside each other, is a more bottom up approach, which is going, oh, if I'm having all of these obsessive thoughts, I am probably in a stress state in my body. I'm probably in my sympathetic nervous system, which is where we are when we're in our fight or flight mode, or we're very mobilized and everything speeds up. And I think that will be a very familiar state for most people with more anxious attachment patterns or fearful avoidant as well. So spending a lot of time in that mode that feels very intense and fast paced. And from that, you can start to go, okay, it is less about the content of the thoughts and more about the fact that I'm in the mode of obsessive thinking that tells me what I need to know, which is I need to do something with my body. Right? So rather than engaging with the content of the thoughts, which is more the approach we took in the first one with Byron Katie's questions, we can just go, look at me.
[00:11:57]:
I'm in this obsessive mode. I've been scrolling my phone thinking about this person or that interaction or this thing that's gonna happen in the future for the last half an hour. I'm clearly feeling anxious. What do I need to offer to my body to shift some of that anxious energy to move and mobilize some of that anxious energy so that I can discharge it? And oftentimes a byproduct of that is that our obsessive thoughts melt away. So if you've ever heard me talk about, you know, in my anxious attachment course, we do a whole module on nervous system regulation and tools and self soothing. And there's a great quote from a woman called Deb Dana, which is that your state creates your story, meaning the state of your nervous system is determinative of the content of your thoughts, the way you perceive the world. And so when you are in a state of anxiety, a felt experience of stress in the body, it bleeds into your thoughts, and really taints your perception of the world around you and your relationships and yourself. So state creates story and then the story reinforces the state.
[00:13:07]:
As I said, we can really spiral there. So rather than trying to change the story first, we can try and change our state and trust that our story will then reflect if we can bring our body into more of a state of regulation. So doing things like moving your body, I think for anxiety in particular, when you've got a lot of energy moving through you, it can be futile to just try and calm down, to try and regulate by doing something like meditation. If your brain is going at a 1000000 miles an hour, sometimes that's just not the right medicine. It might just not be what you need. So really good things for anxiety, moving your body in one form or another. So it might be going for a brisk walk. It might be going for a run.
[00:13:51]:
It might just be like getting up and doing jumping jacks or shaking or something, shaking your arms and legs, going to the gym, lifting weights. Like, any movement that takes you out of your head and puts you into your body allows that energy that is currently being expended on obsessive thinking to be channeled into something that actually allows that energy to move and discharge rather than just swirl around. So that sort of more somatic approach, that bottom up approach is another really powerful way to stop that obsessing about someone. Okay. And the last thing that I'll say about this, how to stop obsessing about someone, and this is not a quick fix to be fair. It's a broader you know, piece of work that you'll do over, you know, weeks, months, years potentially. But recognizing that when we're obsessing about someone or something, it's almost always a product of some wounded part of us, some insecurity. And when we obsess about someone who rejected us, it's because we probably were already obsessing about some story of unworthiness or not good enoughness or some way in which we perceive ourselves to be defective.
[00:15:00]:
And so we just take someone else's behavior as an opportunity for us to keep reinforcing those painful stories. And so what you'll notice as you sort of do this work over a longer period of time to becoming more secure is that you will naturally be less prone to obsessing about things, about people, about situations. Because I think that that strategy, that pattern is a product of the insecure mind and body because it tends to spring from fear and stress and low self worth. And so I think when we become clearer in who we are, we have more self compassion, we have more compassion for others. That whole story of villain and victim, which I think is at the heart of a lot of rumination, it just becomes less seductive to us. It becomes less appealing. We start to see the world in more shades of gray, and we understand that everything is nuanced. And I think that over time, that tendency to just fixate on whatever it might be, that just becomes sort of diluted until it's no longer something that we find ourselves stuck in.
[00:16:13]:
And we have so many other tools and resources, and such a greater capacity to be with discomfort, that we don't tend to go down those mental rabbit holes anywhere near as often or to the same degree as we once did because of all of that other work. Like sort of just a, welcome byproduct, of doing that work to become more secure. So I hope that that has been helpful for you. As I said, these are all things that I have been practicing for some time and continue to lean on whenever I feel I need them, whenever I notice that part of me getting a bit noisy or chattery or trying to drag me into feeling like a victim and getting righteous and blaming everyone around me, which is not an energy that I like to inhabit. So when I notice myself going there, it's really helpful having these tools to quickly check myself and shift into a mode of being that feels clearer and more honest and more integral, and more empowered certainly for me at least. So I hope that's been helpful, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks guys.
[00:17:29]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna go deeper on all things attachment, love, and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a 5 star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
anxious attachment, anxiety, rumination, obsessive thoughts, emotional control, thought patterns, Byron Katie, victim mentality, self-soothing, nervous system regulation, stress state, sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight mode, emotional state, rejection, mindfulness, relationship dynamics, self-compassion, compassion for others, mental rabbit holes, insecure mind, self-worth, body experience, spiritual traditions, letting go, emotional spiral, negative emotions, cognitive approach, somatic approach, anxiety management, emotional well-being