One day as I was driving in Utah, traffic came to a complete standstill.  After an hour had passed, I got out of the car to see if I could find out the cause of the traffic slowdown.   I saw a large semi-truck, carrying gravel that lay upside down on the side of the road.  It’s brakes had gone out and unable to stop, it continued barreling forward eventually hitting two other vehicles and taking out road signs and railings as it rolled off the road.  The damage was significant.

Because of the mountainous terrain, most freeways in Utah have a run-away truck ramp for the very purpose of slowing down semi-trucks that lose their brakes.   Had there been a run-away truck ramp available, this destruction could have been avoided.

Our minds work a lot like a semi-truck who’s lost it’s breaks.  It’s not uncommon for us to experience something small on the spectrum of seriousness and begin to make assumptions about it.  We jump to conclusions which barrel us down the road of doom and destruction in our minds.  This causes unnecessary stress, anxiety and overwhelm.

One night I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed my eyes felt strange.  I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed my vision was blurry.  Immediately my mind assumed the worst.  My vision is failing, I thought.  I am going blind.

Before I even confirmed the fact that I was going blind, I found myself wondering how I would still function, take care of my kids, and if I could learn Braille.  This all took place before I finished washing my hands.  I had a run-away mind.  I laid awake in bed that night worrying about how I could handle this new change in my life.

In the morning, I woke up panicked.  My eyelids were swollen and stuck together.  My brain re-calculated; I realized I had Pink Eye. Not cancer, not vision loss, or anything remotely serious.  I was not going blind.  There was no doom and destruction at the end of my run-away mind scenario.  I just had a simple infection that the miracle of antibiotics cleared up in a couple of days.

I could have saved myself a lot of stress, and gotten an extra hour of sleep if I had used a theoretical run-away mind ramp instead of allowing my brain to barrel forward, gathering speed, and ending up in a pile of misery and anxiety worrying about the worst case scenario.

There are many ways to slow down your mind from running away.  I will share two.

Sentences in our mind have tremendous power when we allow them to float around freely in our brain and multiply.  They often feel slippery and they are difficult to get any leverage on.  The feel bigger and more overwhelming in our cognitive space.

When we write down our thoughts and beliefs they become concrete—something we can get a handle on.  We can examine them like we would a physical object and evaluate them with our rational part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex.  We can then begin to be deliberate about whether we want to keep thinking that thought.

If I had written down my thoughts, my list might have looked like this:

My vision is blurry.

Something is terribly wrong.

I might have eye cancer.

I am going blind.

How am I going to function?

With even a cursory glance it would have been easier to look at my thoughts on paper from a third party perspective and recognize that I was quickly jumping to conclusions and running away to disaster in my mind before in was necessary.

Instead of just assuming your negative thought is true, look at the actual evidence.  Sometimes it’s easy to mistake our own emotions or erroneous thoughts for evidence.  It’s important to bring your reasoning back to indisputable facts.  When it gets down to the facts, the story slows was down and becomes a lot more manageable.

My story reduced to only evidence was:

I woke up and my vision was blurry.

End of story.  The rest was my run-away brain creating drama.

When have you recently let your mind run-away?

Next time try writing down your thoughts so you can see them as a third party.  Then reduce your story to only the facts.