There are some painful feelings that don’t fade over time. It’s like you’re in a cave, and no matter what you do the dark thoughts just keep echoing and following you.

Trite advice like “stop focusing on the negative” is unhelpful. Dark thoughts keep echoing in that cave even after you fall silent. I spent a lot of time surrounded by those feelings, and I’ve learned that removing the negative is not enough. You have to replace them. Your mind is a machine that processes information, and right now it’s stuck in a feedback loop. Each echo of a distressing dark thought creates more echoes, and you’re unable to escape.

The answer is to feed your mind something completely different. Not just empty your mind of dark thoughts, but fill it up with something completely new. It’s easy to feel miserable when we are still in the cave, and our mind has nothing new to focus on. Real emotional health comes from feeding our mind stimuli that it can focus on in healthy ways. Get out of the cave! Even if new activities are uncomfortable or unfamiliar, they are more healthy than letting the same old anxious thoughts bounce back and forth throughout this cave.

Do you know why people often prescribe going for walks, reading books, and calling friends? It’s because those activities pull your attention out of the cave and feed it new stimuli. You’ll see new things on your walk, explore new characters in the book, and jump into the new world of your friend’s life as you catch up. 

You need new stimuli if you want new feelings. Right now your pain is stuck in a loop, and your mind has nothing new to focus on so it plays over the same painful patterns. This is also why a regular gratitude practice helps so many people. You’re feeding your mind positive stimuli which can echo and create feedback loops just like the negative can. Metta Meditation has created positive loops for me in a similar way.

It’s up to you where you point your attention, just know you have a choice. Simply removing negative thoughts doesn’t work. Our minds need new fuel to create new feelings – feelings we actually want. No one can do this for you, and if you do nothing then those echoes will still be here tomorrow. Is that what you want?

Further Reading: If this post resonated with you then I think you’d get a lot out of The Book of Joy by The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. It changed my life by showing me how much gratitude, relationships, and compassion could nourish our minds. All of these things pull us out of our own problems and out of the cave that feels so awful. If you find yourself in a dark and depressing cave often, I think this book can help you find a way out. That’s what it did for me.