Stuck in an anxiety cycle with racing thoughts you can’t turn off? In this episode, Nick Trenton shares his mind games and distraction techniques from ‘How to Turn Off Your Brain’ to help you break the rumination loop and redirect anxious thoughts. Learn how deliberate distractions work against overthinking, help you escape runaway brain patterns, and create the mental serenity that comes when anxious thoughts finally settle.

⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
1:17 The Power of Distraction Against Overthinking
2:17 Mind Games Explanation
3:24 Game 1 – Visualization Exercise
5:33 Mental Alphabet Game
6:41 Build Your Mental Museum
7:20 People Watching as a Distracting Technique
8:47 Second Game and Its Paradoxical Aspect

If you’re tired of getting stuck in that never-ending anxiety cycle and racing thoughts, Nick Trenton is here to help. Join us as we explore how to stop overthinking through deliberate distraction techniques, rewiring your anxious brain with neuroplasticity, and breaking free from the rumination loop for true mental serenity. Don’t miss out on these essential tips for managing anxiety and improving your mental health!

Check it out at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHQVH61H
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWFnONPWH9KovyVXBsGSB-g

If you’ve ever tried to reason your way out of a spiral of worry, you’ve probably noticed something frustrating.
Arguing with an anxious thought tends to make it louder, not quieter.
That’s well documented in the research on rumination.
The harder you fight a thought, the more attention you’re actually feeding it.
Now, what Nick Trenton proposes instead in his book, How to Turn Off Your Brain?
is almost the opposite move, deliberate distraction, not numbing out, but giving your mind something else to chew on that’s absorbing enough to break the loop on its own.
In his book, he calls them mind games, and he lays out seven of them.
The idea only works if you understand why it works.
Trenton’s point is that an anxious mind is a bit like an upset toddler.
You can’t talk it down with logic in the moment, but you can redirect its attention somewhere else long enough for it to settle.
Here’s how he introduces the concept and the first couple of games.
One powerful weapon we have against useless overthinking is distraction, or, as T.S.
Eliot phrased it, distracted from distraction by distraction.
Here’s the thing.
If you already know logically that your rumination does not serve you in any way, then you know you can safely ignore it.
Fighting with overwhelming thoughts just makes them stronger.
What can you do instead?
Answer.
Take a break to completely take your mind off things.
Being distracted is sometimes the perfect and only way to short-circuit rumination and give yourself enough of a break to gain mental serenity again.
Yes, distraction has a bad reputation.
But if we use it consciously and deliberately, it can be a way to quickly escape a runaway brain when things like mindfulness are just not going to work.
Playing mind games with yourself is a little like catching an unhappy child’s attention by waving a stuffed toy around.
You can’t rationalize with a two-year-old having a tantrum about something that makes no sense in the first place, right?
All you can do is cleverly pull attention away long enough to get them to calm down.
Think of your anxious brain in the same way.
It’s just a child having a tantrum.
It’s just gotten stuck in the mud and needs a quick shove to loosen it again.
Here are a few ideas to help you do just that.
Game 1.
Fantasize about the perfect day.
If there were absolutely nothing to stop you, what would your perfect day look like?
If you had all the money, time, and energy in the world, what would you get up to from the moment you opened your eyes in the morning?
If even the laws of physics didn’t apply to you anymore, what kinds of things would you get up to?
Have fun with it.
If you like, you can construct your own imaginary hypothetical society.
or dream up the perfect home.
Doesn’t have to be realistic or make any sense.
Just has to be entertaining.
Game 2.
Get Lost in Questions Anxiety and curiosity are mutually exclusive experiences.
You cannot be both at the same time.
Imagine you’re a child again and looking at the world with completely fresh eyes.
What stands out to you?
What’s really weird when you start thinking about it?
What have you always secretly wondered but never actually investigated?
You don’t have to come up with any profound insights or do anything to find out the answers to big questions.
Just play around with being open and loose.
Like, who decided where the borders of countries go?
What was it like when there were no countries?
When was the first time they even used that word?
Has there ever been someone born exactly on a boundary?
Game 3.
Go on a mental walk.
One sneaky way to distract yourself is simply to give your poor, overworked brain a job that is pretty simple, yet engrossing.
You can displace anxious thoughts with neutral or pleasant ones that require your full attention.
Close your eyes and picture a favorite place, a holiday you’ve gone on, or a well-known route you’ve traveled in the past.
Now, mentally walk through this visualization, taking plenty of time to flesh out the details on each of the five senses.
Alternative?
See how much you can remember from your childhood home or classroom.
Alternative, try to reconstruct the layout of the supermarket you used to go to in another town.
This is a great exercise when you’re trying to fall asleep.
Game 4 The Alphabet Game This one is simple.
Pick a broad category like animals, food, or movies, and then move through the alphabet thinking of an item that starts with that letter.
For example, aardvark, baboon, camel, dinosaur.
You could make yourself think of three items before moving on.
Or make a special rule where you can avoid tricky letters like Q if you want to.
Or when you get to Z, go around the alphabet again and repeat the process with new items.
Game 5.
Build Your Mental Museum
This is a little like going on a mental walk, except instead of fleshing out a memory you already have, you build something from scratch.
Start by imagining that you’re in a completely empty room with bare white walls.
Or go a step further and imagine no walls at all.
Remember that scene in The Matrix?
Now, assemble a collection of things exactly as you want them.
Maybe you could gather up a few favorite images or paintings or make an exhibition of all your favorite items, or for that matter, your favorite people.
Collect little mementos that remind you of happy memories or of things you care about.
You can make the theme of the museum anything you like.
It can be personal or simply a fantastical vision of a hypothetical museum you’d love to visit.
Game six, memory game.
Give your brain the task of remembering a speech, poem, pattern, or sequence.
Challenge yourself.
You can also play counting games where you count backward or skip ahead in fixed intervals or go backward in fixed intervals.
Game seven, people watch.
If you’re feeling anxious while away from home and need a distraction in a public place, try people watching.
Watch people walk by, guess their names, guess their occupations, guess their ages.
Why not try guessing their deepest darkest secrets?
See if you can imagine what each person is thinking at that very moment or where they may be headed to.
It’s true that distraction can be harmful, if done compulsively or unconsciously.
But it can certainly be a clever way to manage stress if used wisely.
You can even try inventing your own distraction games.
The only aim is to find a mental activity that is absorbing enough to pull your mind away from compulsive rumination.
What stands out across all seven of these isn’t the specific game.
It’s the underlying mechanism.
You’re not being told to suppress the anxious thought or to try to push through it.
You’re being given permission to just leave it alone for a while on the logic that a thought you already know isn’t serving you doesn’t need to be resolved before you can set it down.
The second game is worth sitting with a little longer because it points at something almost paradoxical.
Trenton notes that anxiety and curiosity can’t really coexist.
You can’t be genuinely wondering about something and spiraling about something else at the same time.
That’s a big part of why getting lost in questions works as well as it does.
It’s not a trick so much as a redirection of the same mental machinery anxiety uses towards something with no stakes attached.
None of this requires picking the right game or doing it perfectly.
The alphabet game, the mental museum, people watching their interchangeable tools aimed at the same target.
If you only take one of these away, let it be the mental walk.
It costs nothing.
It needs no supplies and works especially well if you’re lying awake with your mind running laps.
Try it tonight.
See what happens.
If this was useful, subscribe for more from Nick Trenton and the rest of this series.
We’ll keep working through the book.
One idea at a time.
As the poet Mary Oliver put it in her essay collection, Upstream, attention is the beginning of devotion.