How to Stop Spiralling (When One Thought Becomes a Verdict)

If you are searching for how to stop spiralling, you may be in one right now – the overthinking, the worst-case scenarios, the voice that turns one awkward moment into a judgement about your whole life. In Who Told You That? The Beliefs That Keep You Small, and the Choices That Set You Free, Mariyah D. Acka’a gives two chapters to this: Chapter 5, The Sneaky Power of Negativity, on how a spiral works, and Chapter 9, The Power of Self-Talk, on the voice that supplies its language. Neither promises you will never spiral again; both are about catching it earlier.

What a spiral actually is

The book describes a structure that sits under almost every spiral. A trigger arrives – an email, a comment, a silence – and the trigger itself is neutral data. What happens next depends on what your mind has been primed to see. If self-limiting beliefs are active, the trigger is run through a filter: what does this confirm about me? Then a story is added, one that goes far beyond anything the trigger contained.

‘The trigger is the match. The story is the fire.’

Mariyah tells this from her own career. Early on, as a Team Lead, she saw a Senior Leadership role open up and dismissed herself from the running so quickly she barely noticed. When the woman leaving the role told her she should apply, the thoughts arrived in sequence: they’ve probably misunderstood my experience; there are people far more suited to this; she probably asked so I could make up the numbers. As she writes, at no point did it feel like being negative. It felt like being realistic.

A spiral is not one catastrophic thought. It is a series of small, unchallenged ones, each narrowing what feels possible – until a possibility has quietly become a conclusion.

Why overthinking feels like the truth

The central deception, the book argues, is that the belief does not announce itself as an interpretation. It presents as observation. ‘Nobody likes me’ does not feel like a thought you are having. It feels like a fact you are noticing.

Chapter 5 draws on Aaron Beck’s work on selective abstraction – how a single piece of negative feedback is taken as evidence of fundamental incompetence rather than limited information about one moment. It also cites Adrian Wells’s finding that people’s beliefs about their thoughts – whether thoughts are dangerous, uncontrollable or self-defining – predict distress more reliably than the content of the thoughts themselves. The problem, as the chapter puts it, is rarely what you are thinking. It is that you do not know you are thinking it.

Two further points are easy to miss. First, the body often knows before the mind does – tight shoulders, a tightening chest, a clenched jaw. Second, if you move between cultures, you may be carrying more than one filter at once – what reads as quiet competence to one part of you reads as dangerous visibility to another. When a spiral will not settle, the book suggests asking: which of my filters is firing right now?

What helps: three ways to interrupt a spiral

Between the trigger and the story, the book says, there is a gap, and in that gap there is a choice. Chapter 5 offers three practical ways to find it.

Name it. Say to yourself: ‘I am having the thought that …’ This creates a small distance – the thought becomes something you are observing, not something you are. The book points to Steven Hayes’s research on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which found that this kind of separation reduces the behavioural impact of unwanted thoughts, even without changing the thought itself.

Ask ‘So what, then?’ Fill the gap between trigger and catastrophe before anxious autopilot does. ‘I might not get this right the first time’ – and then? ‘Then I’ll learn something useful and try again.’ You are choosing the narrative.

Interrupt it physically. A brisk walk, cold water on your face, a few minutes of slow breathing with a long exhale. Early on, this is often enough to break the momentum.

The inner critic: whose voice is it?

Chapter 9 asks the question underneath the spiral: whose voice is supplying its language? The book’s answer is that the inner critic is not original. It borrows tone, language and authority – from parents, teachers, culture, religion, early environments – until it becomes indistinguishable from your own thinking.

The book offers a simple way to tell it apart from intuition. Intuition expands you, even when it asks you to be brave. The inner critic contracts you, even when it claims to be protecting you. ‘Intuition says: This isn’t right for you. The inner critic says: You’re not right for this.’

Identify the critic by its function, not its content: does this voice move you towards something you value, or keep you stuck and small? The book frames it as a misdirected protection strategy – cutting yourself down before others could was once a way of staying safe. The question is whether it still works for you now.

What helps here is not positive thinking. The book cites research by Kristin Neff, and later studies by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, associating self-compassion with higher motivation and more sustained effort after failure than self-criticism. The compassionate redirect is honesty with care attached. In one example from her own notes, after a piece of work met a disappointing response, Mariyah caught the thought you are out of your depth and people can tell, named it, and recognised a tone once reserved for ambitious girls who stepped outside the script. Then she wrote what an honest, caring friend would say: the difficulty is not evidence that you should not be doing it; it is evidence that you are doing it. It did not silence the critic. It gave her a second voice in the room.

If your spirals are tied to trauma, or ever turn towards thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out to a qualified professional or a crisis service. Our safeguarding page lists emergency numbers.

Where to go deeper

In the companion workbook, Choose Forward: The Practical Guide to Rewriting Your Life, Tool 5 – The Naming asks you to write down the opening line of your most familiar spiral and map where it goes, step by step. Most people do not realise a spiral has a structure until they see it on paper. You then map your top three spirals, name each one as it begins – ‘This is the spiral about ____’ – and identify your most expensive one. The goal is not to never spiral. It is to catch it at step one instead of step four.

Tool 9 – The Compassionate Redirect begins with a 24-hour transcript of ten things you actually said to yourself. Then it builds redirects in three moves: acknowledge the kernel of accuracy, strip the verdict, add the next useful action. As the workbook puts it, the goal is not to silence the critic but to refuse to let it finish the sentence.

To practise answering back, play The Critic, a free game in which you negotiate with your inner critic over five rounds. To find out which belief pattern is driving your spirals, take the free Freedom Assessment. And if you want to start at the beginning, you can read Chapter 1 free.

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