Negative Thoughts Got You Spiraling? ‘Don’t Think’ Has a Trick for That

If your brain turns every minor inconvenience into a full disaster movie, you’re in very safe, very anxious company. One weird symptom, one slow work week, one unanswered text—and suddenly you’re diagnosing yourself on Google, pre-grieving a breakup that hasn’t happened, and planning to move back in with your parents “just in case.”

On Don’t Think, host Carla Bezanson takes that exact brand of catastrophic thinking and tears it apart in the most relatable way. Instead of promising perfect positivity, she walks through how to interrupt the spiral with one small shift: neutral, “this-isn’t-helpful-right-now” thoughts. If your inner radio is stuck on Worst Case FM, these takeaways are for you.

Your brain is a liar (and that’s normal)

“It’s kind of like having my own personal radio station that plays 24/7 all day, every day in my mind, and unfortunately, my radio station host is not nice.” Bezanson’s description is unhinged-level accurate. For anxious brains, negative thoughts don’t just show up—they move in, rearrange the furniture, and start narrating your life like they’ve been hired to ruin it.

The trick? Remembering the radio host isn’t telling the truth.

“Just because it says something does not mean I have to believe it,” she explains. And that’s where the real shift happens: separating thoughts from facts. Mental health experts back this up—cognitive distortions are incredibly common, especially in people with anxiety or OCD tendencies. Your brain fires off worst-case nonsense because it’s wired to spot danger, not accuracy.

Bezanson gives the perfect example: she’s been “100 percent convinced” she’s had every serious illness under the sun…and yet here she is, very much alive, very much not diagnosed. That’s confirmation bias in action—your brain decides something is true, then hunts for evidence to support it. When you learn to pause and say, “Just because I thought it doesn’t mean it’s true,” you break that loop. You’re not silencing the radio; you’re refusing to take its script as gospel. And honestly? That’s the first step to getting your life back.

Toxic positivity doesn’t work

If you’ve ever tried to flip a negative thought into a positive one and felt even worse, you’re not imagining things. Forcing yourself to think “I’m thriving!” when you feel like you’re falling apart doesn’t just feel fake—it actively backfires. “I don’t do the toxic positivity thing where you flip it to the opposite. That never works,” Bezanson says. “‘No, you’re the best TikToker in the world.’ No, like that’s just not true. Don’t do that.”

The problem with forced positivity is that your brain immediately challenges it. “If I try to say, ‘No, your business is doing amazing,’ my brain goes, ‘Okay, prove it. Show me the numbers. Refresh your analytics.’ And suddenly I’m in another spiral,” she adds. Instead of calming down, you’re now hunting for evidence, and your negativity-biased brain will absolutely find something to confirm your fears.

This is why “therapy teaches us not to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, but to replace negative thoughts with neutral thoughts,” Bezanson explains. The goal isn’t to feel amazing. It’s to feel accurate. “Challenging negative thoughts, it’s not about feeling good, right? It’s about feeling accurate,” she says. “I don’t want to be toxic positivity girl.”

So instead of “My business is thriving,” try “My business is fine.” Instead of “Everyone loves me,” try “Some people like me and that’s enough.” Neutral thoughts don’t trigger your brain’s fact-checking mode. They just…land. 

The thought interrupter actually works

“When I have a negative thought—‘Oh, your business is failing and you’re irrelevant’—what I’ve started doing is thinking to myself, ‘That’s not a useful thought right now,’” Bezanson says. It sounds almost too simple, but it’s backed by both therapy and neuroscience: interrupting the spiral before it snowballs is the fastest way to break the pattern.

Your brain isn’t just dramatic—it’s an algorithm. The more time you spend thinking a specific thought, the more your brain decides, “Oh, this must be important. Let’s show her more of this content.” Just like TikTok learns your niche, your mind learns your spirals. Which means interrupting them isn’t pointless; it’s retraining the system.

“Every time you interrupt that thought…you are actually training your brain out of the pattern,” she explains. Over time, the over-the-top, catastrophic stuff stops showing up as often because you’ve stopped rewarding it with attention.

Bezanson compares it to “splashing cold water on your face, but for your thoughts”—a quick jolt that snaps you out of the loop long enough to choose something else. And that’s the whole point: not to become an effortlessly chill person overnight, but to create the smallest pause between the thought and believing the thought. Interrupt. Reroute. Repeat. It’s not glamorous, but it works.

For more insights, you can hear the full episode on Don’t Think, streaming wherever you get your podcasts.

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