Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts

by Jennie Allen

Learning to capture our thoughts matters. Because how we think shapes how we live.2

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that?

Did you know that research shows that “75 to 98 percent of mental, physical, and behavioral illness comes from one’s thought life”?

Why, I wondered, don’t the changes so many women desperately want to make stick over the long haul?

Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the behaviors were shaping our relationships, all of which would take us back to either healthy or unhealthy thoughts.

Of those, so many are negative that “according to researchers, the vast majority of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of a toxic thought life.”7

The greatest spiritual battle of our generation is being fought between our ears.

Every lie we buy into about ourselves is rooted in what we believe about God.

A. W. Tozer that says, if God is “exalted…a thousand minor problems will be solved at once.”

Grabbing distractions—our brains are excellent at that.

Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.

The danger of toxic thinking is it produces an alternate reality, one in which distorted reasoning actually seems to make sense.

It is no exaggeration to say that upon hearing Ann’s words—“This isn’t who you are”—I could see something I hadn’t been able to see in months. Because alone in the dark the devil can tell you whatever the hell he wants.

You may live with low-grade sadness and have for as long as you can remember. Or maybe for you, it’s far worse than that. Two people in my life who love Jesus deeply are fighting regular desires to take their own lives. With the National Alliance on Mental Illness reporting that “one in 5 adults experiences a mental health condition every year,”6 it’s safe to say that mental illness is rampant. If mental illness is a struggle you face, may I please wrap loving arms around you, look you in the eyes, and whisper, “This—your anxiety or depression or bipolar disorder or suicidal thoughts—is not your fault”? You may be suffering from a true chemical breakdown in your body. I get that. Several members of my family depend on medicine to help regulate their brain chemistry. Please hear me: there is no shame in that choice. Praise God for tools that help. I just want you to know—please, lean in close and hear this—that throughout this book, whenever I talk about God giving us a choice about how we think, I am not suggesting that you can think your way out of mental illness. I am not. I have experienced seasons of anxiety so brutal that I was paralyzed. There are seasons when we need help in the form of counseling and medicine. But I hope to show you in the coming pages that in every season there is help that we can access for ourselves. Learning to think a single thought can help us all—those of us who struggle with mental illness and those of us whose struggles are of a different ...

if our thought lives are the deepest, darkest places of stronghold within us, all hell will try to stop us from being free.