Breaking the Doom Loop

Three phrases for surviving the doom loop of political work, from meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein

NOTE: I’m currently completing my certification to become a mindfulness teacher, and as part of that process, I’m offering a free 6-week online mindfulness course for politics, policy, and advocacy professionals. Over six 60-minute sessions, we’ll build a sustainable practice that will help change your relationship to work stress and anxiety so that you’re grounded within the chaos instead of swept away by it. I’d love to have you join us. Sign up here.

One of my favorite things to do each morning when I take our dog Arki on a long morning walk is to listen to Dan Harris’ great mindfulness podcast, 10% Happier. Harris is a former television journalist and, as such, suffers from the same kind of stress and anxiety that many of us who work in politics experience. Those high-stakes, ever-changing, every-second-counts environments truly re-wire our brains and alter the way we relate to adversity.

Given our shared backgrounds, I find myself relating to many of the guests Dan welcomes on his show and the topics he covers.

Chief among them: how to deal with rumination or those sticky thoughts and emotions that we tend to loop on repeat in our brains. Our aversion to them only feeds them further and they become all-consuming (or at least they do to me).

So, recently, when Harris invited his friend and longtime meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein to discuss “Buddhist earworms” — little phrases designed to break us out of the trance of thoughts and stories that overcrowd our minds — I turned up the volume. Below are a couple that really stuck out to me:

“Little dictators of the mind.” Too many of us are familiar with the spiral of negative thought, usually tied to a challenge or setback we’re facing at work. We replay a coalition call, draft the email we’re not going to send, or rehearse an argument with someone who isn’t even in the room. Goldstein’s point is that a thought only has dictatorial power over us when we’re not aware it’s just a thought. The moment you notice “oh, this is thinking” — not “this is true” — it downgrades from a command to a suggestion. You can ask: is this actually going to help me achieve what I’m trying to achieve?

“The thought of your mother is not your mother.” In political work this shows up as: the thought of your opponent is not your opponent. The mental version of a difficult coworker or hostile boss that we’re arguing with in the shower is not the actual person — and it’s certainly not the actual negotiation. We can spend enormous energy fighting representations we’ve built up for ourselves, and sometimes those representations prove to be completely false.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” This is maybe the most useful one for organizers specifically, because it counters a very particular occupational delusion: the belief this bill, this op-ed, this coalition partner is the key to unlocking success. Goldstein ties it to his definition of dukkha as “the inevitability of unwanted experiences.” In other words, it’s not a design flaw in your campaign. Setbacks are just the nature of things, and they befall everyone working in a difficult environment. The alternative — believing this round is the one that ends the striving — sets you up to treat every setback as proof you’re failing, rather than as the next unwanted-but-expected thing.

So next time you’re starting to spiral into a negative doom loop, try on one of these phrases for size. They may create helpful distance between you and the thought you’re experiencing — and help you relate differently to it.

If any of this resonated, I hope you’ll consider joining my free, 6-week online course built specifically for people doing this work. Across six sessions we move from the basics of stress and breath awareness to real tools for observing thoughts, working with difficult emotions, and integrating practice into a demanding job — so that by the end, you have something durable you can actually use. Sign up here.