Why You Can't Stop Thinking About That One Thing (And What to Do About It)

I was reading The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. Good book. Genuinely good. And then he started talking about energy bubbles cycling inside your heart centre, and I had to put the book down for a second.

Not because it felt wrong. But because it felt like it was almost right, just wrapped in a layer of mysticism it didn’t need.

Let me walk you through what I mean.

The Highway Analogy

Singer opens with something really simple. You’re driving on a highway. Trees are going by. Cars. Buildings. Signs. None of it stays with you. You’re not thinking about the tree you passed two minutes ago. You’re just driving.

Then you spot a light blue Mustang. Two people sitting close together in the front seat. Looks exactly like your girlfriend’s car.

And just like that, everything else disappears.

The trees are still going by. The cars are still there. But you’re not seeing any of it. Your mind is somewhere else. Was that her? No, it couldn’t be. But what if it was? You keep replaying it. You can’t let it go.

Singer asks a simple question here: what happened? Why did that one car break everything?

It’s actually a great question. And the answer is really interesting, but it has nothing to do with energy centres.

What Singer Says (And Where He Goes Wrong)

Singer introduces a concept called samskara, a Sanskrit word from Hindu and yogic philosophy.

He says that when you experience something painful and can’t fully process it, the “energy” of that experience gets blocked. It can’t pass through you.

So instead, it starts cycling inside you. like an atom, he says, and gets stored in your “energetic heart centre.”

Then, years later, when something similar happens, that stored energy gets activated again. The old feelings rush back. The old thoughts come back. Sometimes even the smells, he says.

Here’s the problem with this.

There is no energetic heart centre in the human body. Not in any biology textbook. Not in any peer-reviewed study. The idea that experiences cycle as energy packets inside your heart is not something science has found to be true.

Singer is borrowing the language of physics — atoms, energy, equilibrium — to explain something spiritual. That is the definition of pseudoscience. It sounds scientific. It uses scientific words. But it is not based on scientific evidence.

To be fair, samskara was never meant to be a scientific concept. It comes from ancient philosophy, and that’s completely fine.

The problem is when spiritual ideas are presented as though they explain physical reality. That’s where it stops being philosophy and starts being misleading.

But, and this is the interesting part, Singer is describing something that is actually real. He’s just explaining it the wrong way.

What Is Actually Happening In Your Brain

Your brain is designed to ignore most things. There’s a process called sensory gating where the brain filters out information that isn’t important to you.

That’s why the trees on the highway don’t stay with you. The brain decides they’re not relevant and moves on.

But the blue Mustang? That gets through. Because a part of your brain called the amygdala flagged it as emotionally important.

The amygdala is basically your brain’s alarm system. When something feels threatening, personal, or emotionally significant, the amygdala lights up and tells the brain, pay attention to this one.

It then signals another part of the brain, the hippocampus, to store this memory with extra detail and extra emotional weight.

This is why you remember the worst moments of your life in vivid detail but can’t remember what you had for breakfast last Tuesday. Emotion makes memory stick.

What Singer calls a samskara, science calls an emotional memory trace. It’s a pattern stored in your brain, mostly in the amygdala, below the level of conscious awareness.

You don’t choose to activate it. It just happens automatically when something in your environment reminds your brain of the original experience.

That blue Mustang five years later? Your brain pattern-matched it to the original memory and pulled up all the old feelings instantly. This is called cue-triggered reactivation. It’s not mystical. It’s just how emotional memory works.

Why Trying To Suppress It Makes It Worse

Singer is also right that pushing things down doesn’t work. Again, right conclusion, wrong explanation.

A psychologist named Daniel Wegner ran a simple experiment. He told people: do not think about a white bear. Just don’t. The result? Everyone thought about white bears constantly. This is called ironic process theory.

When you try to suppress a thought, your brain has to keep monitoring for it, which means it keeps bringing it up.

When you resist a painful memory, when you avoid it, distract yourself from it, refuse to look at it, you don’t get rid of it. You actually make it stronger. In psychology, this is called experiential avoidance, and research consistently shows it makes things worse over time, not better.

So when Singer says that resistance causes the energy to get stuck — the underlying observation is correct. Avoidance prolongs the pain. That’s real. The energy bubble in the heart? Not real.

What You Should Actually Do

This is where a framework called ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy becomes useful. It’s evidence-based, which means it has been tested and studied, not just written about in a book.

The first thing ACT suggests is something called cognitive defusion. This basically means creating a small distance between you and your thoughts.

Instead of thinking “that was her car,” you observe it as — “I’m having the thought that it might be her car.” It sounds like a tiny shift. But it changes how much power the thought has over you.

The second thing is acceptance, and this doesn’t mean you’re okay with the situation. It just means you’re willing to feel the feeling without fighting it.

You let the jealousy or the anxiety show up, you notice it, and you don’t make it into a bigger deal than it is. When you stop fighting the feeling, the rumination loop breaks.

Neuroscience supports this through something called extinction learning. When your brain encounters the trigger, the blue Mustang, and nothing bad actually happens, it slowly updates the association.

The emotional charge weakens over time. But this only works if you allow yourself to experience the moment instead of avoiding it.

So Was Singer Wrong?

Mostly yes, when it comes to the mechanism. Energy centres, cycling impressions, samskara as a literal stored energy packet, none of that holds up scientifically.

But the thing he was pointing at?

Completely real. Emotionally charged experiences get stored differently in the brain. They surface years later when triggered by something similar. Avoiding them makes them worse.

Accepting them, actually sitting with them, is what eventually lets them go.

He got to the right place. He just took a very mystical route to get there.

So the next time a blue

Mustang drives by and something tightens in your chest, you don’t need to call it a samskara. You don’t need to find your heart chakra.

You just need to notice what’s happening, let it be there, and keep driving.

That’s really all there is to it.

If you've been carrying something like this — a memory, a moment, a person you can't stop replaying — that's not weakness. That's just your brain holding onto something it never got to process.

Sometimes the fastest way to loosen that grip is a conversation with someone who knows the right questions to ask.

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