Get Out of Your Head summary

These days, it’s easy to get distracted, whether your personal vice is scrolling through Instagram, binge-watching Netflix, or whatever else. We even distract ourselves with things that seem positive, like too much work, or too many friends. But the truth is that we all need a little bit of silence and stillness in our lives.

That’s because, sometimes, we need something that other people just can’t provide. A friend of the author’s once confided in her about everything that was going wrong in her life. It was such a big and scary list, that Jennie knew there was only one thing that her friend truly needed – and it wasn’t her. It was some alone time with God.

Alone time with God is crucial, but that doesn’t mean all the time. In fact, something that’s just as important as alone time is the opposite: community. Even God is a community, after all: the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The modern world isn’t always much help with this. We’re taught to prize independence as a goal in life, as if it’s good to succeed on our own. But at heart, we all need to surround ourselves with other people. We need to be seen, and we need to be loved.

As we’ve just seen, simply acknowledging a negative thought – even just by saying it out loud – can break its power over you. That’s why Paul, in the Bible, told us to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

Taking your thoughts captive can be as simple as writing them down. Try it. Write down a negative thought that’s bothering you, and really think about it. Ask yourself if it’s really true – and what God thinks of it. You can do that by checking your Bible, and asking people in your religious community for advice. Finally, decide to make a choice about that troublesome thought. Are you going to continue letting it bother you, or are you going to break free?

A friend of Jennie’s was feeling frustrated. Even though she had a college degree, she was stuck in a job she found boring, working in a fashion store. Didn’t she deserve a better career than this?

But one day, she started listening to the Bible during her drive to work. A passage from Philippians 1, written by Paul, jumped out at her. He was expressing his gratitude: “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,” he wrote. At the time, Paul was living under house arrest.

How do you think Jesus spent most of his days? It wasn’t all miracles. Plenty of the time, he was just doing good, low-key, charitable work – discussing forgiveness and grace, helping the poor, and so on. It’s not stuff that would’ve made the headlines.

You don’t have to spend your whole life performing miracles, either. In fact, it’s normal that you should devote lots of your time to service, whether that’s helping your children out, cleaning up, or doing some other task that you might not get thanked for. You shouldn’t be doing it for thanks or praise – you should be doing it for God.

Eighteen months is a long time to spend in a negative spiral of thoughts. But Jennie managed to get out of that spiral – and out of her own head – by turning her focus to Jesus. By choosing to give her mind over to God, she managed to get herself onto an upward spiral of positivity that culminated in her writing the book these blinks are based on – which is designed to help others do the same thing.

The thing to remember is that we all have negative thoughts – in fact, we’re all plagued by self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. The key question is what we do with those thoughts. Remember: the choice is yours.