Whether or not you’ve read Alice in Wonderland, you’re almost certainly familiar with the expression, and the experience, of going down a rabbit hole. Generally, it means that you’ve become engrossed in a line of thinking or research to such an extent that you’re not able to come back to familiar territory – you’re a bit lost and you can’t seem to find your way out. But there is an easy fix for this.

The reason this is familiar for most of us is that it is the nature of thought to get stuck in loops. You start down a particular line of thinking and before you know it, you’re back into a repetitive loop that never leads anywhere but to the same conclusions. You can try a hundred times to start down that path hoping to come to a new or different conclusion, and every time, you’re back in Wonderland.

It’s extremely frustrating, primarily because we EXPECT to arrive at a different place. This is why I like the metaphor “train of thought”, because unlike other modes of transportation, the train cannot leave the track. Once you’re on the train to Paris, you end up in Paris. Our thoughts may APPEAR to be free to jump tracks, but in reality this rarely happens, unless we have a flash of insight.

And this is where the fix can be quite simple: shift the context. Thoughts are quite mechanical in nature, and are often associated with a particular context. The way out of a rabbit hole is a change in your context. I’ll suggest two ways to do this.

The first shift that can lead you out of a rabbit hole is to shift your time horizon to either a very short one or a very long one. You could, for example, ask yourself if the situation you keep mulling over and over in your head looks different if you focus on this exact moment, one second at a time. That’s usually too short for the same story to unfold. Bring yourself fully into this exact moment and look from the perspective of one second. Most problems disappear at this time scale. Stay in the moment, experiencing one second at a time, for as long as possible. At this scale, problems look very different.

The other extreme is to put your problem in the context of an entire lifetime. A problem that seems huge in the context of one month or two seems much smaller when viewed in the context of 85 years. Ask yourself, how big will this problem seem to me 50 years from now? Or perhaps explore it from an even larger viewpoint: how important will this problem seem about 1,000 years from now? 10,000 years? the farther out you go, the smaller the problem seems.

The second shift that you can make is to move yourself to a different environment. Take a trip. Go to a different city. Or even just to a new coffee shop. Go somewhere unfamiliar, with different faces and smells and things to see. You don’t have to go far to change your environment. Go to a new trail in the woods. Just changing your environment forces your brain to adapt and focus on new cues. Doing this can shift your perspective enough to break you free from the train track and into a different perspective. This alone can lead you and your thoughts to a different destination, and different conclusions.

Yes, thought is mechanical and easily gets stuck in a loop. The next time that happens, try playing with your time perspective, and try moving yourself to a new environment. That will likely be enough to pull you out of the rabbit hole.