Very true. I do tend to be what I give the most attention to. If my negative thinking and rumination is dominating my life (as it has definitely done on many occasions), I am inevitably worse for wear.

My therapist was always reminding me to actively find ways to break up that cycle. We spent A LOT of time working on being deliberately proactive about giving myself a break from my head. I used to really fight him on it: "Oh, that won't work." "I can't do that." But he was a persistent bugger about it; he knew what I was not really able to admit to myself -- I was in a really bad habit of actively fighting against what would help me feel some relief.

You see, in my thinking, if it wasn't going to cure all, if it wasn't going to feel perfect, then it wasn't worth trying because I was predicting failure. What I had to come to realize (and it took a LONG time to get there) was that improvement for just an hour was success. The ability to give myself a mental break for just a small portion of a day was a success. And over time, I began to give myself credit for all those little successes along the way, and they started to add up (which is exactly what my therapist had kept telling me).

I also think that somewhere in my mind I believed if I allowed myself a mental break, I was somehow minimizing my own pain or betraying myself or letting the bastards who did this to me somehow get away with it. I had to get over that thinking and learn how to honor myself by allowing myself to feel pleasure and think about the positives in life.