3. Do something you haven't done before

On TikTok, one psychiatrist has been posting "why you feel like shit in a pandemic " videos and touched on the topic of repetitive thoughts. She suggested that a lack of novel stimuli—aka, seeing the same four walls, the same people, the same news stories again and again—can often be a ripe environment for repetitive thoughts, particularly if you're already prone to them.

That's partly because we have so many fewer natural cues to change our patterns of thinking, Dr. Aragam says. Imagine a day pre-pandemic, where you maybe would have run into a neighbor or colleague in the middle of the day.