Looping Recordings

“Looping recordings” is a term I made up, for lack of a better way of describing it. It means listening to short positive affirmations or quotes and setting your music app to repeat the individual track. I have been making these short positive recordings for quite a few years now. I have recorded Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words individually, with the Voice Maker service that provides high quality computerized voices. I have made these recordings available for download. I will explain in the paragraphs below, how this “looping recordings” can work for you.

Looping recordings, to reframe your thinking and help stop worrying and ruminating, can be used with any positive thoughtful quotes or affirmations, religious or not. I hope to record more of these, but you can record your own with text to speech software such as TextAloud, which I have used for years. If you don’t know any affirmations or quotes offhand, and can’t think of any yourself, just google positive affirmations, inspirational quotes, or something of that nature.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words are short snippets of wisdom. I have recorded these in both an audio format, and an audio form with a music background. The Hidden Words book has 82 short snippets translated from Arabic, and 82 short snippets translated from Persian/Farsi. I have made separate tracks for each hidden word. I put a 10-second pause after each hidden word, to give the listener time to think a bit about it.

I then listen to one hidden word, at set my music app to repeat one track. Sometimes I consciously think about a particular problem or struggle I have, and then think about that struggle within the context of what the hidden word is saying. Because the hidden words are wise and from a broader or higher perspective, the particular hidden word I am listening to often has some kind of implication on the struggle I am thinking about. If it doesn’t, I just skip ahead tracks, until I find a hidden word that can reframe my particular situation.

The looping part has been important for me, because one symptom of my mental illness has been an inability to concentrate for long. Apparently, this is a common symptom of mental illness for many people. For people who have never experienced mental illness, listening to the track once is good enough, and listening to it more than once can be boring or annoying. However, if you are having problems concentrating, then you may need to listen to a hidden word several times before it sinks in.

Even for people who don’t have problems concentrating, looping the hidden word could still be useful. These hidden words are deep thoughts. You can listen to a hidden word many times, and still find new ways of understanding it, or find “hidden words” within the actual words. So just listening to one particular hidden word repetitively can bring up different ways of understanding the hidden word, and ultimately, reframing differently the situation you are dealing with. And reframing your understanding of your situation will usually break the worry cycle, if not permanently, at least for the time being.

Nowadays, many headphones have one or three buttons on them, on one of the cables near the headphone part. Below is a photo of some earbuds. I have drawn a circle around the part of the earbuds that has the buttons. This is what they usually look like. These button controls make it easy to quickly skip ahead to the next track. The use and function of these buttons seem to be universal with recent smart phones and mp3 players. It also makes listening to “looping recordings” feasible and practical.

These buttons work differently depending on if you are talking on your cell phone, or listening to a music app. When listening to your music app on your phone, or mp3 player, the middle button does most of the work. Click the middle button, and the music track will pause. Double click the middle button, and it skips ahead to the next music track. Triple click on the middle button, and it either goes back to the beginning of the current track, or goes to the previous track. The top button increases the volume, and the bottom button decreases the volume. It took me some time to figure out how quickly to double or triple click the middle button on my mp3 player, so that it would do what it should do. If you double or triple click too fast, or too slowly, it either won’t do anything, or does something it shouldn’t do.

So if the particular hidden word you are listening to, does not have anything to do with your situation or doesn’t hold your interest, just double click on the middle button of your headphones to skip ahead to the next hidden word.