Get Out of Your Head

Have you ever found yourself trapped inside your own head—stuck in patterns of fear, doubt, or anxious overthinking? In Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts, Jennie Allen argues that the greatest spiritual battle of our generation isn’t external—it’s in the mind. Drawing from scripture, neuroscience, and her own journey through anxiety and disbelief, Allen contends that we can harness the power of God and the renewal of our minds to end toxic thought spirals and experience freedom. The book combines Christian faith with practical mental and emotional strategies, showing how spiritual truths overlap with the latest findings in brain science.

Allen’s thesis is simple but profound: you have a choice. Every thought you entertain either leads you closer to God’s peace or traps you in fear and defeat. As she explains through her own struggles—18 months of doubt and anxiety—she realized that her breakdown in faith was not an absence of belief but a battle for her thought life. Once she recognized the destructive lies she was believing and how those lies contradicted God’s truth, she found a way forward: take every thought captive, as the Apostle Paul urged in 2 Corinthians 10:5.

Faith Meets Brain Science

The book opens by explaining that neuroscience and scripture agree on a critical fact: your thoughts shape your life. We now know that the brain is plastic, constantly changing based on the thoughts we think (a field known as neuroplasticity). This mirrors Paul’s call in Romans 12:2 to be “transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Allen reinforces this by referencing research (and authors like Dr. Caroline Leaf) showing that up to 98% of mental and physical illness is linked to one’s thought life. The more you think an anxious or self-critical thought, the deeper it engrains a neural pathway. Conversely, when you dwell on truth—hope, gratitude, community—those pathways strengthen, making optimism and resilience easier to sustain.

Allen uses a personal example to show how vicious thought spirals can become. One morning, after reading a mildly critical email and scrolling Instagram, she declared herself a failure. That sequence of thoughts led to feelings of inadequacy, which led to snapping at her husband, Zac. In an hour, she descended from confidence to despair. This is how toxic cycles propagate, she explains: emotions spawn destructive thoughts, those thoughts produce actions, and actions reinforce emotional turmoil—a loop she calls “the downward spiral.”

The Spiritual War Within

Allen emphasizes that this war in our heads is not just psychological—it’s deeply spiritual. Early chapters explore Eve’s temptation in Genesis, David’s lust for Bathsheba, and even Jesus in Gethsemane to illustrate that every action begins with a thought. The enemy, she writes, exploits our mental vulnerabilities, feeding lies that mirror three primal deceptions: “I’m helpless,” “I’m worthless,” or “I’m unlovable.” These are not mere insecurities—they are distortions of divine truth. Believing them distorts how we see God Himself, turning us into victims of our own minds.

For Allen, freedom begins when you recognize that thoughts are not facts—they are choices. We can replace the false narrative with the truth of Scripture: that we are loved, chosen, and equipped with divine power to destroy strongholds. Her personal story of recovery after an 18-month spiral of doubt in Uganda powerfully brings this to life. When her friend Ann declared, “Jennie, this isn’t who you are,” it was as if “scales fell from her eyes.” By naming the lies, fasting, praying, and replacing them with truth, Allen seized control of her thought life and reclaimed her peace. (This echoes the transformation in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, where the choice of attitude amid suffering defines freedom.)

Living Transformed

By the end of the book, Allen builds a roadmap for living like Christ through renewed thinking. She urges readers to shift focus away from distractions and busyness and toward stillness with God (“I choose to be still”), to let themselves be known in community (“I choose to be known”), to replace fear with trust (“I choose to surrender my fears to God”), to fight cynicism through worship (“I choose to delight in God”), to replace pride with service (“I choose humility”), to overcome victimhood with gratitude, and to defeat complacency by running their race for others’ good. Ultimately, she argues, a mind fixed on Christ leads to supernatural joy and purpose—a life where, as she writes, “thoughts no longer hold us captive; we are the captors.”

Jennie Allen introduces the metaphor of a “spiral” to describe how thoughts can trap us in cycles of fear, negativity, or despair. Through neuroscience and her Christian worldview, she demonstrates that our brains actually build neural highways—repeated thought paths that become the default way we process information. The good news: those pathways can be rewired by intentional thought—by choosing what she calls “the interrupting thought.” That thought, simply put, is I have a choice.

How Spirals Form

Every thought triggers an emotion. That emotion influences decisions, which shape behavior, which reinforce thought patterns. Over time, this loop solidifies as habit. For Allen, her spiral began during a crisis of faith. After an unsettling encounter with a threatening stranger and months of insomnia, her doubt about God’s presence snowballed into existential despair. “If God isn’t real,” she recalls thinking, “then my whole life is meaningless.” Each night’s fear multiplied into daytime withdrawal and exhaustion. It’s a neurological and spiritual truth, she argues: unchecked thoughts will take you where you never planned to go.

Naming and Interrupting the Lie

She demonstrates a practical process for catching destructive thoughts. Start by naming the emotion (“I’m anxious”), then identify the lie fueling it (“I am not safe”), and finally confront it with truth (“God is my refuge”). Using what she calls a “mind map,” readers can visually trace how one negative assumption—like “I can’t handle this”—branches into fears of loss, failure, and worthlessness. Identifying that web enables you to replace the lie with one life-giving truth rooted in Scripture. This process mirrors cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, though Allen grounds it theologically rather than clinically.

From Victim to Warrior

The spiral metaphor reframes mental warfare as a battle for spiritual freedom. When you realize your thoughts don’t rule you, Allen writes, you transition from victim to victor. She cites 2 Corinthians 10:3–6—Paul’s insight that the “weapons of our warfare” can destroy mental strongholds—as both scientific and spiritual reality. Thought captivity is possible because God empowers it through His Spirit. Like a person redirecting a toddler’s tantrum, you can lovingly redirect your wandering thoughts back toward truth again and again until the new pattern is entrenched.

Allen’s experiment with her own spirals shows that awareness breeds empowerment. Whether through journaling, prayer, counseling, or fasting, she argues, recognizing our choices transforms our mental landscape. She insists that you don’t need to “try harder” to stop spiraling—you need to think differently. It’s less self-help than “God-help,” a collaboration of faith and discipline that turns emotional chaos into peace.

One of Allen’s most transformative practices is holding space for silence. In a world buzzing with distraction, she explains, busyness often masks fear—the fear of being alone with our thoughts and with God. Time alone with Him, however, is where “the spiral stops.” When we still our minds, she writes, we confront lies directly and invite healing truth in their place.

Why We Resist Silence

Using the story of a friend overwhelmed by life, Allen shows that before we can solve our problems, we must stop spinning. Her advice to the friend—“You need Jesus right now”—emphasizes that no amount of advice or activity can substitute for divine presence. Yet when that friend failed to take thirty minutes of stillness, Allen sympathized: we avoid silence because we fear exposure. Solitude may reveal painful truths about our hearts or force us to face what we’ve avoided. But, she insists, God meets us in that exposure not with condemnation but kindness (Romans 2:4).

The Neuroscience of Meditation

Quoting neuroscience research (including studies from Yale and UCLA), Allen reveals that prayer and meditation physically rewire the brain. Quieting our minds increases alpha waves, decreases anxiety, and strengthens neural regions tied to empathy and focus. In short, you were designed to be still. The same creative design God used to make the universe also formed our brains to respond positively to worship, prayer, and rest. This connection between spiritual discipline and brain chemistry underscores Allen’s theme: the renewal of the mind is both divine and biological.

Attention as Worship

Allen closes the chapter by explaining that the most valuable thing you possess is your attention. Whatever you attend to expands—fear, self-pity, gratitude, or God. She encourages readers to shift from attending to anxiety (“What if?”) toward attending to Jesus (“Come to me, all who are weary”). In doing so, you learn that one cannot worship worry and God at the same time. Stillness, then, is not idleness—it’s the mental posture of humility where the mind becomes fertile ground for peace.

After exploring solitude, Allen pivots to its complement: community. Humans are wired for connection because we mirror a relational God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Isolation, she argues, is one of the enemy’s favorite tools to keep believers trapped in shame. According to her friend, psychiatrist Curt Thompson, everyone fears that “if anyone really knew me, they’d leave.” But that lie keeps us from the very relationships that heal us.

How We’re Wired for Connection

Allen weaves together theology and neuroscience to show how our brains respond to belonging. Mirror neurons cause us to internalize others' emotions; empathy isn't learned, it's hardwired. This means community literally heals the brain. Loneliness, conversely, activates pain centers similar to physical injury. “We weren’t made to be alone with our thoughts,” she reminds readers—doing life together is not optional but essential for sanity and spiritual health.

Vulnerability as a Weapon

Allen draws from her own experience moving cities and rebuilding friendships to illustrate how community requires risk. You must, as she says, “say the last 2 percent”—the part of your story you hide most. One woman in her ministry confessed an emotional affair to her friends, spoke it aloud, and “immediately the temptation lost its power.” Secrecy breeds bondage; confession invites freedom. By being known, we defeat the lie that we’re alone in our struggle and activate the gospel’s truth: we are loved as we are, not as we pretend to be.

In a society that prizes independence and appearance, Allen calls for radical vulnerability. Friendship requires what she terms “holy bothering”—showing up, asking questions, and allowing others to disrupt your isolation. True transformation, she writes, happens in circles, not rows. Community is where our thoughts are exposed, refined, and aligned with truth.

Fear, for Allen, is one of the most common lies driving our mental chaos. The “what if?” questions—what if I fail, what if I lose everything, what if God doesn’t care?—pull us from faith into panic. Her antidote? Shift every “what if” into “because God.” Because God is sovereign, loving, and good, you can move from control to surrender.

Faith Over Anxiety

Pulling from Philippians 4, she highlights Paul’s command to “be anxious for nothing.” That’s possible, she says, because anxiety flows from imagined futures, while truth anchors us in present reality. Science supports her claim—studies show 97% of worries never come true. When you fixate on what is “true, noble, right, pure,” your brain’s threat circuits quiet down. Spiritual trust and cognitive calm become one and the same.

Replacing Lies with Truth

Allen offers practical scripts for swapping fear-based assumptions with faith statements. “I’m afraid of being alone,” becomes, “God has promised never to leave me.” “I fear failure,” becomes, “God’s power is made perfect in weakness.” She references Corrie ten Boom’s story in The Hiding Place, where Corrie’s father uses a train ticket analogy to show that God gives strength “just in time.” These examples bridge theology and life, showing that surrender isn’t passivity—it’s rehearsal for victory.

For Allen, peace isn’t the absence of problems but the presence of belief. As we repeatedly surrender fears, trust becomes a reflex—the spiritual equivalent of a well-trained muscle. Fear may visit, but faith answers the door.

In a culture obsessed with self-esteem and empowerment, Allen invites readers to pursue the paradoxical freedom of humility. Drawing inspiration from Philippians 2 and Andrew Murray’s classic Humility, she admonishes that pride fractures relationships and clouds judgment. Humility, however, aligns our minds with Christ, who “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant.”

Seeing Ourselves Through God’s Eyes

Allen tells the story of snapping at a new coworker, realizing afterward that her justifications (“I was tired,” “She misunderstood”) only inflated her ego. Convicted by scripture, she apologized. The act of humility repaired the relationship and her peace. “We are not made to be the center of our own worlds,” she writes. False greatness isolates us from empathy and grace, while self-forgetfulness frees us to love others as God does.

The Joy Hidden in Being Less

Counterintuitively, humility multiplies joy. When you stop performing for approval, you experience rest. Studies even show that people who practice gratitude and generosity have greater life satisfaction. For Allen, this isn’t psychology—it’s theology: true greatness in God’s economy is servanthood. “The more I choose God and others over myself,” she writes, “the more joyful I become.”

Her 10-year-old son’s confession that he didn’t want “shoes that say ‘look at me’” crystallizes her message: a humble heart points upward, not inward. We can stop striving to be awesome because Jesus already is. Humility, she concludes, is not self-hatred but right-sized self-awareness—knowing who we are and whose we are.

After tackling pride, Allen turns to its inverse enemy: victimhood. The antidote is gratitude. Drawing from Philippians 1, she demonstrates how Paul—chained under house arrest—still radiated thankfulness. Gratitude, she explains, literally rewires the brain’s reward center and dismantles the illusion that we are powerless against circumstances.

Gratitude as Spiritual Warfare

Allen’s friend Brooke exemplifies this shift. Trapped in a job she hated, Brooke began listening to scripture on her commute. One day, Paul’s words—“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you”—convicted her. She chose to thank God for her coworkers and customers instead of complaining. That simple mental pivot transformed her attitude and her workplace, illustrating how grateful thoughts replace despairing ones.

Suffering and the Choice to Reframe

Allen connects grateful thinking to neuroscience: expressing thanks increases dopamine and serotonin, creating a positive feedback loop. But she also grounds this in faith, reminding us that Paul endured betrayal, prison, and pain yet declared, “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” Gratitude doesn’t deny pain; it reframes it in light of redemption. She tells of her friend Roddy, whose husband died of ALS but who continues to say, “We never asked ‘Why?’—only ‘Why not us?’”

Ultimately, gratitude frees us from victim thinking by anchoring us in God’s sovereignty. Trials may burn us, but as Allen notes through her pottery metaphor, “the fire can either shatter us or refine us.” Gratitude chooses refinement—it’s the art of seeing God’s goodness even in the ashes.

Allen closes with an urgent call to action: freedom in Christ isn’t for self-fulfillment—it’s for service. Complacency, she says, is a velvet-covered chain: comfortable but deadly. The only cure is mission-minded living. “We weren’t built to live for ourselves,” she writes. “We were made to be active participants in God’s story.”

Rejecting Apathy

Allen admits she too drifted into comfort after seasons of struggle—bingeing Netflix, scrolling Instagram, numbing her zeal for ministry. Citing D.A. Carson’s line that “we do not drift toward holiness,” she warns that complacency masquerades as rest. True rest comes from obedience. She reframes freedom as responsibility: God has set us free not to indulge but to serve (Galatians 5:13).

Work as Worship

She reminds us that God loves work—He modeled it in creation. Whether folding laundry or leading teams, our labor glorifies Him when rooted in love. Research shows that purposeful activity even enhances physical health, echoing Scripture’s truth that serving blesses both giver and receiver. Service becomes sacred when infused with surrender (“Your will, not mine”) and obedience (“I’ll follow wherever You send me”).

Her image of running a race—drawn from Hebrews 12—captures the progression of the book: fix your eyes on Jesus, shed distractions, and keep moving. Service redirects attention away from self-pity and toward others’ needs, transforming mental rumination into purposeful motion. In running our race, Allen concludes, we find the joy that complacency could never offer: participation in God’s ongoing redemption.