How do you trace your own mental loops?

I keep catching myself in recursive thought patterns—debugging production issues at 2am while my brain debugs hypothetical conversations from 2019.

I've started treating these like performance bugs: tracing the call stack, finding the root trigger, watching the loop unwind.

Before I build anything: How do you "debug" your own cognition? Do you journal, use frameworks, white-knuckle it, or just accept the overhead?

Genuine curiosity. If there's a pattern in the responses, I'll share what I've been experimenting with.