Thought repetition?

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I've just noticed and started thinking about something I have been doing in the past year or so.

I'm a verbal thinker. I was a visual thinker when I was younger but that changed as I grew. A more recent development is that I repeat my own thoughts quite often. Instead of thinking "I put the mini wheats at the back", I'll think "I put the mini wheats at the back I put the mini wheats at the back I put the mni wheats t the back".

I compulsively repeat my own thoughts in my head. Sometimes I repeat it once. Sometimes I repeat myself twice or even three times.

I never used to do this. Sometimes I change the way I say it in my head a bit. I might replace one word with a better word while still keeping the same idea. In that way I'm also editing my thoughts.

I don't know why I started doing this but it's something I noticed. Maybe it's a lack of confidence in my own memory?

The more stressed out I get, the more thoughts repeat in my head. I play them out like a video rather than thinking the words. For example, if I'm stressed about the way I behaved in a social situation, I will play it over in my mind obsessively. The more stressed I am, the more I do this.

I do something similar. It’s hard to put into words, but I can relate.
I think it’s a grown-up form of echolalia.
I replay mostly my own words and thoughts, but sometimes the words of others.
For me, I don’t think it’s really a stress thing. It just is.

When I was working full-time in an office and typing every day, I often felt the urge to
type the words I said or thought or heard. No one could have seen it, but my fingers
got the itch to play out whole conversations on an imaginary keyboard.

I do other things in my head that are hard to describe, but I think they fit the general category.
Invisible, but echolalic.

I have certain types of repetitive thoughts at times:

- I have to repeat thoughts when I’m trying to convince or motivate myself to something (suspect everyone does this).

- I have to repeat thoughts when I’m worried I will forget to do something if I get distracted (probably normal for most, but my memory is really easily messed up; sometimes I will be going to do something, another thought will interrupt me, and I’ll get to where I was going and spend a couple minutes trying to recall what I was initially about to do.)

- I repeat thoughts trying to convince myself that I had done something a certain way or had put something somewhere and yet can’t explain why the object is no longer where I thought I put it. No one else could have moved it but me; so again it is me and my faulty memory. Maybe this is similar to what you are doing Seaturtle.

- The one that actually concerns me the most is repeating random questions to myself that have no meaning for up to eight or ten months at a time. Several times a day I would repeat questions to myself (often aloud, since I externalize my thoughts a lot) at random times. I have no idea where they came from or what they mean. They have nothing to do with anything that I can tell. One of these was “What is the square root of pi?” I must have asked myself this question thousands of times. Then suddenly it changed and I started asking “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” which I’ve also said to myself about a thousand times. Recently randomly repeating these things to myself has kind of stopped or at least slowed down. But I can’t help but wonder why I was doing this.

I think this is an ADD thing for me. Just part of the ruckus that is going on in my brain at any given time. For example, I have "ghosts" of what I typed in my last post, remnants of music I was listening to, pieces of a rant that I had in my head over a work issue, and visual traces of a mistake I just made in a sewing project I am working on. Sometimes in that melee, there is also repetitive thoughts like you are describing.

I do that. A word or thought repeated over and over. It's a perseveration. Maybe it's just filling space in your brain between thoughts.

I had Palilalia as a kid, which is where you repeat your own words back to yourself. These days, I don't verbalize it as much, but I'll still "say" it in my mind 2 or 3 times.

I think I do the same or similar thing, too. And as someone said, it gets worse when I'm stressed.

I tend to try to define the situation I'm really stressed about, with words in a very logically organized manner. If that's all it's ok, but I, then, repeat the sentences until I feel the words/sentences match my feelings/thoughts perfectly. I think I'm doing it to clarify the situation and logically understand it so that I can do something about it (though I don't really do much about it) because defining the problem is the first step towards resolving it.

This repeating bit is the problem. Sometimes I can't stop it. If I get really stressed, some noise (such as birds, wind, cars outside, someone sneezing etc or even my own breathing) breaks my train of thought and I feel compelled to start from the beginning. It goes on and on forever. Sometimes I end up doing it for the whole day and cannot concentrate on anything else. Sometimes I have to write the sentences to stop the repetition in my head. My temples and forehead often get itchy/tingly from tension when it's very bad. It was very debilitating. A doctor told me it's probably OCD. It used to be very bad, but it's manageable now.

I used to do this very obviously as a child -- I would repeat that last few words that I said silently, but move my mouth slightly as I did it. It drove my brother nuts. I was just recently made aware that when I'm having a conversation with someone in my head -- repeating an argument or whatever -- I'll move my mouth and make facial expressions as if I'm really talking to that person! I had no idea that I did that, and it made me feel self-conscious and stupid to think others may have seen me do it. Mostly I DON'T move my mouth anymore though. Like the OP said, it's more of a case of looping the last sentence or thought around in your head like a scratched CD.