Tape recorder playing everything over and over in your head

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I went to lunch with a friend today which was a decent time....

Anyways afterward I was driving home and I just kept playing every little sentence piece over and over in my head.

I always do this with interactions with people although not so much when I am talking to my family though sometimes.

Any one else get this mental tape recorder playing over and over again in their head?

Often it can leave me feeling sad as I am trying to decipher every little bit and piece.

This a normal thing? Or is this an aspergers thing?

(Don't want to be a aspergers is everything person)

I don't repeat it in my mind, but I say it out loud. Gotta love echolalia.

I play things over and over in my head, but its usually when I'm trying to get to sleep.

I am like that too. Some people I know are like this about important things but I'm like this about every little thing.

Happens to me much too frequently. Especially when I'm trying to sleep.

Yes, my whole life feels like one but tape recorder. I replay conversations over and over in my head, sentences, things I've seen... Gets a bit annoying but I struggle to stop.

Yes. My mind's gotten less indiscriminate about what it plays back though the more familiar I become with social situations at large.

Yeah that happens to me too. During that time I tend to decipher more of what happened during a social interaction then during the actual interaction. I can remember a lot of detail even when Im drunk. It happens more often when I place more importance on the social interaction. Its a selective thing. I find this used to happen more often when I was younger and I didnt interact as much. Once social interaction started occuring more often, I placed less importance on it.

It's called repetitive thinking, and yeah if you wanna think it's part of Asperger's you can because some AS individuals have it. We are, afterall, defined by "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior". Personally, I only start to think repetitively when I am upset or someone says something to me that makes me feel bad, after-which I mull it over and over in my head trying to figure out why they said it.

me too
sometimes it is hard to shut off....expecially while I am trying to sleep
the more stress I am under the worse it is
sometimes I do it without noticing like a phrase going through my head over and over like a chant in my mind
Other times I do it to understand what has been said to me almost like disecting the words themselves

I have the same problem with conversations playing over and over again; I'll be sitting in my car driving and realize that I just recited an entire previous conversation to myself, and an hour has passed.

But the real problem with replays in my mind are songs. I heard Rag Doll by Aerosmith first thing this morning in my car, and I don't think it has left my mind or lips since then. This happens every day, sometimes with terrible, terrible songs, and I can't do anything to stop it. Some of them are extraordinarily long-term, also - I've had Halcyon & On & On replaying in my mind for a good 14 years now. At least it isn't Rebecca Black.

This happens to me with music and obsessing over and over about circumstances and social interactions.

I wish there was a way to put my brain on *pause* for a while. It seems to be perpetually stuck on *repeat*.

I have this tape recorder playing back all the abusive voices and words from my past over and over in my head.

It's called the Inner Dialogue.

I don't think it's just aspies who have it, but I certainly think it's more pervasive and intrusive for us than it is for NTs.

Mine never shuts up. At least I've trained it not to put me down anymore.

I think the important thing is not to identify with the tape. It's just a portion of your brain that's stuck on automatic and it's not important. If you can adopt a bemused attitude toward this inner chatter, you have already begun to separate yourself from it. With time it may become less obtrusive and easier to shove aside when you need to do some REAL thinking.