Stop Chasing Demons: 5 Brutal Truths About Inner Struggle

Inspired by Chasing Demons – Jasta (feat. Howard Jones)

There is a version of you that keeps showing back up. Not the worst version. Not the broken one. Just the familiar one – the one that runs. The one that circles the same wound, the same doubt, the same bad habit, like a dog that won’t leave the yard. Chasing demons is what we call it when that version of you is in charge. And the brutal truth, the one this song refuses to let you dodge, is that chasing demons is not a crisis. It is a choice disguised as compulsion.

Jamey Jasta and Howard Jones don’t trade vocal weight lightly on this track. Jasta’s bark carries the low-end weight of someone who has been inside that loop for real. Jones’s clean chorus hits like relief that you almost don’t trust. Together, they build a song that doesn’t tell you what your demons are. It tells you what you’re doing to yourself by staying in the chase.

Think of it this way: a boxer who keeps throwing punches at his own shadow isn’t training. He’s exhausted and worn down, moving through the same motions in the dark, pretending that momentum counts as progress. Chasing demons works the same way. Motion without direction. Effort without arrival.

What Chasing Demons Actually Means

The phrase gets used so often it has lost some of its weight. Chasing demons sounds like something a tortured artist posts at 2 AM. Yet strip the poetry out of it and what you have is a behavioral pattern with a name: experiential avoidance. Research from the National Institutes of Health confirms that excessive avoidance – running from the internal experience of fear, shame, or discomfort rather than facing it – doesn’t reduce the threat. It keeps the threat alive. Every time you run, you signal to your own nervous system that the thing you avoided was dangerous. The loop tightens.

Chasing demons is a specific version of this. It’s not pure avoidance, the kind where you go completely numb or disappear. It’s something more restless. You stay near the thing, orbit it, think about it constantly, and build rituals around it. You let it define your pace and your direction without ever actually looking it in the eye. You are always almost dealing with it. So the act of chasing demons itself becomes the identity.

Howard Jones has spoken openly about anxiety and depression during his time in Killswitch Engage, describing walking across the street as a teenager just to avoid strangers – and how that private coping mechanism became impossible to maintain once his face was known everywhere. The demon wasn’t crowds. It was the story he had built around what crowds meant about him. The chase didn’t start with the fame – the fame just made it faster. This is the same pattern explored in identity erosion – the slow replacement of self through repeated avoidance of the thing that most needs facing.

The Loop Is the Point

One of the harder things to accept about chasing demons is that the loop feels productive. You’re not ignoring the problem. You’re engaging with it constantly. There is an internal narrative that says: as long as I’m thinking about this, as long as I’m aware of it, I’m working on it.

Yet that is not working on it. That is the most sophisticated form of avoidance there is. Behavioral neuroscience research published in Neuropsychopharmacology describes how avoidance habits shift over time from goal-directed behavior to something more automatic, more reflexive. The behavior no longer responds to outcomes. You avoid not because avoiding helps anymore – you avoid because it’s what your brain knows how to do when this particular trigger appears.

The Habit Loop Behind the Chase

Charles Duhigg’s work on habit formation in The Power of Habit explains the mechanism precisely. Every habit – good or bad – runs on a loop of cue, routine, and reward. The demon is the cue. The chase is the routine. And the reward is the brief drop in tension that comes from staying in motion rather than stopping to face what’s actually there. The brain doesn’t care whether the routine serves you – it cares that the reward arrived. So it runs the loop again and again, until chasing demons stops feeling like a response and starts feeling like a personality.

The lyric lands hard here: “You won’t find me chasing demons over the deep end.” That line isn’t sung like a victory. Jones delivers it with the weight of someone who has been to the edge and knows what it cost. It’s a refusal, not a boast. Refusals are harder than they sound when the pull of the chase has been running for years.

This is where the song stops being about addiction or trauma in any narrow sense and opens into something broader. Everyone has a version of chasing demons. The relationship that ended but you still scroll their page. The career path you left but resent at dinner. The version of yourself from a decade ago that you keep trying to either prove wrong or get back to. The demon is whatever thing you orbit without landing.

The Demon Loop

This pattern has a name worth keeping. Call it the Demon Loop. It is the circuit you run when chasing demons becomes the identity – when you are no longer trying to solve the problem, you are simply organized around it. The demon gives you a direction to face, a reason to feel the tension, a story that explains why you are not further along. Without it, you would have to decide who you are. So the loop runs – not because you are weak, but because the loop is familiar, and familiar feels like ground even when it is taking you nowhere.

The concept tracks with what Garrett J. White describes in the Wake Up Warrior work: unconsciousness breeds more unconsciousness, and suffering breeds further suffering. The loop is self-sealing. The longer you stay in it, the more the loop looks like your life rather than a detour from it. That is the real cost – not the demon itself, but the slow replacement of your actual life with the management of the chase.

Breaking the Demon Loop does not start with solving the demon. It starts with naming the loop – seeing it clearly enough to say: this is not forward motion. This is a circuit. And I have been chasing demons long enough to mistake the circuit for a road.

Shame Keeps the Chase Alive

Brené Brown has spent decades studying why people can’t move through certain experiences, and the pattern she keeps finding points back to the same mechanism: shame. Not guilt, which focuses on behavior. Shame focuses on identity. Shame says you are the problem. So as long as you believe that, confronting the demon means confronting yourself. Chasing demons feels safer than the confrontation, because at least in the chase you maintain some distance.

Brown’s research shows plainly that shame cannot survive being spoken – the secrecy is what gives it oxygen. Chasing demons is, in many ways, the physical practice of maintaining that secrecy. You stay close enough to the wound to manage it, yet never close enough to let anyone see it clearly, including yourself.

Jasta’s story maps directly onto this. He has described alcohol as the “dark river” that was always flowing, always pulling. He didn’t deny the river existed – he circled it, thought about it, and knew it was there every day. The moment that changed for him came through connection, through a conversation with someone who had faced the same river and chosen the bank. The chase ended not through willpower but through witness. Someone saw the thing he was running around and said: I know what that is.

That is the core of what this song offers anyone willing to sit with it. Not a strategy. A mirror. You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. Brené Brown said that, yet it could be the thesis of every hard lyric Jasta has ever written about chasing demons through the noise.

The Cost of the Chase No One Talks About

There is a practical cost to chasing demons that rarely gets attention. It is the cost of attention itself – the space the chase takes up inside you. Every hour the loop runs is an hour your focus is split. Every time you orbit the wound, you pull cognitive and emotional resources away from everything else: your relationships, your work, your ability to be present in the room you’re actually standing in.

Mark Manson makes a pointed argument in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck that cuts directly here. His position is that we don’t get to choose whether we carry problems – we only get to choose which ones we carry. Chasing demons is the decision, made quietly and repeatedly, to keep carrying the same problem indefinitely. The demon becomes the chosen problem. So every other area of life – relationships, health, work, presence – gets what’s left over after the chase takes its cut.

Psychology Today has framed avoidance as a form of self-sabotage because the brain reinforces the behavior through temporary relief. You circle the demon, manage not to confront it today, and the tension drops slightly. Your brain codes that drop as success. Tomorrow the loop runs again. Over time, the cost compounds, and the things that matter most to you become secondary to managing the thing you won’t face.

The real sting is that chasing demons doesn’t look like suffering from the outside. It often looks like drive, like intensity, like someone who cares deeply and works hard. The high-functioning version of chasing demons is one of the most effective disguises in the human experience. You look like you’re building something. In fact, you are running.

What Stopping the Chase Looks Like

Stopping the chase is not the same as solving the problem. This matters. A lot of people stay in the loop because they believe the only alternative is complete resolution, total healing, full arrival. That standard is too high, and it keeps people chasing demons in circles.

Willingness Before the Feeling

Gary John Bishop’s central argument in Unfuck Yourself reframes this directly. Bishop draws a hard line between being able to do something and being willing to do it. Most people stuck in a loop aren’t there because they lack the ability to stop chasing demons. They are there because they have not yet chosen to be willing. Willingness is not a feeling that arrives on its own – it is a declaration made before the feeling shows up. You decide you are willing to face the thing, and then you act from that decision before fear talks you back into the circuit.

Stopping the chase means making contact – turning toward the thing once, directly, without running. Not to fix it. Not to win. Just to see it clearly for a moment, to let it exist without immediately circling it. Research on anxiety disorders from Boston University found that the core of treatment is not eliminating fear but reducing avoidance. Learning that you can be in the presence of the difficult thing and survive it – that exposure, repeated and survived – is what rewires the loop.

What It Looks Like in Practice

In practice, stopping looks like naming the demon out loud to one person. It looks like sitting with a feeling instead of creating activity to outrun it. It looks like choosing stillness when the pull toward motion is at its strongest. From the inside, it doesn’t look like courage at all – from the inside it looks like nothing. Like staying in the room.

Jasta and Jones aren’t offering a five-step program on this track. They’re offering recognition. The chug of the riff and the contrast between Jasta’s bark and Jones’s clean ache create a sonic image of what chasing demons actually feels like: relentless, forward-moving on the surface, unresolved underneath. The song ends. The riff stops. And you’re left with the question the whole thing was built around.

The Final Riff

Chasing demons is one of the most common and least-named things people do. No rock bottom required. No obvious addiction or crisis you can point to. All it requires is the habit of staying close to the thing you most need to face, without ever actually facing it. That habit costs you something real every day you let the loop run.

Name what you’re chasing. Not for anyone else. Write it down in a sentence – one sentence. “I keep circling ________.” The act of naming it takes one hand off the wheel of chasing demons.

Find one person who can hold the weight of it without flinching. Brown is right that shame survives in silence and dissolves in witness. You don’t need a therapist, though that’s a valid option. You need one person who won’t turn the thing into either a project or a punchline.

Practice stopping once. Not forever. Once. The next time you feel the pull toward the loop, stay still for ten minutes instead. See what happens. The first time is the hardest – yet every time after builds the same muscle: the muscle of not chasing demons down every dark corridor they open.

Chasing demons doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. The decision to stop the chase, to turn and look, is where the weight starts to lift.

Sources

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11332439/
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01263-4
• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/overcoming-self-sabotage/201005/avoidance-anxiety-self-sabotage-how-running-away-can-bite-you
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5879019/
• https://lambgoat.com/news/25000/Howard-Jones-ex-KsE-opens-up-about-near-suicide/