Our minds follow patterns and use short cuts all the time. Otherwise we’d have to re-learn what doors and other things were each time we encountered one. And we’d have to go back to our text books to find out how grammar worked every time we spoke. Which, on second thought, could be useful for some people online but that’s another discussion entirely.
Pattern interrupts help us reboot our mind when we need to.
In much the same way as Windows needs rebooting to clear the junk out of its storage that’s been left lying around by programs like Firefox that habitually leak into its memory as well as other processes that should have ended but are still running. Our minds do the same thing.
Usually “what if” questions for all sorts of possible outcomes that could happen but almost certainly won’t.