The Real Reason Your Brain Won’t Shut Up
It has nothing to do with “being prepared,” and everything to do with a lack of self-trust.
For a long time, this photo is exactly what the inside of my head felt like. It is how my outside world felt. Like waves crashing on rock in a storm, my overthinking and rumination were endless, immortal, chaotic, and never satisfied.
If your brain never shuts up, whether it is in the shower, on your drive, or at 2am when you’re exhausted, on the surface you tell yourself this is just being prepared, but really there’s a part of yourself that you stopped trusting. I’m going to show you where that comes from and give you the two-part process that I use to actually bring silence. The second part is what makes it work.
But none of this came to me naturally — not until I could see what I was actually fighting.
The Enemy
When I talk about overthinking here, I’m talking about the noise that’s always on where you wake up and it’s already going. These are legitimate problems to you, but it goes beyond the anxiety before that big presentation or spiraling over a specific conversation or hard decision that you have to make at work.
It’s basically your baseline. It’s not a reaction to a situation. And if you’ve looked for other tools that help with overthinking and rumination and they haven’t worked longer term before, it’s because they were never really built for this. They treat the surface, situational occasions.
And here’s what’s hidden in that: every tool you’ve tried that didn’t stick is failing because it treats what’s on top while what’s underneath keeps generating it.
I spent probably 95% of my waking life overthinking and ruminating. My brain was running almost all of the time, and I never knew peace. Actually the concept of peace was a bit foreign to me. And I look back and I see those fleeting moments of, like, walking in the park and having just a little bit of bliss. And it feels like sweet, eternal release because it really is so fleeting.
What I came to terms with is that the problems in my life weren’t significant enough to justify that level of mental activity, which feels like crazy talk to the person who’s overthinking, because all of these are really significant problems, honestly. Like they’re soul-crushing, defeating things. There’s self-worth-proving things. And so that was a difficult admission. And since that chatter was always on, it just went looking for something else to attach to. It was the next thing. It was anything. It’s absolutely a compulsion.
Some part of you believes that this process is working, that if you just think hard enough, if you think long enough and turn it over enough times, you’ll land on the answer that makes the uncertainty go away. It feels like problem-solving. It feels like responsibility and preparation. That if you stop the process, something will slip through the cracks and you won’t be ready. Researchers call that a metacognitive belief, which is a belief about your own thinking that keeps the loop alive. I have to keep thinking this because if I stop, bad things will happen.
And it’s the most convincing solution your brain gives you because it disguises a compulsion as diligence.
And I mean, that’s the sneaky bastard of it all. Because a compulsion will get you to justify its existence any way it can. And then you nearly fall in love with the process of it, because it feels identical to safety and comfort.
What am I going to say when I get to work? How do I explain being two minutes late? Actually, I’m two minutes early, but what if someone notices and thinks I’m trying too hard? What’s my boss going to think about that email I sent? Did that come across wrong? I should have worded it differently.
And you’ll notice that instead of solving the problem and being satisfied with where you’re at, you actually find yourself forecasting scenarios endlessly. Each one branches into ten more, and then those branch into ten more. And all of a sudden you’re doing Inception stuff and you’re four layers deep into a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. And before you think this whole process is over, it loops back to the beginning to do it again.
Your brain pulls from every interaction you’ve ever had, every pattern you’ve ever observed about how people react. It starts running simulations. How could this person respond? What would satisfy them? What would make them uncomfortable? What would make me uncomfortable? What version of me do I need to be so that this goes well?
And so you might ask the question, how do you tell the difference between preparation and overthinking? If you’re approaching a problem from different angles and making progress and you reach some level of satisfaction in that, that’s productive thought. If you’re looping the same scenario and never satisfied, no matter how many times you run it, that’s overthinking. And you tend to know which one you’re on.
The exhaustion is obvious. The mental debt, the frustration — none of that is news.
What’s harder to accept, and this is what we really need to sit with, is that as much as you believe this process is helping you prepare for the unknown, it just isn’t.
Now, it might be making you feel better. But it’s not actually getting you any closer to solving the problem that you’re setting out to.
Being prepared implies a level of ‘problem-solved’ satisfaction. And think about when the last time was you said, “Okay, that sounds like enough thinking,” and then you put the idea to bed and moved on. Not when you had the perfect answer. But when you had enough. Doesn’t happen.
Because when you’re forecasting, you’re looking for certainty that you can control the outcome. And honestly? You are no closer to having control of a reality in that situation than if you had just gone with the first thought in your head.
Chronic overthinking is worse than unhelpful. Leading research shows that rumination actively degrades your problem-solving skills. For one, your solutions become objectively worse and less practical to the exact issue you are looping on. Ultimately, overthinking makes you worse at the exact thing you are trying to fix. And second, it’s eating the bandwidth you’d actually want for other parts of your life that matter. It’s monopolizing your focus and energy. The machine that you built to protect you is now making you less capable.
Ultimately, instead of being satisfied with a good enough answer, you’re searching for that one perfect, pain-free solution among a million disastrous ones. And that word — perfect — is important. Because what’s hiding underneath all of this overthinking, for a lot of you and me, is perfectionism. The need to get it exactly right, the need to control the outcome so completely that nothing can go wrong and no one can be upset. And you never have to feel the sting of a mistake. That you don’t have to see how an imperfect version of you comes out the other side of your problem.
But you know, perfection doesn’t really exist. Yet the search never ends.
Because the overthinking isn’t really about thinking. It’s about feeling unsafe.
Feeling like you have to control things that are actually out of your control. Your brain has decided, probably a long time ago, that the way to survive an unpredictable world is to think your way through every possibility before it arrives.
Like potentially a lot of you, this was my own learned strategy from a young age. It’s how I moved through the world. It’s what kept me safe before. But not anymore. It was growing up in a home where you had to read the room to stay safe, then learning early that mistakes had enormous consequence. Maybe you figured out that if you could just anticipate what people needed, you could avoid the pain.
And now it looks like replaying a conversation in the shower to figure out what you did wrong. It looks like lying in bed running through everything you said today and grading yourself on it. It looks like not being able to enjoy where you are because you’re already solving for where you’re going next.
It’s the same strategy. It’s the same kid trying to stay safe. The hyper-pattern recognition skills that kept you safe served you at one point. But now they’re a compulsion and now they get in the way. And now they still run even though the threat is gone.
It took me years to see what’s underneath this. The kid stays hidden for a reason and admitting why is harder. Underneath all of that is one thing. And once I named it, the way I work with my own brain changed completely.
The Shift
This is the logic that changed how I interact with myself.
You overthink to perfectly prepare for every possible outcome. You need that perfect answer because the unexpected feels dangerous. And the unexpected only feels dangerous because you do not trust yourself to handle it.
That’s the root. That’s what’s underneath all of it. It’s not a broken brain or a personality defect that you’re stuck with.
It’s a lack of self-trust.
It literally follows like this. And you will feel the results in this fashion. When you stop trusting yourself, your overthinking rises. When you start trusting yourself, it lowers.
And I want to be really clear about what self-trust means here because it’s simpler than you think. And even so, I have to remind myself all the same.
Self-trust just means you believe you can handle whatever comes your way. Not that you need the answer, but that even when you don’t have it figured out, you’re still going to be okay. That’s it.
Now, coming from a world of having to figure out every answer, that sounds like a scary prospect. If that does sound scary or your gut fear is “but I can’t handle things,” then I have some genuinely great news.
You can handle what you don’t know. And you already have. Time and time again.
You’ve handled the unexpected, the imperfect, the situations that you weren’t prepared for that you swore you couldn’t survive. And here you are. You’re still here.
You’ve made it.
But inside, you probably want to argue with that, too. Like — made it? What do you mean? I’m a fucking mess. But you know just what I mean. You’ve gone through and you’ve survived it. It’s not about getting through perfectly.
But you could argue with more. Of course you could. “But that was different. That wasn’t surviving. That didn’t count. I didn’t really handle anything. There’s nothing that I have that’s actual proof.” I mean, give yourself some credit for a moment. And if you really can’t draw anything up, I’m going to help you with that too.
What we’re looking for here isn’t that you knew the answer. It isn’t that you got through it unscathed. It’s, “Sure, I handled it, and I might have been a mess, but I got through it.” Your need for it to look perfect going through is the perfectionism talking.
Handling it doesn’t mean you were graceful or composed or impressive. It means you got through it. You’re still here. That’s the bar. And that is enough.
You may not believe it right now, but you have more evidence than you realize that you are capable of navigating what comes your way.
And if you struggle with recollecting that evidence — closing your eyes and looking back to find the proof you’re looking for — there’s a specific reason why you probably can’t see it. We’ll get to that, because it’s the piece I mentioned earlier that unlocks normal people shit for you.
You can understand all of this and still not feel it. I did, for years. There’s one moment that changed me. The moment my body believed it.
I signed up for a four-day leadership program without fully knowing what I was walking into. Which turned out to be a room of 30 strangers and four days of being asked to do things I didn’t think I could do. Not to sit and learn, but do. Over and over and over in ways where no amount of overthinking kept me safe enough.
By the end of day one, I was inches away from going home. I almost went to the coaches and said, give me my phone, I’m leaving. Because none of the rehearsing, the forecasting, or trying to figure out the right answer before I had to act mattered.
When the goal was to show up without my walls.
I cannot overstate how uncomfortable I was. I mean, hands shaking and my mind racing and heart just going all the time. Because I didn’t think I could handle it and I didn’t really want to find out. But I did stay. And each time I did something I was sure I couldn’t do, I came out the other side of it. I developed an accumulation of proof that I did it, that I handled it, again and again.
By the end, I had the most blissful internal silence that I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I looked at my before and what I came through, at the fear I discovered within it, and that I came out of it. That I handled what came my way, my way. And that I believed with my whole heart that it was me that did that. And for that, it was worth celebrating.
This was the strangest, most peaceful thing I have ever felt. And I didn’t even know my life had access to it.
That silence — that was self-trust. That was my brain finally going, “Okay, we can handle things. We’ve seen it. We were a mess and we didn’t feel good. But we don’t need to run through every situation anymore to feel safe enough.”
That same evidence is what we’re pursuing today.
What this self-trust unlocked was something else I didn’t expect. All the books and courses and frameworks I’d consumed for years and never stuck — they suddenly became usable. All of the typical tools and suggestions that I couldn’t stick with long term. Because the real problem underneath it all was finally resolved. And I not only felt safe enough to apply them, but I had enough open cognitive function to think about how to apply them for me.
This information isn’t magic. But it might help if you’re ready to actually trust yourself enough to try it.
The Tools
Which brings us to what you actually do about it. The tool is in two parts. It’s what I do when I catch myself looping. The first mechanic helps us build new pathways for our thoughts, and the second brings us back to self-trust.
Stop actively trying to solve the problem.
If that sounds like “just don’t think about it” — that’s wrong. When you catch yourself in a loop, when you notice you’re running the same scenario again or searching for that perfect answer, your first move is to stop engaging with the thought.
It’s not to suppress it. It’s not to fight it, not argue with it, or reject it, or tell it to piss off. Not to replace it with a positive affirmation. Or tell yourself, “I don’t need to think about this. I just need to let it go.”
What that all looks like is fighting with your brain, and it’s real good at fighting back. Far better than you are, or at least than I ever was. But instead of fighting — what if you just don’t engage?
Disengagement is withdrawing your participation. You’re not grabbing on to something. You’re letting go. Whereas suppression is fighting the thought with a new thought. You’re still active and meeting effort with effort.
My favorite way to think about this comes from Doctor Michael Greenberg, who describes rumination as a treadmill you step off of. Rather than being active, you just stop running on it.
Now, in practice, here’s what I do.
Because I’m a visual person, I imagine myself on the treadmill with the loop I am in, and I visualize the loop and I visualize stepping off of it. I let myself disengage. Another visual could be holding on tightly to your loop that you’re thinking about, and then visualize letting it go.
Today, when I notice myself looping, I tell myself: I don’t need to solve this problem. Which sparks the familiar sensations that I’ve built in releasing, so I don’t have to rely so much on visualizing anymore.
And then I breathe. I literally just breathe. It’s not a special technique. Just breathing and letting the discomfort move through me as much as I’m able to. Because your brain is going to fight you. The compulsion to re-engage, to pick the thought back up and start running again, it’s going to be intense. And especially when you first start this process. You’ve just told yourself to stop doing the thing your nervous system believes is keeping you safe and alive. Of course it’s going to push back.
And while at the end of this we are pursuing peace, I’m not going to tell you that this is what peace feels like yet. It’s going to feel uncomfortable because this is a new thing. Your mind is still moving — it’s just now frantic about the fact that you’re not engaging with the compulsion anymore. Depending on who you are, the resistance can feel more challenging than the overthinking itself.
Because if it was easy, we would have done this a long time ago.
Like I said earlier, the compulsion gives you what feels like safety. And when you get rid of that, it’s the familiar feeling of being unsafe. Except now you just feel unsafe because the safety maneuver is gone, which is an important distinction. So you keep breathing and you might need to repeat it. You will have to repeat it. “I don’t need to solve this” — as many times as you need. You’ll probably come back to the treadmill and that’s fine. Just step off again.
What we’re striving for is what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls defusion — distance between you and the thought. You become someone observing your mind rather than someone who believes they are their thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You are not your anxiety. Your brain is doing a thing — an old, habitual, well-intentioned thing — and you can acknowledge it without obeying it.
Okay, now here’s the part that actually makes this work long term, because it’s good to know how to get off the treadmill, but it really helps to know that you don’t have to be on it to begin with. This is where we build the self-trust.
So after I disengage, after I’ve stepped off, what I’m really reminding myself — and even telling myself actively — is that I’m doing this overthinking because I’m not trusting myself right now. And for me, that goes beyond just the sentence. It pulls up everything, every visualization, every meaning that I have built around what those words actually mean to me. The evidence that I’ve collected and the things that I’ve already handled. The proof that I’m okay even when I don’t have the answer.
You can step off the treadmill all day. But if you don’t change why you got on it, you’ll be stepping off forever.
Building the Evidence Bank
If you’re a perfectionist — and many of you are — you spent years minimizing your wins, dismissing your accomplishments, and moving on to the next problem before you ever let yourself feel the success of handling the last one. You survived the genuinely hard moments, but your brain filed it under “not good enough” or “barely made it.” You navigated a breakup, a failure, a terrifying unknown — and you’re still here. But it doesn’t feel right to believe any of that.
And even further, the evidence through your life might just feel like a washed-out blur because you were focused on surviving rather than building self-trust. You needed to pause to let it register, but you were already worrying about the next thing. So the proof exists, but it never became felt. It never became yours.
So when I say “trust yourself” and your evidence bank comes up empty, it isn’t because you haven’t earned the evidence — it’s because you never deposited it. You never celebrated your wins and you never counted your successes.
And all that sounds heavy, but here’s what matters. Your journey is not over. You are not limited to whatever you’ve accumulated or failed to accumulate up to this point.
You can start building new evidence today. Deliberately. And this time, it’s yours.
The next time you do something that you are nervous about or overthinking on — even something small — and you get through it, I encourage you to pause. You actually pause and you let yourself feel it. How do you feel right now versus before, when you were afraid of what was on the other side of the moment? When you felt a compulsion to control whatever that looked like?
Measure where in your body you feel it so that you can compare it physically. Maybe it feels like relief, and maybe it’s just franticness at pulling yourself through. But intentionally measure: what was the fear before, and what’s the reality now?
You don’t need to journal it if you don’t want to, but you need to stop long enough to let your nervous system register: I handled that. Maybe not ideally, maybe messily. I’m here.
And then you do it again tomorrow. And then the next day.
Neurologically speaking, this is what you’re doing: when we build new habits, you’re carving new paths over the old ones. The ones that default to “that wasn’t good enough” or “what about the next problem?” — those paths are still there, which is why this takes repetition to build, like a new habit. But the new ones get stronger every time you use them. They become even more preferred.
And here’s what happens over time. When you catch yourself overthinking and you say, “I’m not trusting myself right now,” you’re saying it into a growing catalog of proof. Moments where you chose something uncertain and came out the other side, or conversations you stumbled through and still survived, or risks that didn’t destroy you.
You cannot think your way into self-trust. You have to live your way into it. One small moment at a time.
What the First Week Actually Looks Like
I want to be straight with you about what the first week looks like. Because if I don’t, your perfectionism will use the gap against you.
You are redefining your safety mechanism. Because now you’re not just dealing with the original overthinking. You’re dealing with the discomfort of not doing the thing your nervous system is begging you to do. The safety maneuver is gone and you don’t feel safe yet.
I’ve never had an instance where this process is comfortable or perfectly smooth. But I don’t look for it to be anymore.
You’re going to catch yourself running through a conversation and looping. You’ll notice it and disengage. For about 40 seconds it works, before you realize you’ve been back on the treadmill for the last five minutes without even noticing you stepped back on. That’s normal. That’s not a failure. It’s just what the beginning looks like. But it does get easier. Faster than you’d expect, but never as fast as we want.
Because within that same week, you’re going to have that moment where you disengage from the overthinking and you go into the situation you wanted to think about over and over. Maybe you were awesome, maybe you were a mess, but that doesn’t matter anymore because you did it without the need to endlessly forecast. And then you pay attention to the moment. And that — that single data point — is the beginning of your evidence.
The more you practice stepping off the treadmill and then watching yourself navigate the thing you were afraid of, the faster your nervous system starts to update. It starts to believe the new story: that you can handle things without rehearsing every possibility first.
Keep doing this and you’re going to feel something consistently that was just fleeting before. That’s agency. The sense that you’re choosing how to move through your life rather than being dragged through it by your own mind.
It is super good stuff and I highly recommend it.
Close
In the beginning, I showed you what the inside of my head used to feel like. Today, that same image brings me something completely different.
I love the Pacific Northwest. I love the violent waves crashing on rocks. Now I imagine sitting on a rock by myself with those waves crashing all around me. And I am at peace.
None of this is fast. It took me years. And I still catch myself on the treadmill, more often than I’d like to admit.
The noise in my head didn’t go away because I found the right answer. It went silent because I finally trusted myself not to need one.
I’ll see you in the next one.