Every anxious person knows the feeling of an event sending their ruminating mind into turbo drive. You feel deeply upset, and your thoughts keep looping back to what happened. You’re scattered, distracted, exhausted. The event feels like it has a grip on you.
For this post, I’m going to assume the upsetting event involves being implicitly or explicitly criticized. Maybe someone criticized your work or your ethics. Or maybe you made a mistake that’s making you doubt yourself.
Here are six tips to help you get into a better mental state when your overthinking mind has gone rogue—whether you need to shift into problem-solving mode or simply calm down.
1. Imagine Someone You Admire Telling You the Same Upsetting Event Happened to Them
Imagine this: You’re an intern. You make an error that causes your whole team to spend their Friday night fixing the problem you’ve caused. It’s 6:52 p.m., and 30 people are discussing on Slack how to remedy the issue, even though everyone usually clocks off at 5:30 p.m.
You feel awful, mortified, and embarrassed. But over the next few days, four people share similar stupid mistakes they made as interns or early in their careers. One of them is a very senior manager who made an even worse screw up. These perspectives help you see that your mistake won’t doom you to failure forever. It’s a typical experience, not exclusive to you.
In your situation, you may not have others sharing their stories with you. However, even imagining someone doing so can help you calm down. Think about what story, and from whom, would help you.
2. Give Yourself a Physiological Reset
When we’re gripped by rumination, we often feel both exhausted and amped up. You can give yourself a partial physiological reset by doing any of the following: sleeping, slow breathing, listening to a meditation, listening to a familiar voice that relaxes you (like a favorite podcast), taking a shower to metaphorically wash off the stress, or exercising.
Take care of yourself as if you were healing from an ailment. For instance, eat some healthy food, to the extent your ruminating stomach will allow.
3. Delay Solving the Problem
Sometimes, giving yourself a physiological and mental reset requires you to deliberately delay solving the problem. You can say to yourself, “I don’t need to work on solving this problem for the next X minutes or hours.” You can choose any time frame that feels manageable, from five minutes to four hours or until tomorrow. Your mind may not completely obey this instruction, but setting the intention is still useful. Research on “worry scheduling” shows that delaying worry to a designated time can help reduce its impact and improve focus.
4. Try a Three-Minute Self-compassion Break
There’s considerable evidence that Self-compassion is an effective antidote for the ruminating mind. The most well-researched Self-compassion framework involves three pillars: acknowledging your emotions, recognizing the ways you’re having a common human experience, and practicing kindness.
Even though the specifics might differ, there will always be aspects of your experience that are, in essence, universal. For example, everyone has experienced causing a mistake that inconveniences others. Everyone has made a mistake while trying their hardest.
The more you can recognize these shared experiences, the less alone you’ll feel in your pain. Research shows that writing about a weakness or mistake for just three minutes can help reduce psychological distress.
5. Find a Healing Analogy That Resonates With You
Physical healing follows a similar trajectory to emotional healing. For example, you take an antibiotic for a skin infection. For the first few days, the medicine is getting the infection under control, but the wound is still red and weepy. At day four to six, there is noticeable improvement, but the skin is still damaged. After a few weeks, the damaged skin looks its usual color again.
When an upsetting event sends our overthinking mind into hyper-drive, the process of that system switching itself back off doesn’t happen instantly. Over time, as you get some psychological distance from the event, your mind will drift to the event less often. You’ll eventually get to the point you can go much longer without thinking about it.
Think of something you’ve healed from physically to give yourself an analogy you can ground your emotional healing in. Your emotional pain won’t behave like an on/off switch, and there will be different stages, but if you look over long enough time periods, you should be able to see it’s heading in the right direction.
6. Ground Yourself by Engaging in Your Typical Routines
When we’re ruminating, it often feels like the world was one way before the upsetting event, and then it’s suddenly completely different after. You can counteract this sense, and give yourself an anchor, by engaging in your typical routines.
I’m talking really simple stuff, like putting your trash out if tomorrow is trash day. You don’t need to do everything you would usually do, but do some of what you would usually do.
When your ruminating mind has taken over, grounding yourself in familiar routines can help restore a sense of normalcy. Just as the event may feel all-consuming, these small, everyday actions can remind you that life continues, and help you regain control.
These strategies—including imagining someone you admire having gone through the same situation, resetting your body, or sticking to your usual routines—can help break the cycle of rumination. Over time, they’ll help you regain control and bring you back to a clearer, calmer mental space. Whether you need to soothe yourself or shift into problem-solving mode, these tools can help you get there.
