STOP! Let me overthink it!
Ruminated Lately? Been told ‘think positively’ or ‘find the silver lining’?
Capable women I meet are desperately trying to wrangle their distress and overloaded nervous systems, by swapping negative thoughts for positive.
Then they wonder why nothing works. They still feel shit and they’re stuck going round and round thinking about their problems.
I call this, The Bog of Rumination.
Because that’s how it feels. Wading through a mental quagmire of all the things that have or could happen.
As a smart woman, your mind is undoubtedly an asset – but for almost every woman I work with, it’s overactive.
And the answer is NOT more thinking. It’s not more mental discipline and focus on the positive.
As an aside, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with these things – training your focus is incredibly important, but it’s only one part of the puzzle when it’s been glorified as the whole answer.
Lauren is a great example of this.
She’s a Partner in a law firm, who came to work with me because the distress and loss of confidence she was experiencing was impacting her career and life.
She was losing sleep. Second guessing every decision. Panicking when she had to deal with stressful situations. Replaying everything over and over to analyse what had happened and what she could have done differently. She was beginning to think she’d just have to leave her job.
Lauren was feeling stress and uncertainty that were pushing her beyond her tolerance and capacity.
She was stuck in the Bog because her (very intelligent!) brain was just doing what it knew how.
Through our work together, Lauren learned to respond to her anxiety and stress from a deeper, more compassionate place.
And over time, she developed the capacity to stay present with the things that were previously too much for her to hold.
She could show up again as the leader who backed herself (even if she was still a bit nervous!).
Her mind quietened, and stayed that way. And when it did get loud, she now knows what to do.
Overthinking and rumination are rife in driven and capable women today because they’ve spent so much time developing their minds and intellects to do their jobs well and manage their busy lives.
If you’re someone who’s stuck in the Bog of Rumination on a regular basis, the answer isn’t to focus on the positives, or be more disciplined with your thinking.
It’s to learn to feel the stuff your mind is trying to help you avoid. The uncertainty, the anxiety, the doubt…
Your mind is just trying to keep you safe – help you survive.
But when it’s overactive, it’s never going to help you find a real solution, it’s just going to keep you stuck in survival mode.
The Bog of Rumination is one of six survival mode patterns I see driven women trapped in.
Find out which one’s keeping you stuck – and what to do about it – with my new free diagnostic, The Survival Mode Decoder for High-Functioning Women.
The decoder is a custom GPT trained in my material – you need to be signed into your chatGPT account to use it.
