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I was sitting in my eye doctor’s waiting room when my smartphone rang. The call was from a British scientist I’d known for a while. He’d recently asked to read a manuscript for a book I’d written that was coming out later that year. If he could read it in advance, he’d told me, he could offer feedback. Usually, I wouldn’t show anyone my unpublished work, but his offer seemed genuine and well meant, and I’d sent it to him a week or so earlier. What science writer doesn’t want feedback from a scientist? It could only make my work better.
So I walked out of the waiting room and took his call.
He was, he told me, writing a paper for a research journal.
In his paper— he didn’t think I’d mind— he’d borrowed key sections from my book that encapsulated my core argument. In a paper under his name.
I struggled to understand. When I’d sent him my manuscript, I’d explicitly said he couldn’t use anything he read, especially since my book wouldn’t be out for many months.
“You can’t use material taken from my book! In your paper!”
“Well, now that I’ve read it, I can’t pretend I don’t know what I know. You’ve synthesized recent science to create a significant argument that can help people.”
I sputtered on the other end of the phone.
“Besides, don’t you want people to have this information sooner? They shouldn’t have to wait for your book to come out.”
My shock shifted into anger. “You can’t publish my work under your name!” My heart hammered in my chest. “When my book comes out, people will think I’m stealing your ideas when you’re the one taking my work.”
He talked about the authority his name would lend to my ideas, enabling them to find a wider audience. A creepy sensation made the hairs on the back of my neck prick up— the sensation of being ill-used and gaslit. “I’ll have to alert my publisher to your intentions,” I told him.
Now he seemed stunned. “You don’t need to do that. We’re friends, aren’t we? We can work something out between us, can’t we?”
I stabbed my finger at my phone to end the call. My hands were shaking. My mind future-tripped into possible scenarios that might play out. If I fought back, he could do real harm to my career. Fear disintegrated into a thought bomb of self-loathing and regret. Why did I show him my manuscript? Why did I think I could trust him? I have only myself to blame! What kind of idiot lets something like this happen? I do, apparently.
Self-blame seesawed back to rage. What kind of person does this to another person? One more old white dude who tries to coerce and take advantage of a woman who holds less status and power than he does! A familiar dread unfurled in my chest and radiated down through my arms, my legs.
I looked back toward the waiting room. I could not sit through my eye exam in this state.
I told the front desk I was suddenly feeling unwell and needed to reschedule. My fists grew white as I clutched the steering wheel and drove home.
Once there, our dogs danced around me, winding their bodies through my legs, snouts nudging me as insistently as did my thoughts about the conversation I’d just had. When I didn’t offer both dogs their usual head and belly rubs, they began to chuff with small, worried barks.
I called out for my husband, hoping he might hear me from upstairs. My voice did not sound like my own.
It isn’t just me. So many of us are living this way now. Something happens—a difficult interaction with a friend or colleague, a conversation with our partner that goes sideways, wondering why we haven’t heard back from someone we care for—and our mind goes off the deep end.
So, I went looking for answers. Why do we do it? Why are most of us, according to research, doing it more today than we used to? And how do we exit our endless, judgy, self-critical thought loops?
What I found is that our thought spirals aren’t a character flaw. It’s a survival response gone rogue. Your brain is trying to protect you. It just doesn’t know when to stop.
What starts as an attempt to make sense of something painful or unsettling can quietly become a loop that deepens distress instead of easing it.
Our brains dangle before us the very seductive promise that if we just keep thinking about this we’ll find the answer. Or some relief. But the relief never comes, only more story spinning, and it feels terrible.
This experience is more human than most of us admit, and it deserves gentle introspection and understanding rather than self-criticism or shame.
We all fall into the trap of rumination, and the focus of our thought spiraling isn’t random. It’s almost always about whether we belong and whether we matter to the people who matter to us.
That’s the tender thing underneath all the mental noise. When properly heard, our thought-spiraling is an invitation to tend to the unheard parts of ourselves—the fear, anxiety, exile, grief, anger, and hurt.
It might seem like all this overthinking is harmless, but it turns out your brain can’t tell the difference between something terrible happening to you right now in real life and your replay of that thing over and over again in your head. Both have the same impact: Your body gets caught up in a heightened stress response that, over time, can harm your mental and physical well-being.
The good news is, once you understand all this, there are very simple ways to interrupt your thought loops, so you can devote your precious mental energy to everything you love to do and think about and enter that state of well-being and creativity that feels so good.
This is why, in my new book, Mind Drama, I set out to offer an endless array of practical tools and exercises, to help people feel more in control of their minds again.
Because everyone deserves a break from their mind drama.
