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“Out out out, damn thoughts!” is always my first and overwhelming response to intrusive thoughts.
I wrote about this experience with intrusive thoughts in my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, where I described it as feeling like “I was under assault from within, both the perpetrator and the victim of a mental crime.” The more I tried to make the thoughts stop, the tighter they clung. The trick, I eventually discovered, was not to tighten but to loosen. Not to control but to allow.
And recently, a Dutch word has helped me remember that.
Uitwaaien
I first learned the word uitwaaien on the Dutch episode of my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, which I cohost with Emily John Garcés. Each week, we explore words from around the world that do not have a direct English equivalent, words that point to something our culture might be missing.
Uitwaaien (pronounced OUT-vah-yen) literally means “to walk in the wind.” But it is not just about a stroll. It is about letting the wind blow your head clean. The Dutch have long used this as a restorative practice. When the weather turns blustery, people put on their coats and head for the dunes, the coast, or the open fields. They let the wind do what it does best: move things around.
It is the opposite of control.
When I heard the word, I thought: This is it. This is what helps with my mind. Because when it comes to intrusive thoughts, my instinct is always to seal the hatch and argue. To fight. To reason my way out. But uitwaaien reminds me to open a window instead.
The Wind as Therapist
Now, when I notice the familiar churn, the stuck loop, or the mental jackhammer, I tell myself, “Time to go uitwaaien.”
I do not go out to clear my head exactly. I go to let it be aired. To let the thoughts be moved by something bigger and more natural than me.
There is something healing about the physical sensation of wind: the way it presses against your coat, whips your hair across your face, hums in your ears. It is a force that does not ask you to do anything. It just moves around you and through you.
As my Dutch guest Jozua Ros explained on the podcast, the Dutch have a way of “making something positive out of strong winds, heavy winds,” and that when people say, “Let’s go for a stroll,” what they mean is that they want to “walk outside and clear their mind, have the wind blow through their hair, have a fresh spray of water and wind and that kind of feeling.”
He laughed as he described it as “a positive thing… making a plus from a minus kind of attitude.”
The Body Is the Key
The best interventions for intrusive thinking often come from the body, not the mind, from forces that are beyond our ability to manage or manipulate.
When the wind blows through my hair as I walk and whips against my face, I picture my thoughts, those rigid, metallic little sentences, becoming less dense, more wispy, more diaphanous. They start to flutter. They are not gone, but they are not as rock-hard, not as barbed anymore.
Aerating the Mind
What makes uitwaaien so beautiful as a practice is that it is not about expulsion. It is about aeration. In gardening, when soil gets compacted, plants suffocate. The fix is not to replace the soil; it is to poke little holes in it to let air and water in. The same applies to the mind.
When our mental soil gets compacted with obsessive loops, we need air, movement, breath, and weather. We need to remember that our thoughts are not marble statues. They are wind currents, capable of shifting form.
So when I walk, I imagine the wind moving through my head the way it moves through trees, stirring, whistling, shaking loose old debris. And something about that physical metaphor helps the thoughts move around a bit as well.
Why Doing Nothing Works
The paradox of uitwaaien is that it feels like doing nothing, and that is why it works. For those of us with obsessive minds, doing nothing can feel like a threat. We want to act, analyze, or fix. But the most helpful thing is often to let an external force, something as impersonal as weather, do the work for us.
In my case, the wind becomes a stand-in for grace. It is an outside agent that does not need my cooperation.
It just needs me to step outside.
