A while ago I was watching “The Good Place” when one of the main characters, Chidi, said “you know the sound a fork makes when it gets stuck in a garbage disposal? That’s what it sounds like in my head all the time.”
I turned to my partner and said “that’s how my brain sounds.”
He promptly reached over to me and placed his hands over my ears so that I couldn’t hear anything at all. When he let go, he said “that’s how my brain sounds.”
“Just don’t worry so much”
We are all unique individuals. Regardless of our gender identity, our unique life experiences shape the way we approach challenges and live our day to day life.
That being said, in my experience I’ve noticed that women seem to be more prone to overthinking than men. Many of us spend hours upon hours thinking about every tiny aspect of our lives. And when it comes to making decisions, we can get so tied up in knots about the pros and cons that we end up doing nothing at all.
It’s exhausting, frustrating and makes life feel really hard.
Years ago I used to fall into rumination spirals all the time. This wasn’t just a case of thinking about something a bit more than normal - it was like someone had flipped a switch in my brain and suddenly all I could do was think about this thing. It would come along with feelings of deep distress, an obsessive compulsion to ask Google for answers, an inability to concentrate on anything else, and often physical symptoms, like a sore stomach, loss of appetite or poor sleep.
Here’s a small list of things my brain has gone into a rumination spiral about…
How guilty I felt about taking a day off sick (even though I was genuinely too sick to work) and what my colleagues would think about me.
Whether I should reply to that person’s text immediately or wait a few hours so that I don’t appear too needy.
Why everyone else in the gym class seems to be keeping up so much more easily, and why my feelings get so easily hurt when the instructor gives me a correction.
What the environmental impact would be of me getting a taxi home from the supermarket with a big load of shopping, versus ordering home delivery.
How useless I felt when work was going through a quiet period and I didn’t have much on my to do list.
How overwhelmed I felt when work was going through a busy period and I still felt like I had to do everything perfectly
Why my partner had liked that girl’s Instagram post, but not the one I posted earlier that day.
Before you ask, the answer is yes, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder!
My first therapist diagnosed me with Generalised Anxiety Disorder, and I also have traits of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As I discussed openly elsewhere, I believe that many of the struggles I had in my early twenties was a bad case of Relationship OCD.
Having a label to understand the difficulties I was facing was really helpful in many ways. It helped me to explain to others what I was dealing with, and realise that I wasn’t alone.
However, over time the characterisation of what I was experiencing as a “disorder” started to not sit well with me. So many women I knew in life struggled with overthinking, and while not everyone reached the depth of the rumination spirals that I did, we all seemed to sit somewhere along a spectrum, with our busy minds working overtime.
And yet, more than once, when describing my difficulties to a partner or a male friend, they have barely been able to comprehend what I was talking about.
“Just don’t worry so much!” They shrug.
Why do we overthink?
It seems obvious from an outside perspective that overthinking is damaging to our physical and mental wellbeing. But when you’re ‘in’ it, it’s normally the desire for wellbeing that’s driving it in the first place.
My rumination was often an attempt to find the “perfect” solution in the belief that once I found it I would finally feel okay.
As I learned more and more about how our nervous systems work, what our emotions are designed to do, and how important our relationship with our body is, I made a few important discoveries...
When we perceive that we are in danger, we will do whatever we believe we need to do to find safety.
If a sensation feels too overwhelming for us to handle, we will ‘disconnect’ from it - an easy way of doing this is to redirect our energy and focus to our minds. While we’re doing lots of thinking, we’re usually doing less feeling.
If we’re carrying a lot of stress in our nervous systems (perhaps from past experiences we haven’t yet processed) we’ll reach this ‘over capacity’ point more easily, which is why we can end up in rumination spirals about things which our logical mind knows aren’t all that important.
The more I learned, the more I realised that overthinking was my mind’s attempt to help me feel safe, when I didn’t feel able to handle the uncomfortable sensations being provoked in my body.
When the feeling of guilt for potentially letting down my co-workers felt too much, it made sense that my mind took over, and tried to help me avoid that feeling by working out if there was something I could do to make sure no one was upset with me.
When the possibility of being rejected came up in my intimate relationships, my mind stepped in to try to stop that from happening, by strategising the ‘perfect’ way to behave (and the ‘right’ time to text back!)
When I felt criticised or inferior, I literally had no idea how to be kind to myself or help myself to handle those hard feelings, so instead I would focus on the stream of consciousness that was going through my brain. Even though my critical thoughts weren’t nice to listen to, it still felt slightly safer than believing in myself, and risking the feeling of disappointment if others criticised me first.
I started to see that at the root cause of my overthinking was the fact that I didn’t feel safe to experience a wide range of emotions, and I didn’t believe that I was capable of handling situations which might provoke those feelings.
I finally realised that my overthinking wasn’t really a problem at all - it was an attempt to solve a problem. The ‘problem’ of not knowing how to face the range of emotions that comes with moving through this world, and feel safe within my own body.
It makes complete sense that so many women overthink
When we look at overthinking as a symptom of feeling unsafe in our bodies, it becomes clear why so many women find themselves struggling with this.
Patriarchy teaches us that we can’t trust our emotions. While it’s more socially acceptable for women to express emotion in our society, we’re still taught that our emotions are ‘wrong’, extreme and cannot be trusted. We’re called hysterical, dramatic, needy, too sensitive and dismissed for being ‘just hormonal”. This creates a difficult relationship with our emotions where we come to distrust and fear them, believing them to be a destructive force, rather than a useful guidance system designed to help us navigate life.
Society places unreasonable expectations on us. While society places unreasonable expectations on everyone, women experience particularly harsh and conflicting expectations, which creates a constant backdrop of stress. Women consistently take on higher levels of housework even if they’re working the same amount, and many women carry the ‘emotional load’ of the household. We’re expected to look good, stay young, be good mothers, strong leaders at work, and do it all with only a fraction of the community ties our societies used to have. No wonder our nervous systems are on high alert.
Women’s bodies are NOT safe in our society. The prevalence of sexual assault, sexual harrasment and domestic violence in our societies creates an environment where it’s little wonder we don’t feel safe in our bodies. On top of this our bodies are objectified, treated as something to be used and controlled by others - from the tightening of abortion laws to widespread access to violent porn, to the sexualisation of women in the media while we receive almost no education on our own sexual pleasure, we continuously receive the message that our bodies are not our own.
We’ve inherited the stress of our ancestors. Stress gets passed down from one generation to another. All of us have inherited the experiences of our ancestors. For women this means that in our bloodline lives the pain of those who were persecuted as witches for the ‘crime’ of being seen as powerful, and the agony of those who were sent to degrading institutions for having children outside of marriage or struggling with their mental health. The need to ‘fit in’ in order to be safe is a visceral experience that lives inside us.
This is the environment you grew up in.
Of course your system is overwhelmed!
Of course making a social faux pas feels like it’s genuinely dangerous!
Of course you don’t feel at ease in your own body!
Understanding this environment is important to help you see that your responses are normal and natural. There’s nothing wrong with you.
But that doesn’t mean that this is your destiny. And the quest to find another way of doing things, that led you to click on the link to this blog post, is evidence that your body-mind is ready for a new solution - one that creates less harm and helps you discover the ease in your own skin that is your birthright.
Finding safety in sensation
I lied to you at the beginning of this article.
When I said that I told my partner “that’s what my brain sounds like” that isn’t quite true. What I really said was “that’s what my brain used to sound like all the time before I started embodiment work. Now it just sounds like that some of the time.”
I spent years fighting with my brain, trying to calm it down, and get rid of my thoughts. It never worked - if anything, that just made the overthinking worse.
When I discovered embodiment, I started learning how to feel all of my emotions without reacting to them right away. This taught my body to stop perceiving all uncomfortable sensation as a sign of danger, which meant that I no longer had to dive right into a safety strategy.
This allowed my nervous system to start to relax, and I began to process old wounds that I was only able to face with my new-found skills. This relieved even more stress from my system.
The vicious cycle became a virtuous circle, and the more willing I was to let myself feel uncomfortable emotions, the less afraid of them I became.
Over time, I noticed that my once highly active mind no longer felt so loud or so dominant. I no longer fell into rumination spirals quite so easily, and even when I did, I was able to recognise it and redirect my focus to my body, which interrupted the pattern.
Now that my mind no longer needed to work so hard to keep me safe, it left me alone.
And although I do still find myself overthinking from time to time, I no longer see it as such a problem - I recognise that it’s just my body trying to protect me as usual, and that once I return to my body, the overthinking will fall away on its own, like a dead leaf falling from a tree.
You can do the same. It all starts with learning how to feel your feelings, rather than run from them.
My “How to Feel your Feelings” meditation is a great starting point and it comes along with a free guide to making the most of embodied meditation.
Don’t worry, this ISN’T one of those meditations that’s aimed at getting rid of your thoughts. This is meditation for people who don’t want to sit still, or stay quiet, and definitely don’t want to turn their thoughts into their enemies.
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