Overthinking, Anxiety, and the Quiet Voice That's Actually Right
Episode 4: My Brain Won't Shut Up: Overthinking, Anxiety, and the Quiet Voice That's Actually Right
I have been rewriting the same five-word text message for two days. "Do you wanna come over Sunday?" That's the whole message. The first version felt too casual, the second too formal, the third had emojis and made me feel like a fraud, and now I can't stop thinking about my niece telling me that punctuation in a text is aggressive. My friend doesn't know I'm asking her over. She also doesn't know I'm insane, so we'll keep that between us.
This is what my brain does. I'm a life coach. I know the techniques, I've read the books, and I still lay awake at 1am last night replaying a conversation from last week. So this episode is for anyone who has ever built a tiny legal case over a text message, talked herself out of something good because her brain found 17 reasons it would fail, or spent years dismissing the one feeling that turned out to be right. Overthinking isn't a personality quirk. It's a tax. Sometimes it costs you hours. Sometimes it costs you years. And underneath all of it is the harder thing: sometimes your anxiety is lying to you, and sometimes it's the smartest part of you trying to get through.
In this episode:
The two-day text message, and the little internal trial my brain runs over dishes that are, in fact, fine
The travel certification I overthought for two years. Every reason my brain gave me turned out to be wrong, and the years are still gone.
The most expensive overthinking I've ever done: the two layers that ran inside my marriage, one talking me out of trusting my gut, one punishing me for having a gut at all
The reframe I use most days: if the worst-case scenario is possible, why can't the best case be possible too?
The disaster movie my brain plays about my memoir, and the other movie that has exactly the same amount of evidence, which is none
Anxiety has a texture: loud, repetitive, demanding action right now. Intuition has a different one: quiet, patient, willing to wait for you. Telling them apart is most of the work.
What I actually do at 1am: the glass of water, the couch, and why it has to be pen and paper instead of a notes app
A real caveat, in my own words: I'm not a therapist, anxiety is a real diagnosis, and a doctor is the person to talk to about managing it. What I have is my own pattern, studied on paper over several years.
"I thought my anxiety was the problem. It turned out my anxiety was sometimes the only thing telling me the truth."
If the pen-and-paper thing at 1am sounds right but you don't know where you'd even start, I wrote something for you. It's a short story called The Script I Was Following, about what happens when you spend years listening to every voice except the quiet one. It's free, and it comes with a place to hear from me when new episodes are out.
Follow Honestly Kristin on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so new episodes come to you. And if this one sounded like a woman you'd want in your living room, send it to her.
