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Reader's Question: “How do I stop replaying conversations in my head for days after they happen?”

This happens to a lot of us! To answer the question how to stop, we need to first understand what the replay is trying to accomplish.

Here's what I'd want to ask you:

• What is the story you are telling yourself about yourself or your leadership as a result of this conversation?

• When you replay the conversation, what are you editing? The words you said, the words they said, or both? Is it just about word-smithing?

• Does the replay feel more like regret, anxiety, guilt, shame, something else?

I ask because replaying a conversation is rarely about the conversation itself. It's almost always about something the conversation activated within you.

I’ve seen a pattern: re-playing or overthinking is not a thinking problem, but a lack of grounding.

When the mind loops, it's usually because one of a few things is happening:

• you aren’t happy with the outcome and believe that if you would have said things differently, you would have reached a different outcome. This can be addressed with skill-building in communication.

• you are running on perfectionism which makes it difficult to tolerate anything less than perfect. This requires understanding and unlearning the sources of that perfectionism.

• something in that exchange touched a deeper wound around shame or belonging. This needs some processing of the original situation to better understand the loop. Sometimes we think if we can "fix it” (the original situation) by re-playing it in our present-day lives. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t really work that way.

• sometimes it’s all of the above and then some.

The loop continues because the nervous system doesn't yet feel safe enough to file the experience away. It keeps retrieving it because it believes there is still something to solve. It’s like when you have too many tabs open on your browser window. They stay open because we haven’t quite finished working through them.  

Try this: Draw the cycle out on paper. Start with the triggering moment, then map what happened inside you, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, until you get to where it loops back to the beginning. Then ask: what is the core belief of this cycle? Common ones sound like:

• “I didn't come across as intelligent enough.”

• “I may have disappointed them.”

• “I need people to approve of me to feel safe.”

  Then ask: what is one thing I could actually implement or do differently next time that would make this a learning moment rather than an ongoing loop? Write that down separately. That's where the cycle ends.

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