Some of us recognize some version of this, even if we’ve never named it so plainly. We give and give in a relationship, and somewhere beneath the giving is a question we’re quietly hoping the other person will keep answering.

It helps to start by noticing that affection like this usually has more than one motivation running at the same time. I sometimes picture two ponies pulling the same carriage down the same road. One is the loving pony: you care about this person, you’re naturally warm, and expressing that warmth is simply you being yourself. The other is the anxious pony: the part that gives to get something back, that offers affection partly to quiet a worried question inside. Both ponies are pulling toward the same affectionate act, which is exactly why they can be so hard to tell apart from the inside.

The loving pony needs no fixing. The work is only ever with the other one. And the giving-to-get pony tends to come from a particular place, a felt sense that something is missing, that the care you need isn’t quite there or isn’t quite secure. That sense of deficit is what gives the giving its subtle, almost compulsive quality, the way it can start to feel less like a choice and more like a reflex.

The trouble isn’t your warmth. It’s that some of it has become a way of asking whether you’re still loved.

This is common, and there’s nothing shameful in it. It usually means an old and tender need is still looking to be met. The encouraging part is that it can be worked with directly and gently, and this balance between warmth and steadiness is much of what we explore in my Strong Heart program.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through three things I’d suggest to anyone caught in this pattern: how to start meeting the underlying need yourself so the giving isn’t doing that job, how to slow the impulse down and read what the other person actually wants, and how to talk with them, in concrete terms, about the kind of affection that works for you both.

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Later, you may wonder why reassurance never seems to fill you for long, or why you can long for closeness and then hold it at a slight distance the moment it actually arrives.

This shows up in different ways. For some people, it looks anxious: no amount of reassurance quite sinks in, so you find yourself needing it again and again. For others it looks more avoidant: closeness starts to feel like too much, and you keep a quiet, optimal distance even from people you care about. Either way, the good is being offered, and something in you isn’t able to take it in.

It’s tempting to read this as proof that you’re too guarded, or somehow hard to love. More often, it’s something understandable: an old protection, learned early. If, when you were young, letting yourself need and receive tended to end in disappointment — or if letting yourself want more once led somewhere painful — the mind learns a sensible response, which is to keep the whole process at arm’s length. The absence of good early on can shape us as deeply as the presence of harm.

There’s a logic to it. Letting something good in can stir up a strong wish for more, and if wanting more once led to real hurt, the safest move was to shut the wanting down. So when care arrives now, an old part of you keeps it at the edge, to protect you from needing what might be taken away again.

The problem usually isn’t that love isn’t there. It’s that an old part of you learned it wasn’t safe to take in.

Taking in the good, though, is more a skill than a fixed trait, and skills can be built over time. The brain changes with repeated experience; what was shaped by the past can be reshaped, gradually, through enough moments of letting something good actually register.

This is much of what we work with in my Healing Insecure Attachment course — the practical process of receiving the experiences that help fill the hole in the heart. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll look at how to recognize your own particular block to receiving, a simple three-part way of working with strong feelings as they come up, how to take in a good experience so it begins to leave a trace, and what to do when the people around you can’t give you what you need — including how this still works when you’re largely on your own.

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This can happen with a partner, a parent, a friend, a boss. The details differ, but the pattern is familiar: another person’s distress arrives, and your own center of gravity slides toward them, sometimes completely.

It’s tempting to read this as oversensitivity, or simply as being a caring person. Some of it is care, but for many people, the speed and the totality of it point to something else — an old pattern in the nervous system, learned long before the present relationship.

Human beings are deeply attuned to the emotional signals of the people who matter to us. Early in life, another person’s upset can carry real stakes; a caregiver’s anger or withdrawal can feel like a threat to our safety or our place in the relationship. So the nervous system learns a strategy: when someone important becomes upset, do whatever restores the connection — agree, soothe, fix, disappear. For a child, this is intelligent, it works. The difficulty is that it tends to keep running in adulthood, automatically, even when nothing is truly at stake beyond a disagreement.

There is an important difference between feeling with someone and losing yourself in them. In the first, you can sense what another person is going through and still know where you end and they begin. In the second, their state seems to overwrite yours: their upset becomes your emergency, their disapproval becomes proof you’ve done something wrong. Often the reaction is out of proportion to what is actually happening — a flicker of tension in them, and a flood of alarm in you. The problem isn’t that you feel what they feel. It’s that you go missing while you do it.

For many people, this is the anxious side of insecure attachment showing up. Underneath the scramble to fix someone’s mood is an older fear: if they’re upset with me, they might leave me. So you work to resolve their feelings as fast as possible — not only for them, but to quiet that fear in yourself. The cost is that it teaches you, again and again, that your own footing depends entirely on someone else’s emotional state.

Understanding where this pattern comes from, and learning to stay steady inside it is much of what I explore in my Healing Insecure Attachment course. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll look at the difference between connecting with someone and merging with them, how to catch the exact moment you begin to leave yourself, a few ways to stay in contact with your own experience while another person is activated, and what it means to do your part in a hard moment without taking on feelings that were never yours to carry.

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You find yourself replaying conversations, wondering whether you should have said something differently, imagining alternate outcomes, or revisiting moments. Sometimes this happens even when you understand why the relationship ended and have no real desire to get back together.

This can be confusing. If the relationship is over, why does the mind keep going back? Part of the answer is that the mind is often trying to do something useful.

It may be trying to understand what happened, it may be trying to learn from mistakes, or it may be trying to make sense of a painful experience or find some kind of emotional resolution. In that sense, returning to the relationship is not necessarily a problem. Reflection can be healthy. Looking honestly at our lives is one of the ways we grow.

But there is an important distinction between reflection and rumination.

Reflection helps us understand something more clearly. It moves us forward. Rumination keeps circling the same territory without producing much new understanding. We revisit the same memories, ask the same questions, and arrive at the same conclusions, yet somehow feel compelled to do it all again tomorrow.

The challenge is that these two processes can feel very similar from the inside.

A person can spend months believing they are working through something when, in reality, they have become caught in a loop. Their attention keeps returning to the relationship, not because there is still something important to discover, but because the habit of returning has become deeply established.

There is another layer as well.

Breakups do not only involve the loss of a person. They often involve the loss of a future we imagined, a role we occupied, or a sense of security we associated with the relationship. Sometimes what we miss is not the relationship itself, but what it represented. Sometimes old attachment wounds become activated, and the mind continues searching for understanding, reassurance, or completion long after the relationship has ended.

If you’ve noticed that certain relationships continue occupying your mind long after they’ve ended, it may be worth looking beneath the breakup itself and exploring the attachment patterns that keep the wound alive. These are some of the themes we’ll be exploring in my upcoming Healing Insecure Attachment course. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore a framework I find very helpful for understanding relationship regrets, why grief and rumination are not the same thing, and what it means to “turn a corner” without suppressing your feelings or pretending the relationship never mattered.

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You may have seen the pattern plainly, explained it carefully, approached the conversation thoughtfully, and tried to stay patient, compassionate, and open. You may have returned to the same issue many times, hoping that eventually the other person will understand what has been painful, recognize their impact, or begin relating differently.

And sometimes people do change. Human beings are capable of real growth. Relationships can improve significantly when there is sincerity, self-awareness, goodwill, and a genuine willingness to repair.

But sometimes, despite repeated conversations and sincere effort, the relationship continues settling back into the same patterns. The other person may become defensive, dismissive, emotionally closed off, or simply unable to engage with the issue in the deeper way you are hoping for.

This can be painful because what often keeps people trying is not only the present relationship itself, but also the hope that clarity will finally lead to change, and that if they explain themselves carefully enough, lovingly enough, calmly enough, the other person will eventually understand.

And when that hoped-for change does not happen, many people don’t know what to do next. Part of the difficulty is that letting go of this hope can feel like giving up on the relationship entirely. But those are not always the same thing.

Sometimes the deeper question is: What do you do when another person may not become who you need them to be?

If this is something you struggle with in your own relationships, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores many of these patterns in greater depth, including boundaries, emotional regulation, attachment dynamics, and the practical process of relating more wisely to yourself and others. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore why we sometimes become emotionally stuck trying to create change in other people, how grief becomes part of this process, and what it can look like to protect your well-being without becoming harsh, closed off, or hopeless.

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This often doesn’t happen all at once. It can look like constantly accommodating, suppressing certain feelings, over-focusing on another person’s emotional state, or becoming so preoccupied with preserving the connection that you stop fully listening to yourself. Over time, this can become a deeply ingrained relational pattern.

Many people learned early in life, often without realizing it, that staying connected to others required some degree of self-abandonment. Perhaps there was pressure to accommodate, to stay agreeable, to suppress certain feelings, or to prioritize the emotional states of other people above their own.

These adaptations are understandable. Children naturally organize themselves around attachment needs, they learn what helps preserve connection and what threatens it.

But patterns that once helped us maintain closeness can eventually create a different kind of suffering in adult relationships.

A person may become highly attuned to others while remaining disconnected from themselves. They may sense everyone else’s feelings very clearly while struggling to recognize their own needs, limits, or emotional reality in real time.

And because this pattern develops gradually, many people don’t initially recognize it as self-abandonment at all. It can simply feel like being caring, empathic, accommodating, or relationship-oriented.

But caring about others and staying connected to yourself are not opposites. In fact, healthy relationships depend on both.

If this dynamic feels familiar to you, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores these patterns in much greater depth, including practical ways to build a more secure and grounded relationship with yourself and others. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore how self-abandonment develops, why it often persists even in adulthood, and several practical ways we can begin rebuilding a more trustworthy relationship with ourselves from the inside out.

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On the one hand, it can be deeply validating to recognize your own patterns in a clear way. You begin to understand why certain relationships feel so activating, why closeness may feel difficult, why reassurance sometimes never quite feels like enough, or why conflict can affect you so intensely. Experiences that once felt confusing or personal begin to make more sense in the context of early relationships and nervous system learning.

At the same time, many people begin to feel that something is fundamentally wrong with them.

If attachment patterns run deep, especially when they were shaped early in life or reinforced repeatedly over time, it can feel discouraging to see how automatic some reactions have become. You may notice yourself repeating familiar patterns even when part of you already understands them intellectually. You may find yourself reacting in ways that do not fully reflect who you want to be.

And after a while, people can start relating to themselves primarily through the lens of what is wounded, insecure, anxious, avoidant, reactive, or unfinished.

But that is not the whole picture.

One of the most important things to understand about insecure attachment is that these patterns are not the entirety of who you are. They are learned adaptations. They are ways the mind, body, and nervous system learned to cope with particular environments and experiences. Some people carry these patterns lightly. Others carry them much more deeply because life has simply been harder and more painful.

Both are understandable, and in both cases, growth remains possible.

Compassion Comes First

A useful place to begin is with compassion.

Compassion simply means recognizing suffering and responding to it with some degree of care instead of condemnation.

This matters because attachment wounds often generate shame very quickly. People become frustrated with themselves for needing reassurance, for struggling with closeness, for becoming reactive, for pulling away, or for repeating familiar relationship dynamics despite years of effort to change them.

But shame rarely helps people heal. Usually, it makes the nervous system more defended and less flexible.

Compassion, by contrast, creates conditions in which understanding and change become more possible. It allows people to look honestly at their patterns without immediately collapsing into self-judgment.

And importantly, compassion does not make a person weak. You can still have boundaries, you can still be clear, direct, strong, or discerning with other people while also relating to yourself with basic kindness.

If this is an area you’d like to explore more deeply, my Healing Insecure Attachment course goes much further into these patterns and the practical process of working with them over time. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

Understanding the Pattern Without Becoming the Pattern

Another important part of healing is learning to understand your own relational patterns clearly. This requires honesty, but not harshness.

Over time, many people begin to notice recurring tendencies in how they relate to others. Perhaps they become highly anxious when there is distance in a relationship. Perhaps they avoid closeness when vulnerability increases. Perhaps they repeatedly choose emotionally unavailable people, over-accommodate others, or lose touch with themselves in relationships altogether.

These patterns often feel deeply personal, but in many ways, they are learned expectations about closeness, safety, conflict, and connection.

And once they are recognized, you begin to separate your identity from the pattern itself. Instead of saying, “This is just who I am,” it becomes possible to recognize: “This is something I learned.”

That distinction matters because what is learned can gradually be worked with, reshaped, and softened over time.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore why insecure attachment patterns tend to repeat themselves, how healing happens through experience rather than insight alone, what it means to find “fertile ground” in relationships, and why there may be something fundamentally healthy in you even beneath long-standing fear, insecurity, or reactivity.

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Someone takes longer than usual to text back, their attention shifts elsewhere, they seem distracted, distant, or less emotionally available than they were a few hours ago. Sometimes nothing explicit has happened at all, and yet something inside you begins reacting as though the relationship itself is under threat.

At those moments, the mind naturally moves toward reassurance. You may want confirmation that everything is okay, signs that the person still cares, or some kind of emotional certainty that the connection remains intact.

And of course, this is deeply human. Human beings are relational creatures. We are affected by closeness and distance with other people, especially in important relationships.

But anxious attachment adds another layer on top of normal relational sensitivity. The need for reassurance is frequently driven not only by care or affection, but also by doubt. Doubt fuels anxiety, and anxiety fuels more doubt in return. The two can reinforce each other until even ordinary moments of separation begin to feel emotionally loaded.

One of the difficulties here is that reassurance often helps only briefly. You may feel better for a moment, but then the uncertainty returns, and the mind begins scanning again for signs of distance, disconnection, or change.

Over time, this can become exhausting for both people, and it can distort the way normal relationship experiences are interpreted.

When Separation Starts to Feel Like Threat

Part of the challenge of anxious attachment is that ordinary separations can feel much bigger than they are.

People get distracted, stressed, tired, preoccupied, or temporarily emotionally out of sync with each other. None of this necessarily means something is wrong in the relationship itself.

These things happen in all relationships. No two people are perfectly synchronized all the time.

But when anxious attachment is active, the nervous system can interpret these ordinary relational frictions as signs of danger. A moment that might objectively be small begins to feel overwhelming internally.

You may already recognize this pattern in yourself. Something happens that is realistically a two or a three on the scale of relational difficulty, but internally it quickly becomes an eight or a nine.

And once that escalation happens, it becomes harder to respond clearly.

If you recognize this pattern in your own relationships and want a more structured way to work with it, my course Healing Insecure Attachment explores these dynamics in depth, including practical ways to build greater security, steadiness, and trust in relationships over time. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through how anxious attachment shapes perception, why reassurance alone often fails to resolve it, and what helps foster a greater sense of stability and security from the inside out.

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“I’m noticing that certain types of people keep finding me, people who need a lot of reassurance, who want constant processing. I genuinely care about them, but I’m exhausted. Is there something wrong with me? Am I attracting chaos because of my kindness?”

If you’ve ever felt this, you know how uncomfortable the question is. You want to be kind. You want to help. But you’re also wondering why your compassion keeps leading to situations that drain you.

The Compassion Trap

In wisdom traditions, there’s an ancient teaching from Tibetan Buddhism about the integration of compassion and equanimity, “the jewel and the lotus.”

You need both. Compassion alone, without the container of wisdom and boundaries, becomes a trap. You end up drained, resentful, and wondering why your kindness keeps backfiring.

Early in my career, I started noticing something that made me uncomfortable.

There were people who were particularly drawn to me and they all seemed to want the same thing. They were looking for that father figure kind of kindness: the steady presence, reassurance, and the validation they’d never received.

And I genuinely wanted to help them. I am a kind person. That’s not false advertising.

But the demands would escalate. No matter how much I gave, it wasn’t enough. They needed more reassurance, more processing, more of my time and energy.

And I realized that I couldn’t deliver what they were really looking for. No one could.

What they needed wasn’t actually me, it was the father they never had. And I’m not their father. I can’t fill that void, no matter how kind I am.

It’s Not Random Who’s Drawn to You

Here’s what I had to accept: It’s not random who’s drawn to you.

Because of your particular qualities, maybe your warmth, your steadiness, your ability to really listen, you attract people with specific attachment wounds.

If you’re naturally compassionate, you might draw people with anxious or disorganized attachment styles. People who are genuinely hungry for what you offer, but whose hunger runs so deep that no friendship, no amount of support, will truly satisfy it.

Your kindness isn’t causing chaos; your kindness is revealing who needs what you have, and sometimes, what they need is more than any friend can provide.

Once I understood this pattern, I had to ask myself a different question.

Not “Why do I keep attracting difficult people?” but rather: “Who is it that’s drawn to me, and can I actually be helpful to them in a sustainable way?”

Here’s permission I had to give myself, and the permission I want to give you: You can’t be helpful to everyone, and that’s perfectly normal.

Some people are genuinely a good fit. Their needs and your capacity align. You give, they receive, they give back. It’s mutual.

And what other people need requires professional support, or a different kind of relationship, or healing work they can only do themselves. You’re simply not the right person to meet those needs.

And recognizing that difference is wisdom.

Being More Careful (Without Closing Your Heart)

So what did I do with this insight?

I became “more careful” with certain types of people coming my way. Not cold or rejecting. Just discerning.

When I sensed that someone was looking for me to fill a parental void, I could recognize it earlier. I could be kind and supportive, and also know my limits. I could refer them to resources better suited to their needs. I could be honest: “I care about you, and I think what you’re looking for requires more than friendship can provide.”

This wasn’t about protecting myself from all neediness. It was about recognizing the difference between needs I could meet and needs I couldn’t.

And that recognition freed me to be more helpful to the people I genuinely could support, because I wasn’t depleted by trying to be everything to everyone.

The Jewel and the Lotus

This brings us back to that ancient teaching. Compassion (the jewel) without equanimity (the lotus that contains it) becomes overwhelming, depleting, unsustainable.

But equanimity without compassion becomes cold, detached, self-protective.

You need both.

You need the warmth that makes you who you are, the kindness that makes you want to help. And you need the wisdom to recognize your limits, to notice patterns, to say, “I care about you, and I also know I’m not the right person to meet this particular need.”

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yes, this is exactly what’s happening to me,” here’s what you can do:

Notice the pattern. Who keeps showing up? What do they need from you? Is there a type?

Get curious, not judgmental. Your kindness isn’t a flaw. The question is: Can you sustainably meet what they’re asking for?

Ask the real question. Not “How can I help everyone?” but “Who can I genuinely help, and who needs something I can’t provide?”

Remember: Being careful about who you can help isn’t the same as closing your heart. It’s protecting your capacity to be helpful at all.

The Bottom Line

Your kindness isn’t attracting chaos because you’re doing something wrong. It’s attracting certain people because of who you are, and that’s valuable information.

Some of those people will be wonderful matches. You’ll genuinely be able to help them.

Others won’t. And that’s okay.

Your job isn’t to help everyone. Your job is to be sustainably compassionate, which means recognizing the difference between the needs you can meet and the needs that are beyond the scope of friendship.

The jewel and the lotus: compassion and wisdom. You always need both.

If this was helpful, and you want to sign up for my Healing Insecure Attachment course, use code substack10 for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

It’s a real tension. You’re trying to meditate, practice mindfulness, take care of your nervous system, and then you’re hit with news of war, climate disasters, and injustice. The guilt sets in, and it feels almost obscene to be sitting peacefully when others are in crisis.

This is the central challenge of our time: How do we care for ourselves without turning away from the world’s pain?

The False Choice We’ve Been Sold

For years, I’ve watched people get trapped in a false binary: self-care OR activism. Inner peace OR outer engagement. Your well-being OR the world’s well-being.

This either/or thinking creates two unsustainable patterns.

On one side, you have people who are so consumed by the world’s suffering that they burn out completely. They’re scrolling news constantly, absorbing every crisis, carrying unbearable weight. Eventually, they shut down and become unable to help anyone, including themselves.

On the other side, you have people who’ve checked out entirely into “spiritual bypassing.” They’ve gone so deep into their practice that they’ve become numb to suffering around them. Everything is “just raise your vibration” or “focus on gratitude” without any real engagement with what’s happening in the world.

Both patterns create suffering, and both are unsustainable.

What I want to offer you is a third way, a path that integrates self-care with genuine engagement.

Redefining Renunciation

In Buddhist practice, there’s a concept called renunciation that’s widely misunderstood in the West.

Renunciation doesn’t mean renouncing the world or checking out into some isolated spiritual practice. It means releasing your own suffering, the patterns, habits, and attachments that keep you stuck in cycles of reactivity, overwhelm, and despair.

You renounce the impulse to consume news compulsively. You renounce the belief that your anxiety is somehow helping others. You renounce the story that taking care of yourself is inherently selfish.

The reason this matters is simple: you cannot pour from an empty cup. A burned-out activist serves no one. Your well-being isn’t separate from the world’s well-being; it’s actually the foundation for sustainable engagement.

The “Both-And” Path

So how do we actually practice this? How do we hold both self-care and engagement?

I’ve developed a framework I call sustainable engagement, and it rests on four principles:

1. Wake Up From Comfort

If you have the privilege of comfort: a safe home, financial security, relative peace, you have a responsibility not to stay asleep in it.

This doesn’t mean drowning in guilt about your privilege. Guilt is useless. But awareness is essential. The practice is asking yourself: What am I complicit in by staying comfortable? Where am I looking away?

You don’t need to carry the world’s entire weight. But you do need to stay awake to what’s happening.

2. Act Sustainably, Not Heroically

You don’t need to save the world tomorrow. You need to find one or two causes that genuinely matter to you and engage with them consistently over time.

Not in bursts of intensity fueled by rage or guilt. Not in overdrive that leads to inevitable burnout.

Steadily. Sustainably. For the long haul.

Real change doesn’t come from viral posts or weekend activism. It comes from people who show up year after year without burning out.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk you through how to “personalize” suffering without being consumed by it, the practice of equanimity and why it’s not the same as detachment, a Buddhist reframe on “emptiness” that will change how you hold pain, practical daily tools to manage overwhelm while staying engaged, and how to expand your heart wide enough to hold both your peace and the world’s pain.

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Have you ever found yourself caught in a mental loop, replaying past events, worrying about the future, or dwelling on negative thoughts? This common experience is known as rumination, and it’s a pattern of repetitive thinking that can steal your peace and drain your energy. While some reflection can be helpful, rumination often leads to feeling worse, not better.

If you’re not sure whether you’re ruminating or just processing, take this quiz to find out.

What is Rumination?

Rumination is essentially “sticky thinking” – your mind gets caught on a particular thought, memory, or concern and keeps circling back to it. It’s like a broken record playing the same track over and over. This isn’t just about thinking a lot; it’s about thinking repetitively and unproductively about something, often without reaching any new insights or solutions.

For example, you might ruminate about:

• A mistake you made at work.

• An argument you had with a loved one.

• A perceived injustice or slight.

• Worries about your finances or health.

The tricky thing about rumination is that it often feels like you should be thinking about these things. You might believe that if you just think about it hard enough, you’ll find a solution or gain control. However, more often than not, rumination just intensifies negative emotions like anxiety, sadness, and anger, and can even contribute to conditions like depression. It keeps you mentally trapped, preventing you from engaging with the present moment or moving forward.

Why Does Our Mind Ruminate?

Our brains are wired for problem-solving and pattern recognition. When something feels unresolved or threatening, the mind naturally tries to process it. Rumination can be an attempt to:

• Understand why something happened.

• Prevent future negative events.

• Gain a sense of control over uncontrollable situations.

However, these attempts often backfire. Instead of finding clarity, we can get lost in a whirlwind of “what ifs” and “if onlys,” deepening our distress. The constant mental activity can also deplete our inner resources, making it harder to cope with daily life.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a prisoner to these mental loops. There are powerful, practical ways to gently guide your mind out of rumination and back into a state of calm and clarity.

In the rest of this article, you’ll learn:

• How to recognize when rumination is starting

• Practical techniques to disengage from repetitive thought patterns

• Ways to shift your attention intentionally

• Methods to cultivate a more spacious and resilient mind

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Often, it can feel useful at first. You may be trying to understand what happened, to see what you missed, or to figure out what to do next. In that sense, thinking has a purpose. It can help you learn, prepare, and make better decisions.

But at a certain point, you may notice that you are no longer arriving at anything new. The same points repeat themselves, the same emotional tone is present, and there is a sense of movement without any real progress. Instead of leading to clarity, the thinking seems to keep you in place.

When Thinking Stops Helping

At this point, reflection becomes rumination.

One way to understand the difference is to look at the result. Useful thinking tends to move toward some kind of resolution. You see something more clearly, you make a decision, or identify the next step. Rumination, by contrast, tends to recycle the same material. It can feel active, but it does not lead anywhere. When this is happening, the mind is no longer helping in the way it intends to.

And that raises a practical question: if continuing to think about something is not helping, what do you do instead?

If you recognize this pattern in your own experience and want a more structured way to work with it, sign up for my course Breaking Out of Rumination. It explores these patterns in depth and offers practical ways to shift them over time. If you decide to join, you can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through how to recognize when thinking has stopped being useful, what is often driving rumination beneath the surface, and how to step out of the loop in a way that is both practical and grounded in your experience.

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If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Self-doubt is one of the most common inner obstacles that people face, and it can feel incredibly frustrating, especially when, logically, you know you’re capable. The gap between what you know intellectually and what you feel emotionally can seem impossibly wide.

I’ll dive deeper into this below, and if you’re ready to dive even further into this work, check out my online Self-Worth Workshop that has helped thousands of people so far, and you can use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.

What is Self-Doubt Really About?

Self-doubt isn’t just about questioning your abilities. At its core, it’s often a deeper uncertainty about your worth as a person. It’s the nagging feeling that you’re somehow not enough, not smart enough, not likable enough, not worthy enough - just as you are.

This doubt can show up in many ways:

• Hesitating to speak up in meetings or social situations

• Overworking to prove your value

• Avoiding opportunities because you fear failure

• Constantly comparing yourself to others

• Difficulty accepting compliments or acknowledging your achievements

The painful irony is that self-doubt often has nothing to do with your actual capabilities. You might be highly skilled, experienced, and accomplished, yet still feel that gnawing uncertainty inside.

Where Does Self-Doubt Come From?

Our brains are wired with what’s called a “negativity bias”. We naturally pay more attention to threats, problems, and criticisms than to positive experiences. This made sense for our ancestors who needed to remember dangers to survive, but in modern life, it means we’re more likely to remember the one critical comment than the ten compliments.

Additionally, many of us carry messages from our past, from parents, teachers, peers, or society, that somehow, we need to earn our worth through achievement, approval, or being perfect. These messages can become internalized voices that fuel self-doubt, making us believe that our value is conditional rather than inherent.

But here’s a profound truth: Your worth isn’t something you need to earn or prove. It’s already there.

In the rest of this article, you’ll learn:

• How to recognize and shift the patterns of self-doubt in your mind

• Practical techniques to reconnect with your inherent worth

• Ways to build a foundation of self-acceptance that doesn’t depend on external validation

• Methods to strengthen your inner resilience and confidence

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Each time you replay it, the anger feels fresh, if not even stronger. You craft the perfect comeback you didn’t think of at the moment, you rehearse what you’ll say next time, you build a case for why you’re right, and they’re wrong.

This is anger rumination, and your brain is doing something very specific that makes it incredibly hard to stop.

I’ll get into the science below, but if you’re ready to just dive in and stop this harmful pattern, my comprehensive online course in rumination has helped thousands already, and you can use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.

The Rumination Loop: What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain

Here’s what’s fascinating from a neuroscience perspective: your brain doesn’t clearly distinguish between experiencing something and vividly remembering it. When you replay an angry encounter, you’re essentially re-experiencing it neurologically. Your amygdala — the brain’s alarm system — activates. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline course through your body. Your heart rate increases and your muscles tense.

You’re not just thinking about being angry. You’re being angry all over again.

And here’s the kicker: each time you replay the incident, you’re strengthening the neural pathways associated with that anger. It’s like walking the same path through a field of grass - eventually you wear a path that becomes easier and easier to follow. There’s a phrase in neuroscience for this: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Your brain is literally learning to be angry about this particular thing, making it more automatic, more accessible, more likely to pop up uninvited.

Why Rumination Feels So Compelling (And So Necessary)

But if it’s so harmful, why do we do it? There are actually some very good reasons, or at least, reasons that made sense for our ancestors.

It feels productive. Rumination disguises itself as problem-solving. Your brain tells you: “If I just think about this enough, I’ll figure out how to fix it, prevent it, or win next time.” There’s a sense that you’re doing something about the injustice.

It validates our pain. Replaying the incident confirms that yes, we were wronged. Yes, we have a right to be angry. There’s a kind of self-righteous comfort in that.

It’s a form of preparation. Our evolutionary history wired us to learn from threats and prepare for them. If that saber-toothed tiger attacked from the left last time, you’d better remember that. The problem is, your brain treats even smaller threats — like social slights — with similar urgency.

It gives us a sense of control. In rumination, you get to rewrite the script. You win the argument, you say the perfect thing. In a world where we often feel powerless, that fantasy can be addictive.

The Hidden Cost: What Rumination Actually Does to You

The problem is, while rumination feels like it’s helping, it’s actually doing the opposite.

Physiologically, chronic rumination keeps your body in a state of stress. That repeated cortisol release is linked to inflammation, weakened immune function, cardiovascular problems, and disrupted sleep. You’re essentially putting your body through the stress of the original event over and over again.

Psychologically, it narrows your perspective. When you’re stuck in the anger loop, you become less able to see nuance, less open to alternative explanations, less capable of empathy, even when it might serve you. Research shows that rumination is a strong predictor of depression and anxiety disorders.

Relationally, it poisons your connections. You might snap at people who had nothing to do with the original incident. You become less present with loved ones, and perhaps most damaging, rumination can trap you in a victim identity, making it harder to move forward or repair relationships.

The neuroscience is clear: the more you ruminate, the more you’re training your brain to be angry, reactive, and stuck. You’re literally building the architecture of suffering.

The Good News

Your brain’s neuroplasticity, its ability to change and rewire, works both ways. Just as you can strengthen pathways for anger and rumination, you can also build new pathways for calm, perspective, and resilience.

The goal isn’t to suppress anger or pretend everything’s fine. Anger itself is a valid, important emotion. It alerts us to injustice, boundary violations, and unmet needs. The question isn’t whether to feel anger, it’s whether to get stuck in it.

So how do you actually interrupt the rumination cycle? How do you acknowledge the anger without letting it hijack your brain for hours, days, or weeks? And how do you build the mental habits that make peace more accessible than outrage?

In the rest of this article, I’ll show you how to:

• Interrupt the rumination loop in real-time using proven practices from contemplative psychology and neuroscience

• Process anger in a healthy way that honors your feelings while releasing its grip on you

• Rewire your neural pathways through targeted exercises that take just minutes a day

• Create a “mental firebreak” that stops rumination before it takes root

• Transform anger into wisdom by extracting the useful information while letting go of the suffering

These are practical tools you can use immediately, drawing from both ancient contemplative wisdom and modern neuroscience research.

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If you’ve ever felt this way, there’s an actual evolutionary reason for it, and understanding why can help you deal with it.

In my experience, most people move through their lives thinking that somehow it’s threat level orange when, objectively, right then and there, it’s threat level green. Or maybe threat level chartreuse... like a swimming pool of green paint with a drop of yellow.

(If you’re not familiar: threat levels are the security alert system: green means low risk, orange means high risk. Most of us walk around feeling like we’re in high alert mode when we’re actually safe.)

Why is that? Why do we move through our days overestimating the likelihood of bad events occurring and also overestimating how bad it would feel if they happened?

One of the deep roots of the answer to this question is found in our own biological evolution over the six hundred million year evolution of the nervous system.

Our ancestors could make two kinds of mistakes.

First, they could think that there was a tiger in the bushes about to pounce, some kind of bad thing was coming at them... but in fact, there wasn’t such a threat.

The alternative mistake was to think that everything’s fine, the coast is clear... but in fact, there really was a tiger in the bushes about to jump.

What’s the cost of the first mistake? Needless anxiety.

What’s the cost of the second mistake? No more mistakes forever.

As a result, we’re designed to make the first mistake hundreds and hundreds of times to avoid making the second mistake even once.

In effect, we evolved to be adaptively paranoid of paper tigers. A paper tiger is a metaphor for something that appears threatening but is actually harmless. We’re wired to treat harmless things as dangerous because the cost of being wrong was death.

That’s a good prescription for upping the odds of survival at significant cost to well-being back in the Serengeti Plains. And there are situations today in which yep, this paper tiger paranoia is actually really useful because it super keeps us on our toes.

But for most people, what it leads to is needless anxiety and also a needless swerving away from opportunities with an overfocus on threats.

Think about it:

• You don’t speak up in the meeting because you overestimate how badly it could go

• You don’t tell your partner what you really need because you imagine the worst-case scenario

• You avoid opportunities because the potential downside looms larger than the potential upside

Your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do, but it’s miscalibrated for modern life.

So here’s the question: If we’re wired this way, are we just stuck with it?

No.

There’s a very simple and powerful method I’ve borrowed from cognitive therapy that you can start using immediately. It’s a technique for forming more accurate appraisals of threats, not underestimating them and not overestimating them either.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk you through the exact step-by-step process I use, including a detailed real-world example of how to challenge your anxious thoughts with believable counter-arguments that actually calm your nervous system down. You’ll learn how to separate the paper tigers from the real ones and what to do about both.

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“How do you reconcile wanting to be well with non-dualistic wholeness? If I’m stuck in uncomfortable emotions, shouldn’t I just be sitting with what is?”

This question is not just philosophical, but deeply personal, and it reveals a split that can paralyze people on the path.

On one side: “I am already whole. Nothing is broken. Everything is already complete. I should just accept what is.”

On the other hand: “But I’m suffering, I’m anxious, depressed, triggered, stuck. I want to feel better. I want to heal.”

And in the middle: “If I try to heal, am I rejecting what is? Am I creating the very duality I’m trying to transcend? Am I spiritually failing by wanting things to be different?”

This is the trap of what I call spiritual bypassing disguised as non-duality.

And it’s caused more unnecessary suffering than almost any other misunderstanding on the contemplative path.

So let me be clear: You can be fundamentally whole AND still grow. You can accept what is AND work skillfully with what’s arising.

These are two sides of the same truth. Let me show you how.

The Misunderstanding: Confusing Levels of Truth

Here’s where people get stuck: they collapse different levels of truth into one, and then wonder why nothing works.

On the ultimate level—the level of your deepest nature—you are already whole. Nothing is broken. Nothing needs to be fixed. Your awareness, your consciousness, the very ground of your being is inherently complete.

This is true.

But on the relative level, the level of lived human experience, you have a nervous system that can be dysregulated, thought patterns that cause suffering, and emotional wounds that need tending.

This is also true.

The mistake is thinking you have to choose between them.

People hear teachings about non-duality, about already being the Buddha, about “nothing to do and nowhere to go,” and they think: “Oh, so I should just accept my anxiety/depression/trauma and do nothing about it. To want to change it would be grasping.”

No. That’s not what those teachings mean.

In the rest of this article, I’ll show you exactly how to hold both truths at once, the framework for recognizing your fundamental wholeness while still doing the healing work that reduces suffering. You’ll learn the practical distinction between true acceptance and spiritual bypassing, discover what “sitting with what is” actually means (hint: it’s not passive), and get a clear both/and practice you can use immediately. This is the resolution to the paradox that stops so many practitioners in their tracks.

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The Problem: Your Mind Can’t Think Its Way Out

When you’re caught in a mental loop, replaying conversations, analyzing decisions, spiraling through worst-case scenarios, it’s natural to assume you need to think your way through it.

But here’s what I want you to understand: When you’re dysregulated, your thinking is compromised. You literally can’t access clear reasoning when your nervous system is activated.

The first question isn’t “What should I think about this?”

The first question is: “Am I regulated right now?”

The “Of Course You’re Upset” Technique

I have a practice I call the “of course you’re upset” technique.

Here’s how it works:

When you notice yourself spinning, pause and say to yourself:

“Of course I’m upset. Of course, this is hard. Of course, I’m feeling this way.”

By acknowledging what’s true in your body and nervous system, you stop fighting your own experience, you stop adding a second layer of suffering (”Why am I so anxious? Why can’t I just calm down?”) on top of the first.

You give your system permission to be exactly where it is.

Regulation First, Then Thinking

Here’s the key: Work with your body before you work with your mind.

When you’re dysregulated:

• Your prefrontal cortex (rational thinking) goes offline

• Your amygdala (threat detection) takes over

• Your body is in survival mode

No amount of “positive thinking” or “reframing” will work when your nervous system believes it’s in danger.

So the sequence is:

1. Regulate (breathe, ground, acknowledge “of course I’m upset”)

2. Then think (once you’re resourced, you can access clarity)

How to Tell the Difference

So how do you know if you’re overthinking or dysregulated?

Check your body first.

Are you:

• Breathing shallowly or holding your breath?

• Feeling tension in your chest, jaw, or shoulders?

• Experiencing a sense of urgency or panic?

• Unable to settle or focus?

If yes, you’re likely dysregulated. Your nervous system needs support before your mind can work clearly.

Overthinking, on the other hand, happens when you’re relatively calm but caught in analysis paralysis, weighing options endlessly, searching for the “perfect” answer, ruminating without resolution.

Most of what we call “overthinking” is actually dysregulation in disguise. The thinking is your mind’s attempt to create safety when your body feels unsafe.

The Practice

When you catch yourself in the spin:

Step 1: Name it
“Of course I’m upset. Of course, this feels overwhelming.”

Step 2: Resource your body

• Take three slow, complete breaths

• Place your hand on your heart

• Feel your feet on the ground

• Notice what’s actually around you right now

Step 3: Ask the question
“Now that I’m more settled, what do I actually need here?”

Often, you’ll find the answer isn’t more thinking at all. It’s rest, or a conversation. It’s letting something go and trusting yourself.

What I Want You to Remember

You can’t think your way into regulation. But you can regulate your way into clear thinking.

Your body knows the difference between real danger and perceived threat, and your job is to help your nervous system feel safe enough to remember. Sometimes that starts with the simplest acknowledgment: “Of course I’m upset. Of course.”

Want to go deeper into practices that help you work with dysregulation and build genuine resilience?

Join my flagship course, Foundations of Well-Being, where I walk you through the neuroscience of regulation, practical techniques for everyday stress, and how to transform your relationship with difficult emotions. This is about building real capacity in your nervous system.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

“My 33-year-old nephew died in an avalanche two months ago. I’m trying to practice taking in the good, but I’m struggling. How does this fit with the pain and disorientation of grief? How do I stay in touch with the real pain while also tuning into the real good, without spiritual bypassing?”

There’s a moment in early grief when you catch yourself laughing at something, a joke, a dog doing something ridiculous, the absurdity of a typo, and then immediately feel guilty. How can I laugh when someone I love is gone?

Or you’re walking through the grocery store, hollowed out by loss, and you notice the tulips are beautiful. For three seconds, you feel something other than devastation. And then the grief crashes back in, twice as hard, as if to punish you for forgetting.

This is the impossible bind of grieving: How do you honor the reality of loss without drowning in it? How do you let in moments of beauty without betraying the person you’ve lost?

The question comes from someone whose nephew, young, vibrant, 33 years old, died suddenly in an avalanche. The grief is fresh, disorienting, total. And yet there are also teachings about “taking in the good,” about building inner resources, about not getting lost in the negative. So what to do?

Is taking in the good a form of spiritual bypassing, a way of avoiding the raw truth of pain? Or is there a way to be with the grief while also recognizing that life, somehow, continues to offer small moments of grace?

The Rhythm of Grief

Here’s the fundamental truth: Grief and goodness are not opposites. They coexist.

This isn’t about choosing one or the other. It’s not about “focusing on the positive” to escape the pain. That would be bypassing, and it would fail because grief doesn’t work that way. You can’t outrun it. You can’t think your way around it. It will find you in the cereal aisle, in the shower, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon when you suddenly remember something they said, and the floor drops out from under you.

But the other truth is this: You can be devastated and notice the tulips. Both are real and both are true. Recognizing one does not negate the other.

In fact, this is the very practice grief asks of us: to hold the mosaic of reality without collapsing it into a single story.

There’s a rhythm to this. It’s a three-part process: “let be, let go, let in.”

In the rest of this article, you’ll discover:

• How to honor your grief without being consumed by it

• The practice of “letting go” without letting go of your love

• A simple three-breath technique for holding both pain and beauty at once

• Why taking in the good isn’t betrayal, it’s how your nervous system heals

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This is the question that matters most.

Because let’s be honest, when you’re in the middle of a panic attack, when you’ve just gotten terrible news, when someone’s words have sent you into a shame spiral, when your body is shaking with rage or fear, all those beautiful contemplative practices you’ve learned feel completely out of reach.

Your thinking brain has gone offline, your heart is pounding, your breath is shallow and fast, and you can’t remember what you’re supposed to do. You just know you need something, and you need it now.

This is the moment when we most need skillful tools. And it’s also the moment when most practices feel impossible.

So what do you actually do?

I’m going to share my big three, the practices I return to again and again when I’m flooded, or when I’m working with someone who is. These aren’t theoretical; they’re real survival tools. And they work because they meet your nervous system exactly where it is.

First: Get Grounded in Your Body

When you’re overwhelmed, the first thing that happens is dissociation. You leave your body, you go up into your head, or you fragment, or you disappear into a fog of activation.

So the first practice is simple: find your body again.

I don’t mean this in some abstract, spiritual way. I mean literally: Can you feel your feet on the ground? Can you feel your hands as they touch the armrests of your chair? Can you feel the weight of your body being held by the earth?

This is why I always come back to the body as a refuge. Your body is always here. It’s always now. Even when your mind is spinning stories about the past or catastrophizing about the future, your body exists only in this present moment.

Try this right now:

Press your feet into the floor. Feel the contact. Feel the solidity beneath you.

Notice your hands. Can you feel the temperature of your skin? The sensation of your fingers touching each other or resting on your legs?

Take one full breath and feel your belly expand. Then let it go.

That’s it. You’ve just interrupted the flood.

When your prefrontal cortex is offline, you can’t think your way back to calm. But you can sense your way back. The body is the doorway.

That’s the first doorway back to yourself. But it’s only the beginning.

The next two practices build on this foundation, and together, they form a complete system for working with overwhelm. Let me show you what comes next.

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How can you bring together effort and ease?

How do you care about what you do, while also not becoming burdened by it? How do you stay engaged with life without getting caught up in it?

In one way or another, this question shows up for each of us. You have responsibilities, relationships, work to do, and situations that call for clarity and effort. At the same time, you begin to recognize the limits of striving. You see how much tension comes from trying to control what you cannot control, or from holding on too tightly to particular outcomes.

So the question is not whether to make an effort or to let go. The question is how to live with both. It can help to begin with something very simple.

At a physical level, letting go is easy to understand. You release tension in the body. You unclench a muscle. We exhale. There is a natural shift from holding on to letting go.

In your mind, the process is similar, though often more subtle.

You may be holding on to a belief, an expectation, or an imagined outcome. You may be caught in a pattern of worry that keeps unfolding on its own. In these cases, letting go does not necessarily mean forcing your mind to stop. It may instead involve allowing the process to continue while you step out of identification with it.

For example, when you start worrying, you can observe it as a kind of movement in the mind. Thoughts appear, develop, and pass. If you do not feed that process, it tends to settle on its own. In this way, letting go can mean allowing something to run its course without reinforcing it.

There is also a deeper aspect of letting go that involves recognizing the limits of your power.

There are things you can influence, and there are things you cannot. You cannot make another person return your call. You cannot guarantee a particular outcome. You cannot shape the world entirely according to your wishes.

When you see clearly that you do not have the power to make something happen, there is a place for releasing the effort to do so. This does not mean indifference. It means that you stop struggling with what is not in your hands.

At the same time, there is another side to this. There is the matter of doing the right thing.

In each moment, there is something that fits the situation. There is a way of thinking, speaking, or acting that is more aligned with your values and with the reality in front of you.

Sometimes this is very simple. It may be sending an email that needs to be sent, completing a task, or following through on a commitment. At other times, it is more nuanced. It may involve choosing not to say something that would be unhelpful, or deciding to step back rather than push forward.

When you begin to orient yourself toward what is right in the next moment, life can become less complicated. Instead of becoming entangled in everything you could do, you return to a more immediate question.

What is called for now?

And often, if you are quiet enough, you already know.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore how to stay connected to what is right without becoming strained, how to bring effort into better balance, and how this relates to a deeper recognition of your own nature. The aim is not just to understand these ideas, but also to apply them in everyday life, when things are not simple.

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