Are You Stuck in a Loop?

In my last newsletter I asked if your shoulders were up near your ears.

A ton of people replied and said yes.

They ALSO didn’t even realize it until they read that line.

The cause of that isn’t stress or anxiety.

It’s the loop.

The one that hits at 2 am when you’re replaying a conversation in your head from Tuesday.

The one that hits in the middle of a meeting when you’re rehearsing in your mind what you’re going to say at another meeting three meetings later in the day.

The one that surfaces on Sunday night when instead of being present you’re mentally living in Monday morning.

The loop that pulls you out of right now and into somewhere that hasn’t happened yet.

Or, somewhere you’ve already been and can’t change.

Your brain doesn’t do this because there’s something wrong with you.

It does it because it was designed to scan for problems, anticipate, and prepare.

And it’s so good at it that it’s kept humans alive for thousands of years.

You’re not broken - you’re just built to survive in a world of actual predators instead of overflowing inboxes and back-to-back Zoom calls.

So the loop runs.

And runs.

And runs.

Because you're human and no one taught you how to gently step out of it.

That's where noticing comes in.

Not fixing, fighting, or telling yourself to "just stop thinking about it."

(Which, as you know, never once works).

Just noticing.

The moment you catch yourself in a loop, something shifts if you step outside it, even briefly.

You watch the thought instead of being trapped inside it.

And in that tiny gap between you and the thought…

There's breathing room.

That's mindfulness.

Not incense and silence and sitting perfectly still - just noticing.

That small, quiet moment of, “Oh, there I go again.”

And then you get to ask the question I suggested last week:

Is anything actually wrong in this exact moment?

The loop will always say yes.

But you get to check.

That checking, pausing, and noticing is a practice.

And like any practice, it gets easier the more you do it.

You don't have to be perfect at it. You just have to be willing to try once, and then again, and again.

One breath at a time.

Let me know what came up for you when you read this email - I read and reply to every email I get.