A quick framework for getting out of mental fog

Ever felt stuck? Stagnant? Like your ears are ringing, and the world sounds like adults from Charlie Brown.

The stories we tell ourselves define our experience, and often these stories are unhelpful and incomplete - not to mention paralyzing.

Following a rejection, or even simply a perceived rejection, we may tell ourselves we are not worthy or that there’s no one in our corner. We can extrapolate one or two bad experiences to believe the trend will be neverendingly negative. We catastrophize in our heads, building imaginary dominos from a last-minute rescheduled meeting to that person avoiding us, to our employment being in jeopardy, to losing our home and the respect of our family/friends, to living out our days in exile with a beard.

Or we might turn the other way, stopping ourselves from jumping on the anxiety train through avoidance and numbing. Maybe we binge-watch a Netflix show we’ve already seen, eat junk food after we’re already full, play games on our phone for hours, drink more, bury ourselves in work, or engage in any other creative form of avoidance. 

We might wallow in feeling alone. We may wholly believe our situation is futile and precarious and that no one seems to understand or could lend a hand. 

It’s natural (and nothing to be ashamed of) to get caught up in any of these cycles. Given the consequences of staying in these headspaces, however, here are some quick questions to rediscover our traction and move forward.

How True Is It?

This is a powerful coaching question if we are up to the challenge of answering it honestly. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to believe the story we tell ourselves and drown in imagined implications.

Take, for example, getting into work late. There was a meeting that morning, we are the last ones to arrive, and everyone knows it because we had to walk through the door with our bag still on our shoulders. We might even be catching our breath, trying not to look out of breath while still conveying that we had hurried to make up for our punctuality. 

The room mostly ignores our entrance, maybe just a silent nod from some close colleagues acknowledging we have arrived before their eyes flick back to whoever is speaking. 

So you tell yourself they are angry with you, you’ve missed the important part of the meeting, maybe you shouldn’t bother to contribute, this could be a stain on your reputation, and you’ll have to work overtime to make up for it. Maybe you tell yourself you won’t be forgiven; you know of other coworkers who have inspired anger by being late. This is probably the beginning of a slippery slope to being fired, losing confidence, being unable to find a new job because you can’t garner a recommendation. Now you’re facing a tragic decline and demise.

This train of thought is called “catastrophizing.” We all experience this mental trap, but predicting it can be challenging if we don’t know our triggers, and when we miss the starting gun, it can be difficult to stop the train.

During a spiral is the best time to ask yourself, “How true is it?” Do your career and livelihood truly boil down to one day? One mistake? How many people will actually think about it besides you 5 minutes from now?

And even if we get reprimanded or fired, how true is it that we can’t find our way forward? You’re here reading this because nothing that has happened to you up to now has derailed your life to the extent you probably feared at one point. 

The disarming nature of this question can be enough to allow us to sidestep this runaway train of thoughts and replace irrational anxiety with immediate perspective. 

What Am I Avoiding? What Am I Afraid Of?

I wrote this right after tossing my phone on the couch. For the third time in as many minutes, I had unlocked my phone and mindlessly opened a Sudoku game but thankfully caught myself before spending 40 minutes seeing how many I could complete. 

Behaviors - or perhaps more accurately: compulsions - like picking up our phones are indicative of avoidance. We feel compelled to distract ourselves or suddenly do something we’ve been putting off, like the laundry or dishes. 

We do these activities because they are less scary than facing whatever task we are putting off. Psychologically, procrastination is about avoiding the feelings of confusion, anxiety, and overwhelm that come with a task, not the task itself. For this reason, writing is a common task to procrastinate on - the act of sorting through thoughts to organize them to communicate to others is taxing, ambiguous, and often frustrating.

When we find ourselves compulsively numbing or reaching for distraction, we have to ask the hard question, “What am I avoiding right now?”

The question is not difficult because we don’t know the answer. Usually, we know precisely what deadline or task has been whispering in the back of our minds while the front of the mind screams louder and louder to drown it out. The question is difficult because we have to admit we have something else we need to be doing, and we are avoiding it. 

Facing our fears head-on and labeling them is often enough to stop the buzzing cycle of thoughts keeping us stuck. Even if we decide we are going to watch Netflix now and work on the task later, if we have labeled it and scheduled it for a designated time, we no longer have to expend all our mental energy trying to ignore the whisper. We have acknowledged it.

Other times, we are blocked doing something we really want to do. Maybe we want to get a new job as the current one has become soul-sucking. How often do we spring to the job search? Almost never. We have to dive into the unknown, wondering what jobs are out there. When we find ones we are interested in, we have to apply and risk rejection (or, more commonly, ghosting). If we get the job, what happens if we don’t like it? What happens if we are not good at it? 

The fear these questions inspire prevents us from starting the change we want, often until the discomfort of staying is finally greater than the discomfort of the unknown. If we take the scary leap earlier by facing and describing our fears, we can proactively choose our path. Not only does this speed up our self-improvement, but it also reminds us what we can do next time we feel the fear creep up.

The consequences are never as scary as we think.

Who can help?

Because of our social nature, one of the most challenging human experiences is feeling alone. Unfortunately, our social nature also pushes us to protect our social status, striving for independence and admiration for our talents. This impulse can lead us to turn away from others, believing we should figure it out ourselves.

To save ourselves, first, we have to stop believing we must do it on our own. In business, it’s common to celebrate CEOs rather than companies, and we tend to applaud “rugged individualism” (especially in America) in many aspects of life. This makes it more difficult and more important to realize that nothing is ever truly done alone. 

Olympic champions have many coaches. Every CEO of a large company has employees working tirelessly to create the vision. Even every box of pens requires various organizations of people to source, produce, compile, and distribute the materials before a pen reaches our hand feeling “brand-new.”

In the entrepreneurial space, building a company alone is a recipe for burnout and blind spots. 

If we can accept the need for advice, aid, and mentorship, as well as the surprising availability of all three, we can ask the most powerful question yet: who can help?

Even if we are building something new or trying a novel approach, there will be principles shared with other types of work, analogous examples in the world, and a host of experts who can help. For example, a copper distributor may seem unrelated to a coffee brand, but both must source the materials wherever they can be found naturally in the world, package them to prevent oxidization, and plan marketing and distribution. What can each brand learn from the other? Searching for odd similarities short-circuits unhelpful stories we create - that no one can understand what we’re going through, and certainly no one can help. 

And if we feel that no one in our network can help, there’s a great chance someone knows someone who can. Does your network know your experiences off the top of their head? Could they tell you all the people you know and the ways you could help them and others? 

No. And the same is true in reverse. So asking a question, even to a large social media audience like Twitter or LinkedIn, is likely to uncover connections that will be useful for both parties.

Once you understand the direction you want and have bounced ideas off of others, you can look for the shortest path to expert help - what about coaches? Advisors? Colleagues? Freelancers? Friends? 

The world can always help - if we are brave enough to ask. In particular, we need the courage to ask after being rejected. Our responsibility is to keep the faith that the world is larger - and yet much closer - than we realize.