For a long time, I thought the way I lived inside my head was just… normal.

Always on edge. Always calculating the next move. Always half-braced for something to go wrong. I knew I had anxiety, but if you’d asked me whether it was affecting my quality of life, I would have genuinely downplayed it. Because when you’ve never known anything different, the water you’re swimming in just feels like water.

It wasn’t until I went to therapy and got to the root of it that I understood how much space this thing had been occupying. Getting out from under it was like taking a real breath for the first time. I looked around and thought: oh. this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

The Story We Tell Ourselves Instead

Most of us don’t reach that point for a long time. It’s easier, in the short term, to explain it away. I’m exaggerating. I’ll make a fool of myself. I’m being too sensitive. These are the little mantras we’ve been handed, and we repeat them until they feel like self-awareness rather than self-abandonment.

And when anxiety starts eating into our productivity, our focus, our ability to just get through the day, we call ourselves lazy. We beat ourselves up for not handling things better. What we don’t stop to consider is that a brain running in anxious circles 90% of the time is a fatigued brain. It’s not a lazy brain. It’s an exhausted one that has no bandwidth left.

Judging yourself for struggling in that state doesn’t help you out of it. It just digs the hole a little deeper.

The Theory You’ve Probably Seen on TikTok

There’s an idea floating around social media that’s worth addressing directly because I know a lot of you have encountered it.

The claim goes something like this: if you can’t stop thinking about someone, it means they’re thinking about you too. That you’re energetically bonded, that the obsessive thoughts are a kind of cosmic signal about the connection between you.

I’ve looked into the quantum theories that underpin this idea. I genuinely believe that thoughts are energy, that we’re all affecting each other on a vibrational level, that the field connecting us is real. So I’m not dismissing this from a place of skepticism.

But I’m also not willing to say that if you can’t stop thinking about someone, it’s because you’re soulmates and the universe is confirming it. Because then what do we do with the stalker? They’re consumed by thoughts of someone who doesn’t think of them at all, who may even be afraid of them. The obsessive thought pattern is the same. The spiritual explanation doesn’t hold up.

So if it’s not about the bond between two souls, what is it actually about?

What’s Really Happening in Your Body

Here’s what I believe is going on, and it’s far more grounded than it might first sound.

We are all energetic beings. There’s energy moving through us constantly, in our thoughts, our emotions, our reactions to everything around us. Women especially tend to be highly absorbent of the energy in their environment. We pick up a lot. We hold a lot.

And the human body was built to move. Not as a wellness trend, not as a weight loss strategy. It was literally designed to be in motion as a core part of its functioning. Movement isn’t a bonus. It’s how the body processes and releases the energy it accumulates.

The problem is that most of us are living in a way that’s almost comically sedentary compared to what our bodies were built for. Eight hours at a desk. Then the couch. Then the phone. The energy that would have been metabolized through movement just… stays. It builds up. It stacks.

And eventually, that stacked energy needs somewhere to go.

So it climbs up into the mind.

The mind starts turning things over. Analyzing. Looking for patterns. Running scenarios. It returns to unresolved situations again and again, trying to find the logical explanation that will let it finally close the loop and move on. It constructs worst-case outcomes and rehearses them. It watches you sleep.

This is what we call overthinking. And it’s not a character flaw. It’s your body asking you, with increasing urgency, to give it an outlet.

And Then the Mind Turns On Itself

Once the overthinking is running, the mind starts judging itself for running. Why am I still thinking about this person? I’m being ridiculous. I should just move on. And the judgment creates shame, and the shame creates more anxiety, and the cycle feeds itself.

Think back to being a child and getting it wrong about something. Getting misread by a parent, corrected sharply for something that felt natural to you. Remember how that landed. What it planted.

Seeds of not being enough. Of being too much. Of something being fundamentally off about you.

When you judge yourself for overthinking, you’re doing the exact same thing to yourself that was done to you then. It doesn’t move you forward. It just teaches your nervous system one more time that its signals aren’t safe to have.

Would you tell a broken arm it was being stupid? Would you judge your body for hurting after a fall?

So why do you judge your mind for doing exactly what it was built to do when the conditions it’s living in have pushed it past its limits?

What To Actually Do

Right now, before you read on, bring up a thought you’ve been carrying about your anxiety or your overthinking. Something critical. Something you’ve been telling yourself.

Now replace it, genuinely, not performatively, with this:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with me. My body is signaling that it needs something. This is normal. I’m not broken.

Keep that close. Come back to it when the self-judgment kicks in. Kindness toward yourself is not a soft place to start. It’s the only place.

The second part is more concrete.

Move your body. Not to lose weight, not because someone told you to, not to look a certain way. For your own peace. To give that stacked energy somewhere to go that isn’t your mind.

Evening walks. Dancing. Yoga, pilates, swimming, a combat sport, calisthenics in your living room. Whatever your body actually enjoys rather than endures. Even now, as you read this, you could stand up and stretch. Roll your shoulders back. Let something release.

Do it for a few days. Actually do it. And then notice what happens to the volume of the noise in your head.

I think you’ll be surprised.