I’m two weeks into Impart Therapy’s Transition Toolkit, the support group I’m a part of while I’m on my career transition journey. Last week I wrote about the anxiety sitting underneath all of it (I called it Naming the Anxiety), and this week’s session went straight at where that anxiety actually comes from: my own thoughts.
Currently, I’m trying to build the next chapter of my life with actual intention, which sounds great in theory. In practice, it’s meant a lot of energy spent trying to calculate the “right” way to spend a Thursday, like there’s a formula for making the most of a sabbatical I just haven’t found yet. (There isn’t. I’ve looked!) This week’s session confirmed something I already knew somewhere, but had been quietly hoping wasn’t true: you can’t do everything at once. Things just take time.
Some of that pressure showed up this week as something more specific: mind reading, deciding what other people think of me, usually before they’ve said a word. Calendar-free on a Thursday afternoon, and I’m already convinced someone’s quietly deciding I’m just filling time instead of actually working toward something. No one’s actually said that. I made it up, and then reacted to it like it was fact.
The Thinking Traps I Didn’t Know I Was In
In this week’s session, Deeya broke down seven common thinking traps, the quiet, almost reflexive ways our minds distort a situation until it feels far worse, or far more fixed, than it actually is, often before we even notice we’re doing it:
- Catastrophizing: jumping from a small worry to the worst possible outcome, turning “I’ll mess this up” into “I’ll end up feeling just as wrong about this as I did about my last career.”
- All-or-nothing thinking: seeing only two options for myself, total success or total failure, with no room for anything in between.
- Mind reading: assuming I know what someone else is thinking about me, without any actual evidence that it’s true.
- Fortune telling: deciding a negative outcome is already coming, before anything has actually happened.
- Should statements: the rigid “I should,” “I must,” “I have to” that leaves me no space to just be where I actually am.
- Overgeneralizing: taking one bad experience and deciding it predicts everything that comes after it.
- Perfectionism: believing something has to be done perfectly or not at all, which tends to leave me stuck rather than motivated.
Two of these I know intimately. Mind reading is the one I opened with, deciding what someone thinks before giving them the chance to actually say it. Perfectionism is the quieter one, the belief that if I can’t do something well, I shouldn’t do it yet, and yes, I noticed myself doing it while writing this, rereading this blog more times than I’d like to admit to make sure it sounded right, encouraging, inspiring, before I post it. And should statements tie the two together: the sense that I should already have this figured out, that I should be further along, just because of how many years I spent doing something else.
Overthinking Feels Like Problem-Solving. It Isn’t.
One distinction from the session landed hard, mostly because I’d never had it named this plainly: Overthinking looks like you’re working on something, but it actually moves you further from a solution, not closer. It repeats the same “what if” on a loop, searches for a certainty that doesn’t exist, and has no stopping point. Problem-solving does the opposite: it names the actual issue, focuses on what’s within your control, and ends somewhere. The test I’ve been using since: Is there something I can do about this right now? If the answer is no, I’m probably overthinking, not solving anything, and I’m losing ground while I do it.
A Thought Is Not a Fact
Two tools came out of this week for working with a thought once you’ve noticed it. The first, cognitive reframing, wasn’t new to me by name. Scroll through Instagram long enough and you’ll find no shortage of pages talking about it. Mental health has never been more openly discussed than it is right now. But knowing the term and actually living it turned out to be two very different things. This has been the quiet work of my whole year, trying to show up a little better, for myself, for my friends and family, for whoever I happen to be dealing with that day. Reframing gives that effort an actual shape: “if I don’t get this, I’ll be stuck forever” becomes “this would be disappointing, but it wouldn’t decide my whole future.”
The second tool is the one that actually stuck, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple: add the words “I am having the thought that…” before whatever your mind just told you. I am having the thought that people will judge this. Not “people will judge this.” Just a thought, not a fact. I didn’t expect five extra words to do much, but they put a small gap between me and whatever my mind was insisting was true, and that gap was enough to stop the spiral before it picked up speed. That small shift has been enough, more than once this week, to let me keep going instead of stalling out.
Something to Ask Yourself
If any of this sounds familiar, here’s where I’d start:
- Which of the thinking traps do you recognize in yourself, and when does it usually show up?
- Is there something you can actually do about what’s on your mind right now, or are you circling the same “what if” without landing anywhere?
- What would it sound like to add “I am having the thought that…” in front of whatever you’re telling yourself today?
Next week we’ll be discussing self-compassion, values, and resilience. If week one was about understanding the anxiety and week two was about learning that I don’t have to have it all figured out today, or ever really, all at once, I’m curious what it takes to actually be kind to myself through the rest of this, especially in a year where I’ve been trying, imperfectly, to show up better for the people around me too.
About Karishma Singh
Karishma Singh is pursuing a career in psychotherapy and plans to begin a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology at Yorkville University. She spent more than a decade in public relations and communications, and while her work centred on brands, it was the people and relationships behind them that stayed with her. Over time, she realized she wanted people to be the focus of her work, not a part of it. She currently volunteers with Impart Therapy, where she writes honestly about the uncertainty and anxiety of starting over, hoping it helps others feel less alone in their own life transitions.
Connect with Karishma on LinkedIn.