Have you just tried not thinking about it?
People love to say “Have you just tried not thinking about it?”. It sounds reasonable. Caring. Practical. As if the problem is simply that your mind has wandered somewhere unhelpful and needs redirecting. The implication is that thinking is optional, and that anxiety is something you could put down if you chose to.
This piece is for people who can feel themselves bracing for impact before anything has even happened.
For many of us, especially AuDHD adults, this advice misses the point entirely. The problem is not that we are thinking too much. The problem is that we are stuck inside a story that feels inseparable from who we are.
Rumination rarely starts as drama. It usually begins with something small and mundane. A chat from your boss that just says “I need to talk to you” and nothing else. A form you do not understand. A delay in something you were expecting. A task that feels too hard for its simplicity. The nervous system registers uncertainty, and the mind looks for meaning. Very quickly, the situation stops being about the task itself and becomes about what it says about you.
At that point, thinking is no longer a choice. Telling yourself not to think about it is like telling a smoke alarm to stop beeping without addressing the fire. The noise is not the problem. It is the signal.
One of the most uncomfortable things to admit is that much of our anxiety is not really about outcomes. It is about identity. Anthony de Mello wrote about how suffering arises from emotional attachment to labels, not labels as practical descriptions, but labels as identities. “I have a good job.” “I am successful.” “I am a good husband/wife.” When something threatens one of those identities, the nervous system reacts as if the self itself is under threat.
That is why anxiety feels so personal. It is not “this might go badly.” It is “this might prove something about me that I can’t bear to believe.”
There was a time when doing my tax return felt impossible. Not difficult. Impossible. The forms overwhelmed me. I did not understand what was being asked. Each year I avoided it, and each year the story grew larger in my mind. I convinced myself that I had done something terribly wrong. That this would escalate. That I could get into serious trouble. Jail even.
None of that was grounded in reality. I had not done anything remotely criminal. But the fear was not about tax. It was about identity.
At the time, I was working as an IT consultant inside financial firms, doing complex work and being trusted with serious responsibility. Not being able to complete a basic administrative task felt like evidence that I was not a real adult. That I had somehow slipped through the cracks. That I did not deserve to be in the role I was in. My mind treated that mismatch as proof that I should not be there.
So I avoided it. For years. I paid late fees rather than face the story I had constructed. Eventually, I hired an accountant. They submitted the missing returns. It turned out I was due a rebate.
The relief was real, but the more important insight came later. Nothing about who I was had ever actually been at risk. The catastrophe existed entirely in my head, powered by shame and attachment to an identity that felt fragile.
You might reasonably ask why the mind gets so stuck in these loops, especially when part of you knows they are not helping. For AuDHD adults, this is not just anxiety or poor coping. There are neurological patterns that make getting caught in thought, and staying there, more likely.
One of the most helpful ideas here is monotropism. In simple terms, monotropism describes how autistic attention tends to organise itself into a small number of deep channels. When attention locks onto something emotionally charged, it does not skim across it lightly. It goes in fully. This is what allows for intense focus, depth of thinking, and expertise. It is also what makes certain worries feel immersive and inescapable.
When a concern enters one of these attention tunnels, especially one tied to identity or threat, it can dominate the mental landscape. The mind is not choosing to obsess. It is operating exactly as designed, concentrating its full attentional resources on what feels most important for survival or meaning.
Alongside this sits what many autistic people describe as inertia. This is not laziness or lack of motivation. It is difficulty starting, stopping, or switching states. Once the mind is moving in a particular direction, changing course requires far more energy than it appears from the outside. Thinking can continue long after it has ceased to be useful, not because the person wants it to, but because the transition cost is high.
For AuDHD adults, ADHD adds another layer. ADHD brings mental motion, urgency, and rapid associative thinking, but also reduced ability to steer attention deliberately. So you can end up with a mind that is both moving quickly and unable to disengage. Thoughts race, but they circle the same point. There is activity without traction.
This is where the experience of being unable to act often comes from. It is not that you do not care enough. It is that the system is locked in a thinking state, and the gear change into doing feels inaccessible. From the inside, it can feel like being stuck behind glass, watching yourself think about something endlessly while being unable to move.
This also explains why advice like “just stop thinking about it” fails so consistently. That advice assumes that thinking and acting are freely switchable states. For many AuDHD nervous systems, they are not. The instruction targets the content of thought rather than the state the system is in.
Rumination is often mistaken for problem solving, but they are not the same. Problem solving moves something forward. Rumination repeats without resolution. It is motion without progress. And because it is often fuelled by identity threat, it carries emotional weight that keeps attention locked in place.
Seen this way, the issue is not overthinking. It is attentional capture combined with high transition friction. That is why awareness matters more than suppression. Regulation comes not from stopping the loop, but from allowing the nervous system to move beyond the point where it keeps stalling, without forcing an abrupt switch it cannot make.
Walking the worry forward changes that. Not by catastrophising and not by reassuring, but by allowing the mind to move past the point where it keeps freezing. When the story is permitted to unfold beyond the feared moment, the sense of imminent collapse often softens into something more concrete and survivable.
When you do this properly, something shifts. Not because the outcome suddenly becomes positive, but because it becomes survivable. The fear loses authority when the mind realises that even if a label takes a hit, the person remains. Life continues, altered perhaps, but intact.
This is not about caring less. Consequences still exist. Effort still matters. Loss is still real. What changes is the fusion between outcome and self. You stop treating every difficulty as a challenge to who you are.
January is when many people quietly audit themselves. Am I where I should be. Am I good enough. Am I falling behind. For AuDHD adults, that audit often turns into rumination, shame, and paralysis.
This is not the moment for goals or resolutions. It is the moment for awareness. For noticing where your mind turns ordinary uncertainty into identity threat. For noticing where the story stops halfway. For noticing what is actually on the other side if you let it finish.
If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start by trying to stop the rumination. I would be curious about it. I would want to know what the mind is trying to protect, and which part of the person feels under threat. Rumination is rarely random. It usually has a job to do.
We would slow the worry down and look at it properly, rather than fighting it. What exactly is the situation you are stuck on. What feels intolerable about it. And, quietly, what does it seem to say about who you are if it goes badly.
Then we would walk it forward, step by step. Not to reassure or minimise, and not to jump to a positive ending, but to let the story finish. If that happened, then what would most likely occur. And after that. And what would you do next. Not in theory, but in reality, with the resources and creativity you already have.
What often emerges is not that the situation suddenly feels easy, but that it feels human-sized. The imagined collapse turns out to be an identity story rather than a practical inevitability. A label loosens its grip. The nervous system settles enough for choice to return.
At that point, thinking usually changes on its own. Not because it was forced to stop, but because it no longer needs to keep sounding the alarm.
The aim is never to think less. It is to see more clearly. To recognise when anxiety is asking you to defend a version of yourself that feels brittle and conditional, and to discover that you are still here even when that story softens.
That is not indifference. It is awareness. And for many AuDHD adults, it is the difference between being trapped in your head and finding your way back into your life.
I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.
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Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. _Autism : the international journal of research and practice_, _9_(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Watkins E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. _Psychological bulletin_, _134_(2), 163–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163
de Mello, A. (1990). *Awareness*. Doubleday.
