what i reach for when my brain won’t stop thinking

there are nights i go to bed exhausted and still don’t sleep. nights when my body gives up before my mind does, when my eyes are closed but every unfinished thought from the day begins hosting a reunion party in my skull. they arrive all at once — the unanswered emails, the social blunders, the comment i wish i’d said differently, the life plan that keeps shapeshifting, the sense that i should be somewhere further along by now, even if i don’t know what that means. sometimes they’re loud. sometimes they’re just persistent. either way, they refuse to leave quietly.

my brain doesn’t like silence. it fills it — compulsively, efficiently, sometimes creatively. which can be great, if i’m working on something. but often it’s not creativity. it’s friction. a tug-of-war between every part of me that wants to rest and every part of me that insists we haven’t earned it. so the thoughts keep rehearsing themselves. they pace in loops. they don’t want solutions — they want attention. and if you’ve ever lived inside a mind that runs fast even when you want it to slow down, you know how exhausting it is to keep babysitting your own thinking.

so over time, i started collecting things that helped me shift the tone. not silence the thoughts — but soften them. stretch them out. interrupt their rhythm. things that don’t yell at me to meditate or calm down, but instead offer me something quieter to reach for. and that’s what this list is: not a fix, but a shelf of soft things. things that don’t perform being useful. they just help me remember what it feels like to be a person again, instead of a brain on a treadmill.

1. reading books where nothing really happens

not boring books — quiet ones. ones that are plot-adjacent, sure, but that mostly just let characters observe the world and feel a little misplaced inside it. the kind of book where a chapter can go by with no major incident and yet you feel a little less alone afterward. sally rooney. jhumpa lahiri. kazuo ishiguro. anything that lets you witness people thinking without solving. i find that when i’m reading someone else’s inner life, i stop taking mine quite so seriously. my current read is: days at the morisaki bookshop

2. rinsing the day off with water and new clothes

this sounds basic, but it’s not about hygiene. it’s about ritual. when my thoughts feel frantic, i try to give my body the memo that we’re safe now. that the day is over. i take a long, slow shower — the kind where you don’t rush the conditioner. the kind where you exhale like you mean it. and then i wear something that feels completely unrelated to whatever i wore earlier. even if i’m not going anywhere. especially if i’m not going anywhere. this signals something internally: a shift in phase. it’s no longer the “doing” part of the day. it’s the “being” part.

3. brainless tactile tasks with a point of completion

folding laundry. cutting fruit. wiping down surfaces. unboxing something. not in a “clean to escape your feelings” way — but in a “remind yourself what finished feels like” kind of way. the overthinking brain thrives in uncertainty, so doing a small task that ends is sometimes enough to restore a little order inside the chaos. and when you’re done, you have folded towels and a slightly calmer nervous system. small victories count.

4. walking without a podcast, just once

i know it feels weird. i know silence can be aggressive. but once in a while, i leave the house with no headphones. i walk slowly. i notice the street names i’ve never read even though i pass them every day. i count the number of dogs i see. i name the flowers incorrectly. i let my thoughts keep going — but without an audience. and somewhere between minute 11 and minute 27, the volume inside my head drops just slightly. not off. just down.

5. putting words on paper without editing myself

not journaling for insight. just emptying. i sit down and write exactly what i’m thinking — messy, disjointed, dramatic — and let it spill without trying to be profound. and then, crucially, i don’t reread it. this isn’t content. it’s not memory. it’s drainage. sometimes i write it in notes. sometimes on the back of receipts. sometimes in lowercase, because i don’t want to sound too serious. and often, just the act of letting it out makes it feel smaller. like giving my thoughts somewhere else to be, so they stop pacing the same hallway in my mind.

6. googling something extremely irrelevant

like “how do dolphins sleep” or “what’s the oldest tree in the world.” something beautifully disconnected from my life. something so unrelated to my stress that it gives my brain an off-ramp. there’s a weird comfort in trivia. a reminder that the world is full of strange, gentle facts that don’t require your participation. and in learning something utterly useless, i sometimes find my thoughts reorganizing themselves without me.

8. rewatching a youtube vlog where someone is just… living

not a productivity guru. not a tutorial. just someone making tea and walking around and maybe talking about a book. the more mundane, the better. this is why i love emma chamberlain, moya mawhinney, elena taber, and the whole “my brain is loud but my life is soft” aesthetic genre. it slows me down. it reminds me that slowness is allowed. and it makes me feel like it’s okay to exist without constantly narrating my worth to myself.

9. borrowing the nervous system of a friend

not in the “i need to vent for 2 hours” kind of way. more like sending a voice note just to say hi, or asking someone to tell you something good that happened to them today. sometimes when your mind is spiraling, what you need isn’t solitude — it’s a borrowed rhythm. someone else’s steadiness. someone else’s laugh. someone who isn’t stuck in your loop. their nervous system reminds yours that there are other tempos available. and suddenly, your brain doesn’t feel like the only channel.

10. physically changing location, even slightly

i used to think i had to go somewhere significant to feel different. but sometimes moving from the bed to the floor works. or from one room to another. or stepping outside for three minutes and then coming back in. your brain maps thought patterns to physical cues — so changing the cues, even briefly, can interrupt the loop. it doesn’t solve anything. but it gives you a new angle. and sometimes a new angle is all you need to breathe a little easier.

11. rereading an old idea i gave up on and asking it why

instead of reaching for something new, i open a document i abandoned. a google doc from 2021 titled something vague like “essay draft” or a paragraph i once scribbled in a burst of clarity and then ignored. i don’t judge it. i just visit it like it’s a friend i ghosted. usually, there’s tenderness there. sometimes a little shame. but often, i find that the idea didn’t die — it just needed a different season. revisiting it doesn’t restart the loop. it rewires it. it tells my brain: you don’t have to create something new right now. you just have to remember what moved you once.

12. tracking the shape of the thought — not just the thought itself

this is something i learned through therapy and then refined in my notes: when my mind won’t stop thinking, i try to observe the type of thought it’s spinning on. is it circular? is it predictive? is it self-critical? is it fantasy? instead of arguing with the content, i label the pattern. oh, this is “catastrophic rehearsal.” or “looped guilt.” or “urgency spiral.” once i’ve named it, it’s like my brain sighs in relief. it no longer needs to act like it’s discovering something urgent. it’s just doing what it always does when i’m tired, scared, or overstimulated. and knowing that pattern makes it easier to pause.

13. changing my phone wallpaper to something that emotionally reroutes me

i rotate between a blurry photo of a stranger’s dog in a café, a screenshot of a text from my mom that made me tear up, and a childhood picture of me with skinned knees and a too-serious face. or a family photo of me, my husband, louie and zay (this is my current one). none of them are aesthetic. they’re not for show. they’re for pattern interruption. they soften the edge of doomscrolling. they remind me that life is not a brand, a project, or a productivity dashboard. it’s a blur of sweet and stupid moments. and that’s enough. or in my current case, something that grounds me and gives me a feeling of belongingness

i won’t pretend that any of this makes the noise go away forever. the mind doesn’t turn off just because we want it to. but i’ve learned that you don’t always need it to stop. you just need it to soften. to slow. to stop biting. and sometimes that starts with a grape. or a friend. or a line in a book you’ve already read three times.

so no, my brain hasn’t magically learned how to quiet itself. it still loops. still spirals. still holds onto things way past their expiry date. but i’ve stopped expecting stillness to arrive on its own. now i treat it like a room i have to set up for myself — every single day. sometimes it takes a keychain. sometimes it takes a fake nap. sometimes it takes peeling an orange and narrating it like david attenborough. i don’t always get it right. but i no longer think clarity means thinking harder. most days, it just means giving your brain a softer surface to land on.

and for what it’s worth — if yours is still spinning, this can count as your pause button. you can stop scrolling now. or you can keep going. either way, the noise doesn’t win. you’re still here. thinking your way through. trying to feel human again. and that counts.