Why Your Mind Won’t Slow Down (No Matter How Tired You Are)

You know that feeling when you’ve had the longest, busiest week, and now it’s finally Friday night, you don’t have anything planned for once, and you can finally relax?

You close your email tab, change into comfy clothes, get yourself a snack, and set up on the sofa. Blissful.

… Oh wait. No, it’s not. 

Because your brain’s still bloody wired up, overthinking everything you needed to get done and what you have on your to-do list for next week (or, let’s face it, the weekend), and you feel restless, unsettled, and frazzled. You feel like you should be doing x, y, z - and then you can rest.

So, maybe you start doing something small, like answering an email or paying a bill, but it. just. feels. so. difficult. Like you’re dragging your fingers on the keyboard, like you need to really think it through and double-check you’ve not made some silly mistake. But you persist.

Or - you say to yourself, “that’s tomorrow’s or next week’s problem”. And you start watching your series, or reading your book. Minutes pass, and you realise you have no clue what you’ve watched or read - because your mind, yep, it was doing its thing, thinking about everything that needs doing.

You’re now exhausted, frustrated, anxious, maybe feeling a bit guilty too for trying to relax in the first place.

What anxiety looks like in high-achievers (and why it’s called “high-functioning” anxiety when you feel like you’re falling apart)

When people think of anxiety, what usually comes to mind are those tell-tale body signs, like heart pounding, shallow breath, tension, clammy hands. But what about busy, spiralling minds? What about an inability to focus? What about feeling like everything going 100 miles an hour and you can’t slow down?

That is also anxiety - but because it’s less visible, and because you keep pushing through it, someone came up with the idea of calling it “high-functioning”. As a therapist, I’m not a fan of this label - both because who decides what is “functioning well” and what isn’t, and because, in turn, that makes it pretty ableist.

The link between anxiety and high standards

Anxiety is, ultimately, about threat. We feel anxious because we feel threatened, unsafe. 

And if you’ve grown up with the explicit or implicit message that you need to always be doing better - or else you’ll be found out as not being good enough, or being incompetent - it feels threatening to not do all you can to keep this from happening.

So, you always work hard, not just through your actions, but in your mind too. Because not thinking about this stuff feels unsafe, revealing, maybe vulnerable.

And while it might look like ‘just’ a busy mind, it’s often tied to deeper patterns around pressure, standards, and self-worth.

Why you can’t just switch off

Now, with all this, there’s always nuance. I’m not saying you’re choosing not to be able to rest. 

In fact, most people I work with would give anything to be able to just quiet the mind, and switch off.

But those beliefs and rules I mentioned above - it’s not like you always know when they’re at play. Oftentimes, because they’re so ingrained, you don’t even notice them affecting your decisions, or your actions.

And then comes the other part. Say you do actually notice this all happening, “ah, my mind’s racing again, trying to make everything will be ok, so I don’t look stupid” - the reaction most people would have to this is trying to make the mind stop. Fighting with it, and becoming more and more anxious and frustrating when it doesn’t work.

See where I’m going with this? Counterintuitively, the more you try to make the mind slow down, make the anxiety go away, make your body relax - the more difficult and frustrating it all gets.

Because here’s the thing - you can’t control the presence of your thoughts and feelings. But you can choose how to respond to them already being there. So instead of trying to force your mind to switch off on a Friday night, maybe there’s a different way.

Changing the goal from calm to adaptable or regulated

This is the hill I will die on. If your goal (in therapy, or in life) is to fix, change, or get rid of what’s difficult, you’re setting yourself up to fail. There is no (meaningful) life without feeling difficult, uncomfortable things.

So, you’d do much better to change that goal to being more present, more open, more committed to doing what matters no matter what your mind is telling you, or what you’re feeling in your body.

To get there, you might need to:

• Figure out what beliefs and rules might be affecting how you operate

• Learn how to notice when they are affecting you

• Start doing things differently to test what it may be like if you don’t live as through those beliefs and rules are the be-all and end-all

• Learn how to handle difficult thoughts and painful emotions along the way - so that no matter what life throws at you, you know you can handle it

If your mind never slows down and you’ve exhausted yourself trying to make it, this is exactly the kind of thing I work on a lot in therapy.

You can read more about how I approach high-functioning anxiety, and more, generally, about therapy for high-achievers.

I’m Carina - an experienced, yet very human BABCP-accredited CBT therapist specialising in working with high-achievers with low self-esteem, high-functioning anxiety, or OCD, including autistic and ADHD folks, as well as LGBTQIA+ folks.

I use evidence-based approaches - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), but really from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and mindfulness perspective - so if you’ve tried CBT before and haven’t really connected with it, I might be your person.

I offer a free, no-pressure, initial chat to see how we fit and if it would be helpful to work together - it would be great to meet you!