Three Strikes and You're Out: My Rule for Thought Spirals
How I stopped losing hours to thought spirals.
One of my biggest struggles, and I mean the kind I have to actively work on every single day, is the amount of time I spend just thinking.
Not productive thinking. Not planning or problem-solving. Just... thinking. Replaying conversations. Rehearsing future ones. Walking through scenarios that haven’t happened yet and probably never will. Tinkering with decisions that don’t need this much mental real estate.
I can spend hours on this. Literal hours. And it doesn’t matter how small the thing is. It could be what I should have said to my mom’s doctor, how to approach a conversation at work, or how I’m going to word an email. My brain will turn it over and over, examining it from every angle, running simulations like I’m preparing for a dissertation defense instead of just... living my life.
Giving it a Name
Before my diagnosis, this would completely derail my days. I’d sit down to work, something would trigger a thought, and I’d physically get up from my seat. I’d walk around the house, pacing, playing out entire conversations in my head. What I should have said. What I might say next time. How the other person might respond. What that would mean. What I’d do then.
I thought this was normal. I thought everyone did this. I thought I was just thorough, or maybe a little anxious.
Now that I understand ADHD better, I look back and see it for what it actually was: rumination. My brain getting stuck in a loop because it didn’t have a clear place to put the thought. So it just kept cycling, using up bandwidth I needed for literally anything else.
All that mental energy produced nothing. No clarity. No decisions. No forward movement. Just exhaustion and lost time.
Enter: The Three Strikes Rule
I initially tried journalling regularly, but that faded. I would often forget at the end of the day what it was that drained me. And after all, I needed something in the midst of the spiral to save me from my day being ruined, not a review of a badly spent day. That sounded horrible. Something simple enough that I could actually follow it when my brain was mid-spiral.