Shortening the spiral
The goal isn’t eliminating self-critical thoughts, it’s shortening how long they stay
I stumbled over my intro on an interview panel this week.
I wasn’t the candidate. I was one of the interviewers, and it was the very beginning when we were going around introducing ourselves. I started talking and could feel, in real time, that I wasn’t as crisp as I wanted to be. My sentences felt slightly tangled. I became aware of myself instead of just speaking, which only made it worse. It lasted maybe twenty seconds, and then we moved on. The interview continued. The candidate nodded. Everything was fine.
But I carried it with me.
The next day, in a different meeting, I forgot a team’s name. I corrected myself, and then two minutes later I called them by the wrong name again. The meeting didn’t stop. No one seemed confused or irritated. It was small.
Still, I registered it.
What’s been sitting with me isn’t the mistakes themselves. It’s how quickly my brain turned them into something larger than they were. The slightly awkward intro became evidence that I hadn’t prepared enough. The team name mix-up became evidence that I was getting sloppy. And somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, the narrative shifted toward something heavier: are you slipping?
Objectively, these were minor moments. If I had been the candidate in that interview and one of the panelists stumbled over their intro, I would not have thought twice about it. If a colleague mixed up a team name in a meeting, I would not have attached it to their overall competence.
But when it’s me, the standard shifts.
In therapy this week, I described the replaying, the internal commentary, the way these moments linger longer than they probably deserve to. My therapist asked, gently, whether I thought I might be blowing these things out of proportion.
I said yes.
And what struck me is that insight alone doesn’t immediately stop the spiral. You can recognize the distortion and still feel its pull. Awareness is not the same thing as relief.
For the past year, I’ve been practicing this in a different context. Working with my dietitian and therapist in eating disorder recovery, we talk often about the goal not being the complete absence of disordered thoughts. The thoughts will still show up. The goal is reducing the time spent with them. Shortening the spiral. Catching it earlier and letting it pass instead of building a case around it.
I’m realizing how transferable that skill is.
Because this is the same pattern. A small trigger with a fast, critical narrative. A widening spiral.
If part of your identity is being competent, prepared, articulate, reliable, then small deviations don’t feel small. They feel destabilizing. So you tighten up. You over-prepare. You replay the meeting while doing something else. You scan the next conversation for proof that you’re back on solid ground. It feels responsible. It feels like caring.
It’s also exhausting.
Burnout, at least for me, isn’t always about how much I’m doing. Sometimes it’s about how long I let my mind sit in distortion after something minor happens.
The cost rarely comes from the mistake itself. It comes from the amplification, from the meaning layered on top.
I’ve started experimenting with applying the same recovery principle here: the goal is not to eliminate the self-critical thought. It’s to shorten its residency. To notice when I’ve turned “I stumbled over an intro” into “I’m slipping,” and gently pull it back to its original size.
Most people are profoundly self-focused. They are thinking about how they came across, whether their question made sense, whether they sounded prepared. They are not building detailed case studies about my intro cadence or my recall of team names.
There is something deeply comforting about that.
I care about doing good work. I care about showing up prepared. I don’t want to become indifferent. What I’m trying to loosen is the reflex that turns a moment into a meaning and then sits with that meaning far longer than it deserves.
There’s a difference between a thought appearing and a thought taking up residence. I’m getting better at shortening the stay.
There's a phrase I've heard in numerous places that people are far less critical of you than you are of yourself. I'm trying to remind myself of that daily.