Save Your Spot at Get Your Brain Back in 5 Days:
https://www.balanceinstitute.com/brainback

You know that moment when the meeting ended hours ago, but your brain is still sitting at the table? You’re making dinner, driving the kids, lying in bed and somehow you’re also replaying the look someone gave, rewriting what you should’ve said, and rehearsing tomorrow like it’s already happening. If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t switch off, we get right to the point: your mind isn’t broken, it’s doing what it has been trained and rewarded to do.

We unpack why overthinking and rumination feel like “being responsible” for high-performing women, especially when work uncertainty, economic uncertainty, and constant change crank up the pressure. Thinking has delivered results for decades: planning, anticipating, problem-solving, staying three steps ahead. So when life gets wobbly, the brain reaches for the strategy that’s always worked and does more of it. The catch is that another lap around the thought at 3 am doesn’t create better outcomes, it just keeps your nervous system activated and pulls you out of your actual life.

We also talk about why common work-life balance advice can miss the mark. You can set boundaries, put your phone in another room, even meditate, and still run a full meeting in your head with no keyboard in sight. The real shift is learning when thinking deserves your attention, and building the skill of interrupting the pattern in the moment it shows up, at the sink, in the car, mid-conversation.

If you want to practise with support, I share my free five-day WhatsApp series, Get Your Brain Back, starting 24 August, with one tiny five-minute practice each morning. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s stuck in the loop, and leave a review so more women can find a calmer way back to presence.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. Honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in. 

The meeting ended hours ago. Your laptop's closed, you've left the office, maybe you've made dinner, put the kids to bed, finally sat down on the couch. But some part of you is still in that meeting. You're replaying what you said, wondering what she meant, thinking about the thing you should have said to Simon, running through what needs to happen tomorrow. Your body might be on the couch, but your brain is still in the meeting. And this is the question I've been thinking about. Why? Why does your brain keep dragging you back into something that's already finished? Because most of us know we want to switch off. We'd like to be more present. We can absolutely see what all this thinking is costing us. And yet we keep doing it. There's a really important reason for that. Thinking has been one of the most successful strategies of your entire life. Let's step back for a second and take a look at what you've been rewarded for throughout your entire life. School was all about thinking. Yes, it was your reading, your writing, but so much of that involved your brain. Maybe then you went to university and again, it was about learning. It was about using your brain. It was about coming up with concepts and interrogating ideas. And then you went into the workforce. And unless you're somebody who uses your hands for your job, our careers have revolved around our brains. We've been prepared. We've seen the problem before anyone else can. We've remembered something. We've anticipated something. We've found all the reasons why it won't work and picked it up before anything even happened. We've thought through all the consequences. Plan A, B, and C. So when plan X happens, we're the only ones that have actually played that out in our minds. We've got the answers, and it makes us almost three steps ahead all the time. All of this thinking has made us really reliable because we don't like letting anyone down. We're incredibly capable because of our intelligence, because we think things through. And the brain that won't leave you alone on the couch is the same brain that already built an incredibly successful life. You have decades of evidence that says thinking works. Look at the house, look at the car, look at the job, look at the title. Why would we ever question something? We've been rewarded for being so good at.

And you're not going to know how to turn it off. What happens when we have a brain that has so much evidence that thinking works? And now we sprinkle in a whole lot more uncertainty. We've always lived with uncertainty, we're humans. However, as the pace of change happens, then the amount of uncertainty we are facing in all aspects of our lives is unprecedented. Remember those nights when you had uncertainty of, oh my God, is my kid going to sleep through? And are they teething? And what does that mean? Yes, we've gone through these periods, but it's pretty rare that we get work uncertainty, which a lot of people have right now, economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, social uncertainty. We're in a big era of gender change. So, oh my God, like everything is shifting, let alone the impact all of those external things have on you as an individual. So our instinct is when things are a little wobbly, I know, double down on what's worked really well. Give it more brain power. There's a difficult decision, we'll gather more information. If something could go wrong, we'll run through all the million in one scenarios. If there's an awkward conversation that maybe didn't go according to plan, replay it. Think about what you could have done better. Think about what you do next time because you don't want to make that same mistake again. If something hasn't happened yet, well, you want to make sure that it does go to plan and it does go as well as it could. So you rehearse it. If you're still thinking about it, then it can feel like I'm still doing something about it. But I want to ask, is that is that really true? In you interrogating the meeting and that look that Brad gave to Simon across the table, you trying to work out what did that mean? Nothing can be changed then and there. What is the extra thinking actually achieving for you? What are you hoping another lap around that thought will give us? Now, so many of you will go, Joe, I need to make sure it doesn't happen again. Yep. And that is probably a 30-second intentional reflection exercise to go, oh, that meeting didn't go according to plan. Okay, the start, the smart strategic move is to sit down and go, why didn't that go according to plan? Was it me? Was it the environment? Could I have said something different? I'm gonna take responsibility for this piece. Great, okay? Put the bloody thing down. Doing more laps at 3 a.m. when you're sleep deprived is going to yield you zero extra benefit. And yet we do. We loop, we go round and round in circles. Because, for some strange reason, thinking about it more makes us feel more in control, makes us feel safer. And ironically, in an environment where there is so much uncertainty, we can actually find certainty in the looping.

This is why all the advice we're given about how to switch off, how to disconnect never actually works for us. We might try better boundaries. You might put your phone in another room. You say, right, I'm not gonna check my emails. I'm walking out of the office at this time. I'm going to try to do some meditation, get myself a massage, I'm gonna create a wind-down routine or a morning routine or whatever it is. But you can put your phone in another room because you're not gonna check your emails and actually conduct an entire meeting in your head, whether the phone is there or not. You can say, right, that's it. I'm done with work. Then you can be cooking dinner or driving children around, and you are still making your slides. You're still reading the email that you sent yesterday again. You are still crafting the email that you are going to send first thing tomorrow, but you don't have a keyboard in front of you. So your body is on the couch, or your body is in bed or in the shower, but your brain is still in the meeting. Now I had a brain that would not switch off. It was always on. And let's be fair, I was always constantly fueling it too. It was constant podcasts learning because, again, more information, more certainty, more to think about because it's worked so far, right? So just do more. But what I found is that the more I changed my circumstances, thinking, right, I've got to do something about this, isn't working. And of course, all those circumstances require extensive amounts of thinking and research. I changed everything on the outside. But this thing between my ears, believe it or not, came with me. I couldn't chop it off and leave it behind. So we have to understand the hold this strategy has on us if we are ever going to change our relationship.

Because there is a cost to living in our heads far beyond being busy or stressed. And you will know when your system is activated or you're trapped in fight or flight. Obviously, we go straight to survival mode. And so you will go to the place that has served you well, which is back in your head. When you are physically in a conversation, but while your brain is elsewhere, or you're stewing on something, or you're marinating on something, you actually miss out on the life that you're actually living. Two of the things women tell me they want the most is calm and peace and presence. They want to actually be there listening to their children while they're talking to them, not interrogating their 4 p.m. They want to be able to sit down on the couch after a long day and not need wine, chocolate, ice cream, whatever, to actually try to turn their brain off because they haven't learned how to do it themselves. Your attention is particularly important because where your attention goes determines how much of your actual life you experience. It's one of the few things we have control over. So we have to learn. So we have to appreciate that a strategy can be incredibly successful and still become too expensive to use everywhere. I want you in your life. I want you present with those you love. I want you able to sit on the couch and actually recharge your nervous system rather than continuing to double down on the thing that you think got you successful, but it actually has a cost that it's becoming too high to pay.

Now, before you go, oh my God, Joe, what are you saying? Stop thinking. I don't want you to call thinking the enemy here. We need these extraordinary brains we have. They solve problems, they create things, we lead people, we inspire others, we make money, we care for families, we do so much. But what I want you to clock is when does thinking actually deserve your attention? Can you catch yourself when you are consciously using your brain versus automatically following wherever it goes? Trust me, your brain is this most incredible machine, but it will be solving world peace. And the next moment it will be thinking about needing more bananas. So if you were to actually write down every single thought you have, you will realize that actually it's not as great as we make it out to be. And we need more choice over when we pick it up and consciously use it and when we put it down.

Now the irony is we have solved so much through thinking, but you cannot think your way out of this one. You can understand your patterns incredibly well. You can know where it comes from, you can know why you do it, you know your triggers, and still find yourself halfway through dinner, mentally back in your 4 p.m. This is something all humans have to do because knowledge helps, but the change has to happen in the moments when the pattern actually shows up. This pattern of defaulting to let me think about it, let me prep it, let me think about it, let me research it, let me do this, let me do that with it, has had decades of practice and so much reinforcement that this is the pathway to success. But can you catch it when you're brushing your teeth? Can you catch it when you're in the car with a child talking to you that you're not actually listening to? You have to learn different strategies that fit within your life, that fit within your brain, that give it evidence that you can let something go and not think about it, and the world does not fall apart.

Can you believe it? If you don't interrogate something, you mean the world's not gonna end? Surely, no, Joe. I'm going to solve everything by thinking about more of it. I've actually had someone say that to me. But this is why even my practice has to continue despite everything I know. You have to practice your way back into your everyday life.

This is exactly why I've created Get Your Brain Back. Because I could give you another podcast. I love talking about this stuff. I could give you more information about your brain, about why you think the way you do, and you will eat it up and you will find it fascinating. Just like I will have fun creating it. I want you to experience what happens when you actually interrupt these patterns in your real life. I'm not talking about just getting together and meditating. If you like doing that, that's amazing. You keep doing that. But there are so many women who might even have their 10 minutes of meditation in the morning or before bed and yet are constantly replaying and are constantly stuck. So starting the 24th of August, we're going to spend five days doing the reps together. In the moment, when you spiral, when Simon does that thing in your meeting. It's completely free and it's happening inside WhatsApp. Every morning I will send you one tiny five-minute practice to use inside your actual day. This isn't about tons of homework or a big commitment with time you don't have, because trust me, I don't have that time either. But together we're going to help you get your brain back. Catch one of those moments that would normally steal your time, absorb so much of your energy, or completely captivate your attention and experience what happens when you interrupt it. Because once you've done that for yourself, you begin to get evidence. You feel what it's like to get a little piece of your brain back. And you can do it again. And you can do it again. The link to join is in the show notes. Come and do the five days with me. I am genuinely doing these reps alongside you because as much as I might know about this work, my brain still needs them too. And maybe the next time the meeting ends, you can actually leave it there. Let's get your brain back so you can get back into your actual life. I'll see you inside.