When Work Takes Up Too Much Space in Your Head
There are days when I can lose an extraordinary amount of energy having arguments in my head with things I cannot change. Replaying a conversation that didn't go the way I wanted it to. Thinking about what somebody else should have done. Trying to work out why somebody behaved the way they did. Running through different versions of what might happen next. And none of it changes anything.
I think most of us know what that feels like. It becomes even harder when something significant is happening at work and we genuinely don't know what the outcome will be.
Your organisation is restructuring.
Roles are changing.
Decisions are being made behind closed doors.
People are positioning themselves.
Conversations are happening that you're not part of.
And you start watching.
Who is talking to whom?
What did that comment in the meeting mean?
Why has that person suddenly been invited into conversations you used to be part of?
What happens if your role changes?
What happens if the opportunity you were expecting disappears?
Before long, you've spent an extraordinary amount of mental energy trying to understand, predict and sometimes control decisions that aren't yours to make.
Of course you need to know what's happening. These decisions affect you. But at some point, I think there's something more important to consider...
How much of my attention is going towards things I can actually influence?
That's where this gets really interesting for me. Because we tend to think about control as something quite rigid. Controlling outcomes. Controlling other people. Making sure things happen the way we want them to. But I'm increasingly interested in control as something much simpler.
Where am I putting my attention?
Because our attention isn't unlimited, and when too much of it is being consumed by things we can't influence, we have less available for the places where we can actually make a difference.
When you can't stop thinking about work
You can leave work and still be there for hours.
You're making dinner, but you're thinking about the meeting.
You're watching television, but somewhere in the background you're replaying the conversation.
You wake up at three in the morning and your brain helpfully presents you with the thing you've already thought about seventeen times.
And sometimes you're not even thinking about something that has happened.
You're thinking about something that might happen.
What if they restructure your team?
What if you don't get the role?
What if your manager doesn't support you?
What if the organisation goes in a completely different direction?
You can spend an enormous amount of energy living inside outcomes that don't even exist yet! I've done it. And the interesting thing isn't that we do it because it's an incredibly human thing to do. What interesting is what happens when we stay there... in that rumination. Because after a while, our whole relationship with the situation can become reactive.
Something happens. We react.
Somebody says something. We react.
Another email arrives. We react.
There's another rumour. We react.
And gradually, almost without noticing it, what's happening around us starts determining where our attention goes.
Where attention goes, energy goes
Where attention goes, energy goes.
And once you start looking at your attention in that way, you begin noticing just how much of yourself some things are taking.
Not just your time.
You.
Your thinking.
Your emotional energy.
Your capacity to imagine something different.
Your ability to concentrate on anything else.
Your willingness to explore.
Sometimes even the confidence we have in ourselves.
That's why I don't think the answer is simply to tell ourselves to stop worrying. That has never struck me as particularly useful advice. If something affects your livelihood, your identity, your security or a career you've spent years building, of course you're going to think about it. And some of that thinking is really useful.
You need information.
You need to understand what's changing.
You need to think through your options.
You need to decide what you're going to do.
But there comes a point when thinking stops helping us understand what to do next and just keeps us circling around what we can't change. And that's the point worth noticing.
Not:
Why can't I stop thinking about this?
But:
What is all this thinking actually doing for me now?
The conversation that happened three days ago
This doesn't only happen during restructures. Think about the last conversation you replayed in your head. You know the one. The version where you say what you wish you'd said at the time. Where they respond differently. Where you finally make them understand. Where you explain yourself perfectly and they suddenly see the whole situation exactly as you do. It's quite satisfying for about thirty seconds. Except they're not there. And the conversation has already happened.
I've caught myself doing this and realised I'm using real emotional energy trying to change an imaginary version of something that is already over.
I can't change what they said.
I can't change what I said.
I can't make somebody understand something they don't want to understand.
So what can I do?
I can decide whether another conversation is needed.
I can decide what I want to say next time.
I can decide what I've learned.
I can decide whether I need a boundary.
I can decide whether this is something I want to continue giving my attention to.
And suddenly we're somewhere different.
The situation hasn't changed.
But my relationship with it has.
Control isn't what I used to think it was
Control isn't about controlling everything around us. It's about becoming more conscious about where we put our attention, effort and energy, and directing more of them towards what we can actually influence.
This is why I've come to think differently about control.
I t's not about getting everything around us to behave itself. Good luck with that. Other people will make decisions we don't agree with. Organisations will restructure. Opportunities will disappear. Plans will go wrong. People will disappoint us. The economy will do whatever the economy is going to do. Life will continue to contain uncertainty because that's what life does.
We can't organise all of that into submission.
But we can become much more conscious about what we do with ourselves inside all that.
Where do I put my attention?
Where do I put my effort?
What gets my emotional energy?
What am I continuing to carry?
What can I actually influence here?
Those questions feel much more useful to me.
Because control isn't always about doing more. Sometimes it's about deciding what no longer gets so much of us.
Some things don't deserve unlimited access to you
This is where boundaries come in too. And not only the obvious boundaries we talk about at work.
Saying no.
Finishing on time.
Not answering emails at eleven o'clock at night.
Those matter. But there are other boundaries too.
How many times am I going to have this conversation about the restructure today?
How many times am I going to check whether something has changed?
How much of my evening am I prepared to give to something that happened at work this morning?
How much space am I going to allow somebody else's behaviour to occupy in my head?
That's harder.
Because nobody else can create those boundaries for us. Sometimes we have to notice that something has taken up far more space than we ever consciously decided to give it, and then begin taking some of that space back.
Not because the thing doesn't matter.
But because we matter too.
What have you stopped paying attention to?
There's one more side to this I want explore here as I think is easy to miss. If your attention is somewhere, it isn't somewhere else. So while you've been watching what the organisational restructuring is doing, what haven't you been doing?
While you've been waiting for somebody else to make a decision, what have you stopped exploring?
While you've been thinking about the opportunity that disappeared, what other possibilities haven't had your attention?
While you've been trying to work out why somebody doesn't recognise what you bring, have you stopped looking for environments that might?
That doesn't mean the difficult thing suddenly becomes unimportant. It means it stops being the only thing in your view. And sometimes that alone creates the movement you need.
You have the conversation.
You find out what your options actually are.
You update something.
You speak to somebody outside the organisation.
You explore a possibility.
You learn something.
Or you simply create enough quiet to hear what you think underneath all the noise.
None of those things guarantees an outcome, and that's not the point.
The point is that your energy is moving towards somewhere your actions can actually matter.
Bringing some of yourself back
This is the idea of Control in the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method that matters most to me. It follows Choice deliberately.
Choice is the recognition that even within real constraints, we still have agency.
Control is what we do with it.
Where we focus.
How we respond.
What we protect.
What we continue giving energy to.
What we decide to release.
And I that's why this is ultimately much less about controlling our careers than it is about taking ownership of ourselves.
So if something at work is taking up an enormous amount of space in your head at the moment, I wouldn't tell you to stop thinking about it.
I'd start somewhere else.
Where is your attention going?
How much of it is going towards something you can actually influence?
And what has been getting less of you while all of this has been taking so much?
Sit with those for a while.
Because sometimes we don't need to solve the whole situation.
We need to take some of ourselves back from it.
Because we can't control everything.
But we can influence what we can.
We can release what we can't.
And we can become much more conscious about where we put ourselves in between the two.
Listen to the full episode
In Episode 30 of Proactive Empowered Careers®, I explore Control, the seventh dimension of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, and what happens when we begin directing more of our attention and energy towards the places where we actually have influence.
🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️
Continue exploring
You can also continue exploring the wider ideas around agency, confidence and the environments in which we work here:
How the environments in which we work can shape what we believe about ourselves and what feels possible.
What If You've Lost Confidence in a Place Where You Used to Feel Capable?Exploring what happens when a change in confidence may be telling us something about the environment, rather than our capability.
When Your Career Feels Out OF Your Control
Why recognising where we have choice can help us begin to shape our direction, even when much of what surrounds us is outside our control.
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