Don’t let your mind pick a fight without you
Runaway thoughts and catastrophizing hobble conversations before they even begin.
Fred the farmer needed to plow his fields. But his tractor was in the shop, and the repairs weren’t going to be done in time. Fred noticed that his neighbor, Ed, had finished his plowing and decided to ask if he could borrow Ed’s tractor.
Fred headed down the lane toward Ed’s house, thinking to himself, “I’m sure he won’t hesitate to lend it to me. Ed’s a good guy.”
A little further down the lane, Fred mused, “Of course, some folks can be a bit odd about lending expensive equipment.”
Then he thought to himself, “He’ll think immediately about the price of gasoline. I’ll need to make sure he knows I’ll pay for the gas.”
A few more steps and Fred realized, “Ed hasn’t been over to chat much lately. I hope he’s not upset with me about something.”
As Ed’s house came into view, Fred remembered that Ed had looked at him oddly at the last church supper. “I wonder what that was all about.”
As he stepped onto Ed’s front walkway, Fred thought, “I hope he isn’t going to make this difficult. He can be a bit ornery sometimes.” In the last few steps to the front door, Fred’s mind reeled with all the ways Ed could be a jerk about the tractor.
He rapped his knuckles on the door. When Ed answered, Fred said to him, “You know what? Keep your darn tractor, you selfish S.O.B. I didn’t need it that badly anyway!”
Runaway thoughts are like a train that’s lost its brakes; once the thoughts start, they race ahead on their own. They are fast, dramatic, and hard to stop. Catastrophizing is when those runaway thoughts spiral to a worst-case scenario, even when it’s unlikely.
Runaway thoughts like Fred’s not only escalate conflict, they can create it. By spiraling into worst-case scenarios, they crank up arousal by triggering the body’s stress response, and they trick us into treating our guesses and assumptions as “facts.”
Noticing runaway thoughts
Fred’s mental journey from “Ed’s a good guy” to “selfish S.O.B.” didn’t happen in a vacuum. These spirals have telltale signs. We start writing scripts for conversations that haven’t happened yet, or we catch ourselves generating comebacks during what should be a peaceful walk. Sometimes we’re so busy predicting someone’s motives that we forget we’re just guessing. We imagine negative consequences with little evidence they’ll happen, turning a simple request into an anticipated confrontation.
The tricky thing about runaway thoughts is how reasonable each step feels in the moment. Fred wasn’t being paranoid—he was just being practical, thinking ahead, considering possibilities. But somewhere between “Ed’s a good guy” and worrying about that odd look at church, his mind shifted from problem-solving to problem-creating.
What started as planning became a full-scale production of a conflict that existed only in his head.
Changing course
Runaway thoughts lose momentum and power when we bring them into focus. We want to start controlling them instead of them running us.
Fred would have benefited from interrupting his runaway thoughts and refocusing his attention on the present. By focusing on what was actually around him as he walked along the country lane, Fred could have interrupted the disaster movie playing in his head.
When Fred noticed his thoughts racing, he could have asked himself a simple question: “What do I actually know versus what am I making up?“ The answer? He knew Ed had finished plowing and hadn’t visited lately. Everything else was speculation.
Fred also could have forced himself to imagine one neutral possibility—maybe Ed’s been busy, maybe he’d be happy to help. The goal isn’t to become unrealistically positive, just to stop treating our worst guesses as inevitable truths.
And Fred could have said to himself, “The story I’ve made up in my head about this is that Ed’s going to be difficult and selfish. But that’s just a story.” This is one of my favorite ways to tame runaway thoughts and expose them for what they truly are.
When we slow down and question runaway thoughts, we reduce drama, expand possibilities, and stop our minds from picking fights before we do.
Over to you
Have you ever been Fred?
How do runaway thoughts show up in your body?
When your mind turns into a runaway train, what do you think it’s trying to protect?
If you were to try out one idea from this article, what would it be?