You are making everything worse for yourself

The version of your problem that lives in your head is always worse than the actual problem.

The instinct, when you notice you're stuck in this loop, is to think harder.

Strategize your way out.

Analyze the situation more thoroughly.

But this never work.

Neuroscience has a name for the loop you're in. It's called the default mode network which is a set of brain regions that activate when you're not engaged in a directed task.

The default mode is what your brain does when it has nothing else to do. It ruminates, rehashes and generates simulations of past and future events, mostly negative ones, because the brain evolved to scan for threats and the default mode is essentially threat-scanning on autopilot.

The problem is that founders, by the nature of the work, spend a lot of time in default mode.

The work is mostly cognitive. There aren't many physical, repetitive, attention-demanding tasks built into the day.

So the brain finds itself idle while you're "thinking through" a problem and defaults to the rumination loop.

You feel like you're working on the problem. But you're actually feeding it.

The only thing that reliably shuts down the default mode network is engaged action, where you're physically or cognitively committed to a task that demands presence.

The same brain regions that fire during default mode quiet down when you're actively doing something that requires your full attention.

There's a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect, named after a Russian psychologist who noticed in the 1920s that incomplete tasks rattle around in your head far more than completed ones.

The brain treats unresolved items as open loops and keeps them active in working memory until they get closed. This is part of why ruminating on a problem feels endless.

You'd be surprised how often the smallest forward motion is enough.

Each act of forward motion closes a loop in the rumination engine and gives the brain less raw material to chew on.

There's a corollary to all of this that I think matters most.

Your life is probably in a better position than the version of it living in your head.

The default mode network doesn't generate accurate appraisals of your situation. It generates threat-skewed appraisals optimized for survival.

The version of your life that exists inside 10 hours of solo rumination is going to be more anxious, more pessimistic and more catastrophic than the version that exists when you're actively engaged.

When you catch yourself ruminating, your first instinct is going to be to think harder about it.

Resist that instinct & move.

There are 2 ways to do this, and they map to the 2 reliable ways the default mode network gets interrupted.

1. The first is to take an action that moves the actual situation forward.

2. The second is to engage in something physically demanding enough that the default mode network can't operate inside it.

The one thing you cannot do is more thinking. More journaling, more running it past friends, more turning it over from different angles.

The founders I know who handle pressure best are the ones who have figured out how to act fast enough that nothing has time to fester.

– Wiz

P.S. Most founders overthink their personal brand to the point of never running it. They wait until the strategy is perfect, the voice is dialed, the calendar is loaded and a year passes with nothing posted. If you want to save that time and start being recognizable in your niche now, book a call and let’s cut the waiting period by a quarter.