Can’t switch off from work? Why your head won’t stop
It is 11:40 at night and you are exhausted. Your body is lying down. Your head is still in the three o’clock meeting, rewriting what you should have said. Then it jumps to tomorrow. Then to the message you haven’t answered.
Tired, but wired.
“I can’t switch off. My head is always busy.”
When women say this to me, they usually mean it as a complaint about their personality. Some people are calm, and they simply weren’t born that way.
A busy head at night is usually doing a job, though. It is trying to finish things.
The antelope and the email from your boss
An antelope bolts because a bush moved. It doesn’t stop to check whether it was a lion or the wind; there is no time, and a mistake costs once in a lifetime. When the danger is gone, its body calms down.
Our bodies react in much the same way. The difference, as I said in an interview for Onet, is that we don’t know whether it’s a lion or an email from the boss. And we can keep the alarm going for something that is no longer physically there, by going back to it in our thoughts for hours or days. The email from your boss sits in your head for three days. The antelope needs a bush. You only need a thought.
Researchers call this perseverative cognition: worrying and ruminating keep the body’s stress response running long after the event itself has ended.
Loops: the mind that keeps working
Your brain doesn’t hold open matters for free. Things you have to remember for later take up attention and memory, especially when you are carrying many of them at once. It is work, the same way lifting something heavy is work for a muscle. With one difference: a muscle hurts, so you know it has been working. Attention doesn’t hurt. You just can’t decide what to make for dinner by the end of the day.
Then there are the loops that aren’t tasks at all. The conversation from three days ago that you keep replaying. Your brain isn’t replaying it for nothing; it is trying to extract a rule so it can predict better next time. But it can’t close the loop, because the information it needs is in someone else’s head, not yours. That is why it can go on for weeks.
The question that closes it is not the obvious one. Not “what did she mean?”, because you won’t find out. Instead: what will I do if it really was the way I fear? Once you have an answer to that, the matter stops being open.
I call this pattern Loops: analysing, replaying and preparing long after the working day has ended. The result is something many women describe to me in almost the same words. You never have a free head.
Why “just relax” doesn’t work
Most advice about switching off is about relaxing: breathe, take a bath, put the phone away. It can help. But if part of your mind believes something important is still unresolved, it will not let go because you lit a candle.
The same goes for holidays. You can spend two weeks on a beach and manage the whole family in your head. Holidays don’t close open loops. They just move them somewhere prettier.
Your mind needs a reason to let go.
What actually helps
Empty your head onto paper. I call it the mental rubbish bin. For two minutes, write down everything that is in there: tasks, worries, things to sort out, things you need to remember in three weeks. Don’t solve anything. Just throw it out. Almost always the same surprise follows: “I was carrying all of this around all day?” Yes. Your head is for thinking, not for storage.
Give each item a next step. “Reply to Marc: Thursday morning.” Studies by E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal reduced how much it intruded on people’s thoughts. In another study, people who wrote a to-do list for the next day before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about what they had already done.
Give the working day a clear ending. Close the laptop, change your clothes, walk around the block. The ritual matters less than doing it every day, so your mind learns where work stops.
Notice the negotiations. “Just this one email.” “Just five more minutes.” Each one tells your body the day isn’t over yet.
Notice what you keep rehearsing. If the same conversation replays every night, the problem is rarely the amount of work. It is usually something you haven’t said, or a standard you are holding yourself to that nobody else is. (Why is it so hard to say no?)
A busy head at midnight is not a personality. It is a working day that never got an ending.
If your head is the thing that never stops, the Energy Drain Diagnostic™ shows how much of your tiredness comes from mental load and what keeps it running. 15 minutes, personalised report by email.
Further reading: Jos Brosschot, William Gerin and Julian Thayer, “The perseverative cognition hypothesis”, Journal of Psychosomatic Research (2006). E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, “Consider it done!”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011). Michael Scullin and colleagues, “The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2018).
Kasia Biernacka is an organisational psychologist and leadership advisor based in Belgium, with more than 20 years in HR and leadership development. She has talked about the hidden cost of living in “I’ll manage” mode in interviews for Onet and iKobiece.pl (both in Polish).
