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Borrowed Trouble - Breaking Free from Personal Rumination


Mark Twain supposedly said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” Borrowed trouble. We all do it. At work, it looks professional, even responsible. Inside, it’s a hamster wheel that never ships.


A recent lunch with my twenty-year-old son brought it home. He’ll leave a tense conversation and instantly start the mental replay: what he should’ve said, might say, definitely will say next time. He asked if I do that too. I laughed, but the truth is yes. And if we’re honest, so do most of the people we admire for looking calm in meetings. The happy-hour version of those same people often admits they were guessing, or battling imposter syndrome, or both.


That replay has a deceptive upside. Like shadow boxing before a big conversation, it can help us prepare. Then something shifts. The scene keeps looping with no new information. The volume goes up, the perspective narrows, and our brain starts burning premium fuel to go exactly nowhere.

Here’s the turn: that is personal process debt. It’s a workflow with cost but no output. It drains attention, distorts risk, and masks the real constraint. And just like organizational process debt, it compounds when you’re unclear.


So how do we stop paying interest on rumination?

  1. Play both sides. Rumination is usually a one-way narrative headed to the worst-case outcome. Force a counterfactual. “What are three ways this turns out fine?” “What am I assuming that might be wrong?” When you articulate the alternate path, you give your brain an off-ramp.

  2. Write it down by hand. Keyboards are for throughput; pens are for truth. A simple pro/con list transforms fuzzy dread into discrete questions. I also use a Five Whys journal, but with a twist: I ask in third person (“Why are you stuck here, Chris?”) and answer in first. That tiny distance breaks the echo chamber and often exposes that the “trigger” was just a proxy for something older or simpler.

  3. Separate autonomy from anxiety. Make two columns: “Own” and “Observe.” In “Own,” list the actions that are yours to take. In “Observe,” list everything you can’t control but need to monitor. Move one item—just one—from “Own” into motion today. Action shrinks monsters.

  4. Move your body to move your mind. A brisk walk with music or a short podcast resets chemistry and attention. It sounds basic; it works. The content doesn’t have to be motivational. Your brain often needs novelty and bilateral motion more than another pep talk.

  5. Declare “enough.” Rumination pretends to be diligence, so it never volunteers to stop. Put a timebox on the replay. When the timer ends, you either act (send the note, schedule the conversation, draft the doc) or you archive it and revisit with new information.


Two final notes for leaders:

  • Clarity is kindness. Unclear work creates the exact conditions where rumination thrives. Tighten the definition of done, narrow who decides, and state the next visible step. Reducing ambiguity is a gift to your team’s headspace.

  • Model it. When you name your own loops and show how you exited—“I wrote the risks, circled the one I own, and made the call”—you normalize the practice without normalizing the paralysis.


Personal rumination will always knock. That’s human. The point isn’t to never worry; it’s to stop funding a process that doesn’t produce.


Process Debt Truth: Worry becomes debt the moment it stops informing action and starts replacing it.

 
 
 

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