The Secret to Ending Mental Rehearsal

You're lying in bed, and instead of sleeping, you're rehearsing tomorrow's conversation with your new manager. You play out what you'll say, how they might respond, what you'll say to that response. You run through three different versions of the conversation, planning for different possibilities.

By the time you actually have the conversation, you feel like you've already lived it. Twice. Maybe three times.

And here's the thing that probably bothers you most: when the actual conversation happens, it almost never goes the way you imagined. Sometimes it's completely different. Often, it's easier than you thought.

So why does your brain keep doing this?

Why Mental Rehearsal Feels Necessary

If you're like most people dealing with stress and life transitions, you've built a very reasonable explanation for this mental rehearsal:

"I'm trying to be prepared. If I think through all the possibilities, I won't be caught off guard."

This makes complete sense. Preparation equals readiness. Readiness equals control. And when you're facing a job transition, trying to be a good parent, maintaining your relationship - having control feels necessary.

The more uncertain the situation, the more you prepare. The more you prepare, the more exhausted you become. But that exhaustion feels like the price of being responsible.

Except there's a problem with this logic that most people never notice.

What Mental Rehearsal Doesn't Prepare You For

Think about the last time something unexpected happened - something you didn't rehearse. Maybe your daughter got sick and you had to rearrange your entire day. Maybe a technical problem came up at work that you'd never encountered before.

What happened?

You handled it. You figured it out in the moment. You responded to what was actually in front of you rather than what you'd imagined might be in front of you.

Now think about all those conversations you've rehearsed - with your partner, with colleagues, with your daughter's teacher. How often did the actual conversation match your mental rehearsal?

Almost never.

So here's the strange part: you're investing enormous mental energy into something that doesn't actually improve the outcome. The rehearsal doesn't make you more prepared. The real conversations require you to respond to what's actually happening, not what you imagined might happen.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what if the preparation itself is the problem?

What Imagined Threats Do to Your Brain

Here's what most people don't know about mental rehearsal, and what researchers in stress physiology have discovered:

Your amygdala - the alarm system in your brain designed to detect threats - doesn't distinguish well between imagined scenarios and real events.

When you mentally rehearse that difficult conversation with your new manager, your body responds as if you're actually having that conversation. Your brain releases cortisol. Your shoulders tense up. Your breathing becomes shallow. Your heart rate increases.

Each time you run through the scenario, you're triggering the same physiological stress response as the actual event.

This is why you feel like you're "living moments twice." Because neurologically, you are.

Your body is paying the real price - the neck pain, the shoulder tension, the exhaustion - for events that only exist in your imagination.

But it gets more interesting.

Why Your Brain Can't Plan and Be Present

Your brain has two distinct operating systems:

The Default Mode Network - This generates scenarios, worries about the future, rehearses conversations, plays out what-ifs. It's your scenario-building machine.

The Task-Positive Network - This engages with what's actually happening right now. It's your responsive mode.

Here's the key: these two networks can't both be fully active at the same time.

Think about when you're playing with your daughter. Are you rehearsing future scenarios then?

Probably not. You're responding to whatever she does. You're present. You're in responsive mode.

And during those moments, something else happens that you might not have connected: the tension in your shoulders decreases. Sometimes you forget about the pain entirely.

Or think about when you're deep in solving a technical problem at work - debugging code, analyzing data. Are you running future scenarios then?

No. You're focused on the problem in front of you. And those are probably when you do your best work.

The scenario planning happens before meetings. When you're thinking about the job transition. When you're worrying about whether you're doing enough as a father.

Notice the pattern? The mental rehearsal clusters around uncertainty and perceived judgment. And it crowds out your ability to actually engage with what's in front of you.

Why This Creates More Exhaustion Than Your Actual Work

Research on mind-wandering shows that the average person spends 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're currently doing.

And here's what the data shows: this mind-wandering - especially future-focused worry - is a stronger predictor of unhappiness than the actual activities people are doing.

You're not exhausted because your job is demanding or because parenting is hard. Those things are demanding, yes. But you're exhausted because you're living those demanding moments multiple times - once in imagination, and again in reality.

By the time Christmas came around, you'd been running stress responses for months about a job transition that hadn't happened yet. You'd depleted your cognitive resources on imaginary problems. When Christmas arrived with its own real demands, you had nothing left.

That wasn't burnout from overwork. That was burnout from over-simulation.

The Difference Between Preparing and Ruminating

Here's the distinction that changes everything:

There's productive preparation - gathering information, clarifying expectations, organizing materials. These have clear endpoints. You can complete them.

Then there's unproductive rumination - playing out conversations that haven't happened, imagining criticism that hasn't occurred, rehearsing scenarios with no way to know which will happen. These have no endpoints. You can always imagine one more scenario.

When you're preparing for your job transition, what would productive preparation look like?

Learning about the team structure. Understanding the tech stack. Reaching out to your new manager with specific questions.

These are concrete actions. You do them and they're done.

Compare that to rehearsing imaginary difficult conversations. There's no endpoint because you can always imagine one more scenario, one more possible response, one more thing that might go wrong.

The productive preparation takes minutes. The unproductive rumination takes hours.

And here's what the research shows: all that mental spinning is actually making you less prepared, not more, because it's depleting your cognitive resources and creating physical tension.

How to Trust Your Response Instead of Planning Everything

You have substantial evidence that you can handle unexpected situations. You do it all the time.

When unexpected things come up at work, you don't have scenarios prepared. You solve them. When your daughter needs something unpredictable, you respond. You figure it out.

The scenario planning isn't actually improving your outcomes. It's creating the illusion of control while draining your energy and causing physical pain.

So what if being prepared isn't about predicting every possibility, but about trusting your ability to respond?

That's a fundamentally different mental stance.

Instead of "I need to plan for everything that might happen," it becomes "I have the skills to handle what comes up."

You already know this is true because of how you work with data. When you're solving a technical problem, you don't rehearse every possible bug. You trust that when an error message appears, you'll read it, assess whether it's relevant, and decide whether to address it now or later.

You treat it as information, not as a threat requiring advance preparation.

What if you could do that with your thoughts about the job transition or parenting challenges?

The Body-Mind Connection That Stops the Loop

You've been experiencing how thoughts create physical tension. The neck pain, the shoulder tightness - these are your body responding to imagined threats.

But the feedback loop works both ways.

When you change your physical state, you change what thoughts are available to you. It's neurologically harder to catastrophize when you're moving.

This is why you felt better when you were physically active before fatherhood. You weren't just burning off stress. You were literally making it harder for your brain to run worst-case scenarios.

Your body was too busy to let your default mode network spin.

And research on the mind-body connection shows you don't need an hour at the gym. Even brief physical activity - five minutes of movement - can shift your nervous system out of stress response.

When you notice your shoulders tensing because you're running scenarios, that's actionable data. Ten push-ups, a walk around the block, even deliberately changing your posture - you're essentially telling your body "we're not actually in danger," which sends feedback to your brain.

The physical movement interrupts the mental loop.

How to Put This Into Practice

Starting now, practice the "Actual vs Hypothetical" distinction.

When you notice you're building a scenario in your mind, ask yourself: "Is this problem actual or hypothetical?"

If it's hypothetical - a conversation that hasn't happened, a problem that might occur - your next question is: "Am I solving a problem or creating one?"

Most of your scenarios are creating problems that don't exist yet and may never exist.

When you catch yourself in that mode, do something physical for 60 seconds. Just one minute. This isn't about exercise. It's about interrupting the loop and building pattern recognition.

For your job transition specifically, make a list of concrete preparation actions - things you can actually do now, with clear endpoints. "Research the team structure" has an endpoint. "Imagine how my first meeting might go" doesn't.

Only work on items with endpoints.

When you're with your daughter or partner, use their engagement as a metric. If you realize you haven't heard what they just said, that's data - you've slipped into scenario mode. Don't judge it. Just notice it and bring your attention back to what's actually happening.

Three times a day, scan your neck and shoulders. If they're tense, that's information. Your body is reacting to imagined threats. Roll your shoulders back five times. Take three deep breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale. This signals safety to your nervous system.

What This Makes Possible

You mentioned feeling trapped between needing self-care and guilt about taking time for yourself.

But self-care isn't about adding more time. It's about reclaiming the mental energy you're currently spending on scenarios that never happen.

When you're not running stress responses to imaginary conversations, you have cognitive resources available for actual presence. With your daughter. With your partner. With the real challenges of your work.

The job transition will still be demanding. Parenting will still be challenging. But you'll face the actual demands once, not three times in advance plus the actual event.

That's not just less exhausting. It's the difference between sustainable engagement and burnout.

And there's something else worth considering: if you've been treating your preparation strategy as the solution when it's actually part of the problem, what other patterns might be worth examining? What else that feels like it's helping might actually be creating the very exhaustion you're trying to manage?

That's worth exploring.

What's Next

Stay tuned for more insights on your journey to wellbeing.