How do I stop spiralling at work after I make one small mistake?

You sent the wrong attachment. You stumbled over a word in a meeting. You forgot to cc someone who definitely noticed.

And now, three hours later, you’re still in it. Replaying the exact moment. Rewriting what you should have said. Catastrophising what your manager thinks of you. The actual work you’re supposed to be doing sits open in another tab, completely untouched.

This is not a character flaw. This is not proof you’re bad at your job. This is your brain doing something it was literally built to do — and doing it at entirely the wrong moment.

What’s happening in your head (and why it feels impossible to stop)

The loop you’re stuck in has a name: rumination. Not in a vague, self-help sense. In clinical psychology, rumination is defined as repetitive, passive focus on negative feelings and their causes — and it’s one of the most well-researched predictors of anxiety and depression we have.

Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent decades at Yale studying why some people spiral after setbacks while others shake them off. Her finding, replicated across hundreds of studies: the problem is rarely the original event. The problem is the loop about the event.

Here’s what makes it so sticky. When your brain detects a social or professional threat — a mistake, a moment of embarrassment, a perceived drop in status — your amygdala fires. That’s the part of your brain responsible for threat detection. It cannot tell the difference between a factual threat (a car coming toward you) and a social one (your boss raising an eyebrow during your update).

So it responds the same way. Cortisol rises. Attention narrows. And your brain starts scanning obsessively for more evidence of danger.

The mistake you made becomes exhibit A. Then your brain finds exhibit B (that other thing you messed up last month). Then C. Then it starts building a case.

The spiral is not weakness. It’s a protection system running in the wrong context.

Why “just let it go” is genuinely useless advice

You’ve probably already told yourself to stop thinking about it. And then thought about it more.

That’s because thought suppression backfires, reliably and measurably. Daniel Wegner at Harvard called it the ironic process theory — the mental process that monitors whether you’re thinking about something unwanted is itself thinking about it. Telling your brain “don’t think about the mistake” is the fastest way to keep the mistake front of mind.

Standard productivity advice doesn’t help either. “Get back to your to-do list.” “Focus on what you can control.” These are fine instructions for a brain that isn’t already in a threat state. For a brain that is, they feel like being told to do algebra while someone’s shouting in your face.

If you have ADHD or you suspect you might, this loop can be particularly brutal. The same executive function challenges that make task-switching difficult also make thought-switching harder. Your working memory gets flooded. The emotional salience of the mistake makes it almost impossible to direct attention anywhere else. This isn’t a willpower gap. It’s neurological. Researchers like Dr. Russell Barkley have written extensively on emotional dysregulation as a core feature of ADHD, not a side effect.

Knowing that doesn’t always stop the spiral. But it does mean you can stop blaming yourself for having one.

The action-bias antidote (and why tiny is the point)

In behavioural economics, there’s a concept called action bias — studied by researchers Ofer Tur-Sinai and others in the context of goalkeeping penalties — where humans feel compelled to do something during moments of uncertainty, even when doing nothing would statistically serve them better.

In most financial or professional decisions, that impulse to act leads us astray. We make a trade when we should hold. We send an email we should sit on.

But when you’re locked in a rumination loop, the opposite is true. The brain is stuck in a passive replay state. It needs a small, concrete action to interrupt the pattern — not to fix the original mistake, but to give your threat-detection system proof that you’re responding, moving, doing something other than freezing.

The action doesn’t need to be related to the mistake. It doesn’t need to be impressive. It needs to be small enough that your brain can’t argue against starting it.

Here’s the specific version:

Write one sentence — by hand if possible — that names what happened and closes it.

Not “I’m going to stop worrying about this.” That’s suppression, and we’ve covered how that goes.

Something more like: “I sent the wrong file. I corrected it. That’s done.”

One sentence. Past tense. Factual. No judgment words.

This works for two reasons. Writing something down activates a different neural pathway than ruminating does. It moves the thought from internal loop to external record, and your brain is slightly more willing to let go of something it can see. Researchers studying the “expressive writing” paradigm — James Pennebaker at the University of Texas being the most cited — have found that even two minutes of written processing can reduce the cognitive load of a stressful event.

The second reason: past tense matters. Present tense (“I am so embarrassed”) keeps you in the emotional state. Past tense (“I was embarrassed, I handled it”) signals to your nervous system that the threat has passed.

It won’t feel dramatic. That’s the point. You’re not trying to transform your relationship with failure in one afternoon. You’re trying to interrupt a loop long enough to get through the next two hours.

What this has to do with money (even though you didn’t come here for that)

If you’re an anxious avoider, this same loop runs on your finances.

You miss a bill, or you accidentally overdraft, or you look at your bank balance at the wrong moment and the number is lower than you thought. And then you don’t look again for two weeks. Because looking means risking more evidence for the case your brain is building against you.

The spiral isn’t about the mistake. It’s about what the mistake means — and most of us have never been taught to separate those two things.

The unopened bank statement and the three-hour loop after a stumbled sentence at work are the same mechanism. Your brain treating a manageable fact as an existential verdict.

I know this not because I studied it, though I did. I know it because I lost £150,000 in a business that I kept not looking at because looking felt worse than not knowing. My MSc in Behavioural Economics did not make me immune. It made me better at naming what was happening, slightly too late.

The naming matters, though. Even after the fact.

One thing before you close this tab

If you recognise the spiral from this post — at work, with money, or both — the most useful next step is understanding which specific beliefs are feeding it.

The Money Beliefs Quiz takes about four minutes. It’s not a personality test. It’s a set of questions based on the work of researchers like Dr. Brad Klontz, whose financial psychology frameworks are about the patterns underneath behaviour, not the behaviour itself.

What you do with the results is up to you. But most people find that naming the pattern is the first thing that makes it feel less like a life sentence.

[Take the Money Beliefs Quiz here.]

You can stop replaying the meeting now.

The sentence is written. That part’s done.

— Joel