Notice What You’re Thinking

Today’s advice for my neurodivergent friends: notice what you’re thinking.

Spend a day paying attention to the things that catch your attention, the thoughts that show up in quiet moments. Is there a theme? Do they skew negative, like rehashing an old conversation or reprocessing old criticism or rejection (hello, rejection sensitivity)? Or maybe they’re proactively defensive, like rehearsing an argument that hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.

Psychologists call it negativity bias: our brains give bad experiences more weight than good ones. I know that’s true for me. I often catch myself thinking about something I could have done differently, or a joke I could have made in the elevator with that one friendly guy 3.62 years ago. But lately I’ve been zapping out of it just by reminding myself: oh, I’m ruminating. Then I steer my thoughts toward an accomplishment I’m proud of, a goal I want to achieve, or something peaceful in my environment.

Here’s the thing, though. I can only catch it because I’ve been practicing noticing. What I’m thinking, how it makes me feel, all of it. The goal is noticing, not grading yourself on what you notice.

It’s harder than you’d think. It’s like opening another browser tab to monitor your 600 other tabs. But it has been so helpful, and it turns out there’s a lot of research behind why.

Your brain is built to defer to the negative

Negativity bias isn’t a character flaw. It’s standard equipment. Two landmark reviews published in 2001 laid it out. Rozin and Royzman showed that negative events carry more weight than positive ones of the same size, that we process bad information more thoroughly, and that a single bad element can tip a mixed situation into feeling bad overall. Baumeister and colleagues surveyed the same pattern across relationships, feedback, memory, and learning and titled the paper accordingly: Bad Is Stronger Than Good. One critical comment in a performance review outweighs five compliments because that’s how the system is wired.

Flo and I talked about this in our executive function episode. Our brains like stories, and without enough curiosity they’ll write a negative one. The example there was a leader assuming a late deliverable means someone doesn’t care. The same machinery runs inward. When the story is about you, the default draft is the critical one.

There’s a second piece that matters for neurodivergent folks. Harvard researchers Killingsworth and Gilbert pinged over two thousand people at random moments through a phone app and found that minds wander almost half the time, and that people are measurably less happy when their mind is somewhere else than when it’s on what they’re doing. Mind-wandering is the brain’s default mode. If your brain already runs hot, with more tabs open than most, you’re giving the negativity bias more raw material to work with.

Why this hits harder when you’re wired differently

Rumination, the repetitive, passive churning on distress and its causes, has been studied for decades. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s work established that it doesn’t just accompany low mood. It makes mood worse, strengthens negative thinking, impairs problem solving, and gets in the way of actually doing things.

For those of us with ADHD, rejection sensitivity gives rumination a running start. The formal research on rejection sensitive dysphoria is still thin, mostly clinical observation and qualitative studies, so I’m careful about the big claims you’ll see online. What the research does support is that emotional dysregulation is a core feature of adult ADHD, not a side effect of something else. A criticism lands, the feeling is outsized, and the brain starts replaying it to figure out what went wrong. In the ADHD superpowers episode I called reading the room a strength, and it is. The same wiring that anticipates how a coworker will react to what I say is the wiring that keeps rehearsing the conversation afterward.

Autistic adults see a version of this too. A 2024 study in the journal Autism found that autistic adults reported more rumination and obsessive thinking than non-autistic adults, and that this repetitive negative thinking was a pathway to higher anxiety and depression. The thoughts aren’t the problem by themselves. The loop is.

And there’s one more ADHD-specific wrinkle. On the executive function episode I mentioned positive illusory bias, where ADHDers tend to overrate how they’re doing and miss the signal that they need help. So we get both ends: a brain that overrates performance in the moment and then punishes itself in the replay. Neither is an accurate picture. Noticing is how you get one.

Why naming it works

The trick I described, saying “oh, I’m ruminating,” sounds too small to matter. Several lines of research say it isn’t.

Labeling turns the volume down. UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and colleagues put people in an fMRI scanner and showed them emotionally charged faces. When participants chose a word for the emotion they were seeing, activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, dropped, and activity in a prefrontal region tied to regulation went up. Putting a feeling into words changes how the brain is processing it. Flo’s advice on the burnout episode was the same practice from a coach’s angle: notice your body first, where it’s tense, what feels heavy, then go find the word. She recommends the free Feelings Wheel for that step.

A little distance helps. Ethan Kross and Özlem Ayduk have spent twenty years studying self-distancing. When people revisit a painful memory as a fly on the wall rather than reliving it from the inside, they feel less upset, show less physiological reactivity, and are less likely to spiral into rumination later. A follow-up study by Jason Moser’s lab found that talking to yourself in the third person (“Andrew is spun up about that meeting”) regulates emotion with almost no extra mental effort. “I’m ruminating” is a distancing move. It turns you from the person inside the loop into the person watching it.

Noticing is a trainable skill, and it protects you. John Teasdale and colleagues compared people recovering from depression with people who had never been depressed. The never-depressed group was far better at what the researchers called metacognitive awareness: experiencing a thought as a thought rather than as a fact. Among the recovering group, people with higher awareness were less likely to relapse. That’s the skill. Not thinking fewer negative thoughts, but relating to them differently when they show up.

Not all repetitive thinking is bad. This part matters for the “don’t grade yourself” piece. Edward Watkins reviewed the full literature on repetitive thought and found it can be constructive or destructive depending on a few things. Abstract, evaluative loops (“why am I like this?”) feed depression and anxiety. Concrete, specific processing (“what happened, and what would I do next time?”) supports planning and recovery. The elevator joke from 3.62 years ago is the abstract kind. There is no next step. Noticing it lets you decide whether a thought has a job to do or is just running.

The practice

This is the browser-tab metaphor made concrete. One extra tab, running quietly, that asks a single question: what am I thinking right now?

1. Pick a trigger. You won’t remember to check in at random. Tie it to something that already happens: the walk to the car, the thirty seconds before a meeting starts, the kettle boiling. On the burnout episode I admitted I’d come around on the “mindful minute” before a high-stakes meeting after years of calling it hippie granola stuff. It works because the trigger is already on the calendar.
2. Notice, then name. What’s the thought? What does it feel like in your body? Is it the past, the future, or now? One or two words is enough. “Rehashing.” “Rehearsing.” “Ruminating.”
3. Don’t grade it. This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one the self-compassion research is clearest about. A 2022 study of over 500 adults with ADHD found that lower self-compassion explained part of the link between ADHD and depression, anxiety, and stress. A meta-analysis of 27 randomized trials found self-compassion training had one of its biggest effects on rumination specifically. Judging yourself for the thought is just another loop. Note it and move on.
4. Steer, gently. This is where I go to an accomplishment, a goal, or something peaceful in the room. Flo would call it resourcing your nervous system. If the thought has a concrete next step, take it or write it down. If it doesn’t, let it go. Nolen-Hoeksema’s work shows that engaging distraction, something that actually occupies you, reliably lifts mood in the moment. A dog, a plant, the next task in your time box.
5. Expect to fail at it. You’ll miss most of them at first. That’s the baseline, not a verdict. On the scaffolding episode I talked about neuroplasticity as drops in the ocean: every time you catch the loop and redirect, you’re strengthening the circuit that catches it next time.

At work

The workplace version of this has a few specific shapes.

• After feedback. If you have ADHD, expect the replay. Plan for it instead of being ambushed by it. Give yourself a time box to process, write down the one concrete thing you’d change, then close the tab.
• Before a hard conversation. Rehearsing is useful once. Rehearsing nine times, each with a new imaginary counterargument, is rumination wearing a productivity costume. Notice when preparation turns into looping.
• The Sunday night gut check. Flo and I talked about this on the burnout episode. Noticing that the dread is building is how you catch burnout before you’re crying in the car. The practice is the same one. Notice the thought, name the feeling, don’t grade it.
• If you lead people. The same bias runs your read of your team. A late deliverable gets a negative story by default. Notice the story, then get curious.

Noticing won’t turn off the negativity bias. Nothing will, and you wouldn’t want it to; it’s the reason you check the stove. What noticing does is give you a say in which thoughts get the follow-up. Four hundred years of contemplative traditions and about fifty years of psychology agree on this one. Open the extra tab.

Keep being you, different at work.

We are not mental health professionals. Nothing here replaces therapy, diagnosis, or professional care. If this brought something up for you, our Resources page has support lines and links.

From the podcast

• You Can’t Out-Charm Burnout: spotting it in yourself, the Feelings Wheel, and the mindful minute
• I’m Not an Executive, Why Do I Need to Function?: brains like stories, positive illusory bias, and challenging assumptions as a leader
• This Is Not a Clip Show: scaffolding strategies, psychoeducation, neuroplasticity, and pre-charging
• Rainbows, Skittles & Sidequests: ADHD superpowers at work, reading the room, rejection sensitivity, the rose and the thorn

References

1. Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296–320. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2
2. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
3. Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi:10.1126/science.1192439
4. Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x
5. Cooper, K., & Russell, A. (2024). Insistence on sameness, repetitive negative thinking and mental health in autistic and non-autistic adults. Autism. doi:10.1177/13623613241275468
6. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
7. Kross, E., Ayduk, O., & Mischel, W. (2005). When asking “why” does not hurt: Distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions. Psychological Science, 16(9), 709–715. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01600.x
8. Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., et al. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7, 4519. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3
9. Teasdale, J. D., Moore, R. G., Hayhurst, H., Pope, M., Williams, S., & Segal, Z. V. (2002). Metacognitive awareness and prevention of relapse in depression: Empirical evidence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(2), 275–287. doi:10.1037/0022-006X.70.2.275
10. Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163–206. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163
11. Beaton, D. M., Sirois, F., & Milne, E. (2022). The role of self-compassion in the mental health of adults with ADHD. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 78(12), 2497–2512. doi:10.1002/jclp.23354
12. Ferrari, M., Hunt, C., Harrysunker, A., Abbott, M. J., Beath, A. P., & Einstein, D. A. (2019). Self-compassion interventions and psychosocial outcomes: A meta-analysis of RCTs. Mindfulness, 10, 1455–1473. doi:10.1007/s12671-019-01134-6