The ADHD Business Owner's Guide to Halting Overthinking

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bogged down by overthinking.

As someone with ADHD, it's practically a default setting to get lost in the endless labyrinth of “what ifs” and “why did I say thats.”

In this episode of the Weeniecast, I'm getting real about how to stop overthinking on demand.

Trust me, you’re going to want to stick around for this because by the end, you’ll have tangible methods to curb those invasive thoughts and finally take action in your business and life.

So, what exactly are we diving into?

First off, I share a deeply personal story about how, on a whim, I reached out to a boy from fifth grade to apologize for not inviting him to my birthday party.

An incident that had haunted me for years, but didn’t even register on his radar 😂😂

After I tell you what he said to me, the stage will be set for exploring how overthinking is not only unproductive but often completely baseless.

But here’s the goldmine: I guide you through a simple exercise to rewire your thought process and bring you back into your body.

A tool that I use and teach my clients to dispatch overthinking and foster effective decision-making.

By listening, you’ll not only understand why overthinking happens but also equip yourself with actionable strategies to manage and eventually sideline these disruptive thoughts.

By the end, you'll be better at focusing, making confident decisions, and ultimately growing your business without the paralysis that overthinking often brings.

Timestamped summary

00:00 Overthinking relationships and communication in business.

04:09 Guilt and overthinking hinder apology and focus.

07:14 Inconsistent posting, undervaluing services, needing client trust.

10:24 Contemplating job offer leads to unexpected friendship.

16:40 Stop overthinking, start living with simple exercise.

18:41 Brain, heart, gut; all thinking and remembering.

22:02 Physical sensations reveal deeper subconscious messages within.

25:14 Processing emotions improves healing and success.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Squirrel. Squirrel. By the end of this episode, you're gonna know how to stop

overthinking on demand. Hi, I'm Katie McManus,

business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie cast

Squirrel in a session with a client yesterday, we were

talking about how she's kind of stopped worrying about the future and

how she's assessed her money, and she's doing pretty well, and

she's pretty happy with the track that her business is on and things in

her life are looking great. And even though there's still a lot of

unknowns, she's not concerned with how

things are going to go down. And we talked about how.

Isn't it funny that everything has always

worked out for the better up until

now? And it did not matter how much

worrying and stressing and overthinking you

did in the past, none of it actually helped things work

out for the better. It just made you miserable while things

were working out. I come from a very proud, long line of

overthinkers. For Christmas last year, my dad actually bought me a t

shirt that said, hold on while I overthink this. The

McManus line has an

uncanny ability to talk for

hours on end on the most simple,

tiny. Oh, no. Did I say that thing? Was

it perceived? Weirdly. What do they think of me?

And of course, like, overthinking happens in your life, right? Especially if you have

ADHD. And we'll talk about where that comes from.

During the pandemic, I reached out to this boy that I went to fifth grade

with because ever since fifth grade, when I didn't

invite him to my birthday party, because for whatever reason, I was kind

of a jerk. Back then, I was in fifth grade. I think most of us

are jerks. Back then, fifth grade, me was an idiot. It didn't matter

why I didn't like him. But ever since that

day, I have literally carried the guilt of not inviting

him to my birthday party. And so I think it was in, like,

2021, I was on Facebook and I saw his name pop

up in a people that you may know, and I was like, oh, my God,

this is the moment I have to apologize. And so I

friended him, I sent him a message, and I said, hey, michael,

I don't know if you remember me. We went to fifth grade together at this

school in California. And I owe you an apology.

I have carried around this guilt since fifth grade, and I'm so sorry

I didn't invite you to my birthday party. He had no idea what the I

was talking about, he remembered me. He had no recollection that I

ever even had a birthday. And we had this very funny little

exchange, but he was like, have you been thinking about this ever since

fifth grade? To which my answer was like, yeah, I

have. Absolutely. Which I'm sure he thought a little

crazy, but, you know, we left it on a good note, and we're still

connected on Facebook. We never rekindled the friendship, but, you

know, we were never friends to begin with, so there we go. God, now I'm

gonna start overthinking that. But there's overthinking that happens in your life over

that thing you said at dinner or you were upset that one

day and did people think that you were mad at them and I overthinking

what other people say to you. Oh, my God. Like, your boss said

something in a weird tone, are you about to get fired? As

a business owner? When you get a text from a client who's freaking out

about something, it's so easy to start spiraling, thinking, oh, my God, they're about to

fire me. Especially if you're a coach or you're a lawyer or you're a

copywriter, know that you are your client's

peer. You're probably one of the few people your client can

turn to to freak out about stuff, right? They can't go to their spouse and

be like, oh, my God, I think I'm running out of money. Their spouse is

going to freak out then. And then they're going to have, like, a very stressful

home environment. But you know who they can freak out to is you.

And meanwhile, you're going to start overthinking. Oh, my God, they're never going to be

able to pay me. They're going to have to stop working with me. Oh, God,

I'm going to have to find another client. And here's the thing about overthinking, is

that it doesn't help. It doesn't help a

situation get better. It makes you feel guilty enough decades later that you

apologize for doing something, sure. But every time I've gone

back and apologize for something that I did decades ago, the person I

apologize to has no recollection of it, has no memory

of the instance that I spent years

consumed with freaking out about your clients. When they

send you something that you perceive as, oh, my God, they're gonna stop working with

me. Does that help you serve them when they get on the phone with you

and they need to talk about their own problems and the

support that they need. Are you actually listening to them for their

sake, or are you listening to them for your sake because you're worried you're gonna

lose the business? There are a lot of

theories about overthinking in the psychological space, which I am

not trained in psychology. I'm not a therapist. I'm just

talking about this based off what I've learned on TikTok and from reading articles and

from talking to my own therapist. But overthinking in psychological

terms is generally referred to as rumination and worrying. Right.

When you ruminate, worry about something. You're just consumed with the

negative thought around it. It's like this endless

loop in your mind, and it can get really obsessive. It's like it's

the only thing that you can think about.

Your mind cannot move forward from it.

Your mind cannot focus on anything else. And, of course,

like, you can ruminate and obsessed and stress over

really serious things. I know I got really sucked into

this when I had my own personal financial crisis. When I

first started my business, I was $50,000 in debt. I had

no money to my name. I just signed up for a $20,000 program.

And this business that I had just started wasn't going great

because I had just started, like, businesses don't go great when you

first start. And we have this weird expectation that, like, we start and then we

should be making hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's not how that goes.

Right? It wasn't until I was able to stop

ruminating, until I was able to stop overthinking it, that I was

able to get to work and actually make my business successful. When we

overthink things in our business, we

actually prevent success from happening. And how this

shows up is like, have you ever created an offer? And maybe. Maybe

you haven't yet? Maybe you're listening to this, and I say this, and you're like,

oh, God. Like, there's. I have so many ideas, I'm not sure which one's going

to be right. So I'm just, like, trying to figure out which one's going to

be right in my own head, and I'm obsessing over it. Honey,

that's overthinking, and that's not helping you get clients. That's not

helping you make money. That's not helping you start your business. You

know, it could be your marketing. I can't tell you how many of my clients

and they start with me. They're not posting to social media. They're not sending

emails. And when they do. They spend days

agonizing over where a comma should go, what word they

should use. They run it up the flagpole to

their spouse, their best friends, anyone that they can ask who has good

grammar to make sure that their post is absolutely perfect. And

what ultimately happens is they end up posting like once every month, which

is not enough to gain any traction, to gain any

visibility, or to build trust with your audience so that they are convinced

that you're the person that they should hire.

People also, really overthink their pricing. The

classic overthinking fallacy when it comes to your pricing

is, oh my gosh, I'm new and no one's going to trust me because I'm

new and I haven't done this as a paid service before.

Mind you, you've been a professional for how many years at this point?

So instead of, instead of charging real money for my services, okay,

well, here's my plan. Here's my strategies. I'm going to give my

services away for either really, really cheap or free. And then

the clients that I get, they're going to be so impressed by my work and

they're going to get such great results from my free work, my cheap work, that

they're going to go and write these glorious testimonials, and then I'm going to have

these testimonials, and then I'll be able to raise my prices by like a.

Then I'll just inch it up every time I get a better testimonial and then

eventually I'll make money. That's exhausting.

That's exhausting. Also, honey, it doesn't work that way. The clients that

you get for free or cheap will nothing value the work that

you do. And because they won't value the work that you do, they will not

see results from the work that you do. Which means there's no testimonial

that'll come, just it's not happening. And the

endless worry about how things are going to work out. The

endless, the endless loop of oh my God, this isn't

working. And this isn't working. And this isn't working. That's not helping

you either. Because instead of looking up and out into the

world to see all the opportunities in front of you, and instead of

tapping into your creativity to see how you can grab hold of those

opportunities and make them worth something to you, you're

obsessing over things not happening the way you thought they would happen.

Which, here's a little news flash, things will never happen

the way you think they'll happen? The universe has

a wicked sense of humor. And I always like to remind people of this,

like, how did you meet your best friend? How did you meet your

spouse? How did you get your favorite job you ever had?

And before those things happened, before you met those people or you

got that job, did you know exactly how it would happen?

I bet not. I bet you couldn't have

planned for how you met your best friend.

Personally, how I met my best friend was I broke up with a

boyfriend who paid for where we lived, and I wasn't making a whole

lot of money. So the very expensive gym that I used to pay for a

membership for, I had to start working at because I didn't want to give up

my membership. But I also couldn't afford to pay the monthly

fee. And she was on the sales team there, and we really didn't talk much

when I first got my job there because I was working at the front desk

like two days a week and they weren't days that she normally worked. But

at one point, the regional sales manager came up to me and was asking

me about the other jobs that I had because I had a lot at the

time. And he. I heard that I did sales for a video

production company. He's like, oh, my God, we're opening up a new club. I'd love

to have you on the sales team there. Do you want to apply? And I

kind of said, oh, you know, I'll think about it. And then Jess

walks around the corner after he leaves and asks, like, how my day

is going. And I said, oh, well, Ray just told me I should apply to

work at the new club that they're opening on the sales team. And she's like,

oh, my God, you totally should. And I'm like, really? Like, I don't

know if I want to sell gym memberships. And then she's like, do you know

how much money you're going to make? And she legit walked back to her office,

printed up what the commissions were for the people who were at the most

successful clubs, and told me how much money I could make selling gym

memberships. And we ended up being colleagues. And we didn't

become best friends until about a year and a half later after working

together for a really long time. But I couldn't have planned on

that. I really couldn't have. I couldn't have planned that there would be

someone who worked at that club that would just

become my best friend. We've been best friends for almost

a decade now. I'm not married yet, so I can't tell a cute story about

meeting my spouse. But I bet you have one. I bet

you have a cute story about how you met either your spouse or your long

term partner. And, I mean, you've

heard how I've gotten jobs in the past. I could not have

planned on any of them. But here's the crazy thing, is that we still

try to obsess around how things will happen in the future.

It's like we think, okay, well, if I make a plan and do the

plan, and everything goes perfectly to the plan, everything should

happen the way I want it to. How's that ever gone for you? I can

tell you that's never worked out for me ever in my life. So

worrying and stressing and ruminating and

overthinking everything actually does not help you. It hurts

you. And here's my

theory on why we do this, especially as people with

ADHD. Most ADHD people that I know

are extremely sensitive individuals, and we have

to be. We walk into a room and we can

immediately read the whole vibe. We know who's

mad at who. We know who's having a good time. We know

who's safe to speak to and who we want to stay away from.

And we know this within seconds of looking

around. When we have conversations with people,

we know exactly which version of ourselves we should be to get

a good response from them. We've been masking our whole

lives, and we learned this very early on because

if we didn't mask, that's when we got in trouble. If we're sitting in

class and we don't have our interesting face mask

on, the teacher would get mad at us. If

everyone around us was laughing or happy and we weren't,

we would still have our happy, laughing face on.

And when we were really, really upset, we

learned that that wasn't always appropriate. We had to hide

it. We have spent a lifetime gaslighting ourselves

out of our own emotions. We've also spent a lifetime having all these

emotions that either were ours or that we were picking up from the people around

us and then being told that's not appropriate.

Calm down, don't get upset. And what ultimately

happens is that we learn to ignore

as best we can the actual emotions and feelings

that come up in our body. And because we learn this from the outside world,

we think that we can think through it, that we can logic ourselves

out of feeling certain ways. This is honestly one of the reasons

why a lot of people with ADHD struggle to find the right

therapist for themselves. Because we have

such an innate talent for

intellectually processing our emotions,

we can make sense of how we feel certain ways. We can

come up with storylines. We can talk about causation

and how other people impacted us and why it

makes sense that we feel a certain way, and yet we still

struggle to move past those emotions. You know, a lot of therapists will

just lap that up. Oh, cool. This person is really self aware.

Meanwhile, we're there on the other side, just continually

obsessing about whatever the situation has been. And the reason we

cannot get out overthinking is because

we never actually learned how to process our emotions. We

never actually learned how to let them move through

us. In coach training, one of the things that we

learned is that, like, in the western world, people get

very scared when we talk about emotion. They think, okay, emotions go to

therapy. Right? Emotions bad, like, go to therapy, get them

fixed. And while, yes, like, there are absolutely

some emotions that, like, especially if it's related to trauma or

depression or really serious anxiety, you should have some medical help for.

Just the fact that you have emotions is not a bad thing.

It doesn't make you less than, it doesn't make you weak.

It doesn't make you broken. One of the best definitions of

emotions that I have ever heard is that it's really energy in

motion, right? Think about when you're angry. Where do you feel that energy

in your body? For me, it's like. It's like this heat in my chest, and

it goes up towards my shoulders, and then it goes up my neck, and it's

like, if you look at me, it's like neck down is just, like, flushed red.

Physically, like, my body literally has a reaction to being

angry. And yet, do I ever let my body process

that out? I mean, I didn't used to. I do

now. It used to be that I'd have to think about, well, why am I

justified in being angry? Why am I justified in being pissed off at

this person or at this situation, and why is it wrong? And blah, blah,

blah, blah? And none of that ever helped me move past it. It

just helped me latch onto something that I would just completely overthink and

talk about ad nauseam forever. I'm sorry to all

of my friends and family who had to listen to me back then. I didn't

know any better. So here's the choice you have in this

moment. You can continue down this road of being an overthinker,

of ruminating, of being a constant worrier about the future.

That is absolutely an option for you. Or you can learn

with me. I'm about to tell you how to move past

that. If you're good being an overthinker, then the

podcast is over. Now go continue your life. Enjoy

overthinking, enjoy your ruminating, really give your

worrying, your all have a good life. If you really want to

learn a new skill and you want to stop overthinking and stop worrying

about the future and actually start living, then

here's the really simple exercise that I practice and that I have my clients

go through. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep

listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel.

If you really want to learn a new skill and you want to stop

overthinking and stop worrying about the future and actually start living,

then here's the really simple exercise that I practice and that I

have my clients go through to get out of their

heads and back into their body so that they can take action and

actually build businesses that they're really proud of. And this practice

is really simple. So when you're overthinking, you know that

the energy is all in your head. You know, it's like you have a ping

pong ball that's just bouncing around inside your skull, activating different parts of your

brain. And of course that internal narration that happens, that the voice

that just goes on and on and on and on about all the things that

are going on, just notice what it's saying.

Just notice all the what if scenarios that it's coming up

with. Just notice all the negative comments it has

about you in the past or you right now and how it's never going

to be good enough and so on and so forth. Now, that

ping pong ball that's bouncing around your skull,

activating these different parts, I want you to imagine

that you're slowing it down, you're just bringing it to

kind of like slow motion ping ponging. And I

want you to slowly draw it down through your head, down

your neck, and bring it down into your body, into your

heart space. Now, this ball is your consciousness.

This ball is actually where you do your thinking and you get

to control where that thinking happens in your body. Now,

something that they've discovered over the last several decades is that,

yes, we have neurons in our brains. We can do thinking in our brains. We

all know this, we do a lot of thinking in our brains, but we also

have neurons that do thinking and store memories in our heart

tissue and throughout our digestive tracts. This is one of

the reasons why when you're sick and you have a stomach

upset, your short term memory is bad because

literally a part of your physical brain that's not just

in your head is offline. It's working on

recovering. So you've brought that ping pong ball into your

chest, face, and whatever it is that you're concerned about,

you're going to ask your heart, you're going to ask your body,

what do I actually know about this situation? Now, here's

where you're either going to get an answer or you're going to notice there is

an emotion coming up that will not let you have an answer

yet. So when we're getting information from our heart

space and from our gut, we have to remember first and foremost that there's no

language center. Right? Our brains have a language center. Our heart and our gut

do not. So oftentimes these messages will come

up visually, they can come up almost in a smell. They can come up

in just a sense or a sensation and just trust

yourself that you will understand what it means.

Now, if you're getting an answer, beautiful. If you're not getting an

answer and you just feel like, tight or like you're going to

vomit or there's something else happening in your body,

like when I get angry, I have that heat through my neck, down into my

chest. This is a sign that you have energy that you're

not letting move through your body. This is an emotion that you're actually

not giving yourself permission to feel through. And what

we need to do in this moment is very simple. Just focus on that

feeling. There's this practice that I got really annoyed with when I

was a kid where, like, if you stub your toe, like, you know how, like,

it really, really hurts and you're mad and you're swearing, you're saying all these bad

words, and you're like, kicking the chair that stubbed your toe and then you're hurting

your foot again. Like, sure, that can make you feel a little better, but

a trick to actually make the pain pass faster is to

simply focus in on that pain and feel it to the

fullest extent you can. And it's really painful.

It really is. Like, when you are in pain and you really focus

in on experiencing that pain fully, it's

agonizing, but it does go faster. You don't

have to focus in on the pain of your stubbed toe and be like, go

away pain. Like, I'm numbing you. That doesn't work.

It doesn't work. It just makes the pain last longer. So I need to

imagine there's an emotion that's coming up. There's a sensation in

your body and set. Your stomach feels very tight and grippy,

and all you're gonna do is you're going to feel into what that feels

like. You're going to notice, like, if it feels tight, like, does it feel like

I'm wearing a cordental? Does it feel like someone's, like, jammed their hand through

your stomach and they're holding on to your intestines with their fist?

Is there a temperature to it? Is it hot? Is it cold? Does it feel

like a snake got in there and is wrapped around you? And as you

focus in on the physical sensation, notice what emotions come

up. Is it fear? Is it frustration?

Oftentimes, these physical sensations are really trying to tell us something.

It's like an alarm system that it just has very poor

communication style. Is the fear trying to tell you,

remember that we failed that one time, and it didn't feel good?

Is your subconscious trying to tell you, oh, my God, like, I really don't want

to fail again? Or is it trying to tell you that you don't want to

look stupid? Or is it trying to tell you, actually, this does not matter.

We don't want to worry about this. We want to worry about something else. We

want to go do something else. This is not the right fit for us. And

once you get that message, receive it, understand what your body's trying

to tell you, and then again, refocus back into the physical sensation

in your gut. What's there now? You're not trying to

make it do anything. You're just noticing. And again, we want

to ask, what's the emotion that's coming up from this feeling?

And you want to go back and forth on this until you get to a

point where you're able to ask, cool, what do I know about the situation? And

you actually get an answer. When I work with clients one on one,

my clients get unlimited on demand support with me,

meaning. And I have it in three tiers. 311 is, hey, I have

a cool idea. I just want to brainstorm it. Can we chat for a few

minutes? Six one one is, I have a time sensitive

question. I have a proposal that I want to send out to this big corporation.

It needs to go out tomorrow. Can we hop on in the next 12

hours and look over my proposal? Or can you answer a couple questions for

me? My favorite. My absolute favorite

on demand call is the 911. It's. I'm freaking the f

out. I don't know what to do. I'm crying. I'm hiding in a bathroom

stall. Things aren't going well. I need to talk to someone.

And I can tell you the clients who use 911

calls the most in the beginning of our work together

are the ones who become successful the fastest. Because

instead of getting in their own heads and overthinking everything and

ruminating and worrying about and thinking, I have to figure this out on my own,

and I have to logic myself out of feeling this way. They're brave enough

to get on the phone with me and just barf it all out. Here's how

I feel. Here's all the shame and fear and anger and frustration that

I have, blah, blah, blah. And while we're on the call,

I talk them through some kind of exercise like this, and I help them process

this emotion. Now, these emotions will come up forever.

We're not getting rid of them. It's not like you're going to get really good

at processing emotions so that you never feel them again. Sorry. Actually, the more

you feel them, the more they come, because, like, they realize that they're safe with

you. So the goal is never to get rid of them completely. The goal

is to process through the ones that hold you back

faster. And this is really hard to do on your

own because you don't have an alarm

system that tells you, oh, remember, like, when you feel this

way, go and do this exercise. So my clients who, when they

feel this way, they think, oh, call for help, call your coach,

get past this. They learn really quickly. Oh,

okay, cool, here's how I'm feeling. This is not good. I need to move past

it. And in the beginning, they'll call me a ton, and I love it.

I can talk them off the ledge. They feel so much better afterwards.

They process through the emotion, and after a little bit of time,

when they have that instinct to call me for help, they realize, hold on,

I know what to do now. I can process this. This isn't that

scary. When you train yourself to do this

through having help, you're not only allowing yourself

to do the work to become massively successful,

you're actually doing a lot of work to heal some self

inflicted and society inflicted trauma that a lot of us with

ADHD suffer from. Because so many of

us, especially millennials and older, were told that our emotions were

wrong, that we were upset for the wrong reasons, that we shouldn't get

this upset. Everyone else is fine. Why are you being a problem?

And when you give your adult self permission to feel all those things and just

process through it and to not shame yourself for being there and to

tell yourself it is okay. This is telling you something. This is part of

your alert system. We're gonna give it the microphone for a

little bit and everything will be fine. You actually open

so many doors for yourself out there in the world and you get to walk

through them without being a completely overthinking basket

case. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually

run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book a generate

income strategy call with me by going to

weeniecast.com strategycall.

On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams,

and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit

for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.

This is Ben from Facebook. I didn't get an invite to the birthday party

either. It's okay. I forgive you.

Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel.