Every decision felt like life or death. Every email needed three rewrites. Mia spent more time worrying about choices than actually making them. Until Lound showed her a pattern she couldn't unsee.
Mia is 29, a product manager at a SaaS company. Smart, capable, promoted twice in three years. On paper, she's crushing it.
In her head? She's drowning. Every Slack message triggers a spiral. Did she word that right? What if they took it the wrong way? She screenshots conversations to analyze later. She writes emails, deletes them, rewrites them, then saves them as drafts "just in case."
Her boyfriend says she needs to "just stop thinking so much." Her therapist is booked three weeks out. She's exhausted by 2pm every day, not from work, but from her own brain.
"I've been lying here for an hour thinking about what I said in the standup today. I mentioned we might miss the deadline. Was that throwing the team under the bus? Should I have handled it differently? I keep replaying it. The way Sarah looked at me. Was she annoyed? Or was that just her face? I can't tell anymore. I'm so tired of my own brain."
"Spent 40 minutes writing a three-sentence email to the VP. Forty minutes! For three sentences! I kept second-guessing every word. Should I say 'I think' or 'I believe'? Does 'hope' sound too weak? I finally just sent it but now I'm worried I sounded too direct. This is insane. I know it's insane. But I can't stop."
"Jake asked where I want to go for dinner and I literally froze. It's just dinner. Pick a restaurant. But my brain immediately went to: What if he doesn't like it? What if it's too expensive? What if we have to wait? I said 'you pick' and he got frustrated. He said I never decide anything. He's right. I'm so tired of being like this."
I've been listening to your entries this week. You mentioned "overthinking" 7 times. But here's what I noticed:
You've talked through 12 decisions in the past two weeks. You made 11 of them just fine. The outcomes were okay. No disasters. No one got hurt. No one even noticed most of them.
The overthinking isn't protecting you from bad decisions. It's just exhausting you before you make the same decisions you would have made anyway.
"I went back and looked at the decisions Lound flagged. The email to the VP? She replied 'Thanks, makes sense.' The standup comment? No one mentioned it again. The restaurant thing? We went to Jake's pick and it was fine. I spent hours agonizing over things that took seconds to resolve and didn't matter. That's... actually kind of embarrassing. But also kind of freeing?"
Why do I do this? Why can't I just decide things?
Looking at your patterns, your overthinking spikes around two themes: work visibility and relationship harmony. You mentioned your mom a few weeks ago, how she'd critique every choice you made growing up. "Why did you wear that?" "You should have said it differently."
The overthinking isn't random. It's a protection system you built as a kid. The problem is, you're 29 now and still running 12-year-old software.
So how do I update the software?
You're already doing it. Every time you record a decision and then check the outcome later, you're teaching your brain that most choices aren't catastrophic. That's the update. Keep doing it. I'll keep tracking.
Your decision-to-outcome ratio this month: 23 decisions tracked. 22 turned out fine or better. 1 needed a small correction (you apologized, it was fine).
Your accuracy rate is 96%. Your overthinking rate is still around 70%. There's a gap there.
"Something happened today. The VP asked for my opinion in a meeting and I just... gave it. Didn't rehearse it. Didn't apologize for it. Just said what I thought. And you know what? She nodded and moved on. That was it. No catastrophe."
"I'm starting to realize that the catastrophes I'm always preparing for almost never happen. And the energy I spend preparing for them is the actual catastrophe. It's been stealing my life."
The breakthrough wasn't learning to stop overthinking. It was seeing proof that overthinking wasn't helping.
Lound tracked decisions and outcomes. The data didn't lie: 96% of her decisions were fine.
40 minutes on a 3-sentence email. Hours replaying conversations. She finally saw where her energy was going.
The connection to her mom's criticism. Understanding where the pattern came from made it easier to update.
Mia still overthinks sometimes. She probably always will. But now she catches herself faster. When she starts spiraling, she checks Lound: "What happened last time I worried about this?" Usually, the answer is "nothing." She picked the restaurant last Friday. Jake didn't even comment. It was just... dinner.
If you spend more energy worrying about decisions than making them, you're not broken. You just need to see the pattern. Let Lound show you what your overthinking is actually costing you, and what it's actually protecting you from (spoiler: usually nothing).