Every anxious person knows the feeling of an event sending their ruminating mind into turbo drive. You feel deeply upset, and your thoughts keep looping back to what happened. You’re scattered, distracted, exhausted. The event feels like it has a grip on you.

For this post, I’m going to assume the upsetting event involves being implicitly or explicitly criticized. Maybe someone criticized your work or your ethics. Or maybe you made a mistake that’s making you doubt yourself.

Here are six tips to help you get into a better mental state when your overthinking mind has gone rogue—whether you need to shift into problem-solving mode or simply calm down.

Imagine this: You’re an intern. You make an error that causes your whole team to spend their Friday night fixing the problem you’ve caused. It’s 6:52 p.m., and 30 people are discussing on Slack how to remedy the issue, even though everyone usually clocks off at 5:30 p.m.

You feel awful, mortified, and embarrassed. But over the next few days, four people share similar stupid mistakes they made as interns or early in their careers. One of them is a very senior manager who made an even worse screw up. These perspectives help you see that your mistake won’t doom you to failure forever. It's a typical experience, not exclusive to you.

In your........

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