06 Nov Anxiety at work: the meeting in your head
What rumination is
Rumination is repetitive thinking that circles a problem, its causes, and its consequences without moving towards anything you can do about it. The psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, whose work shaped how it is understood, described it as attention focused on distress and its causes. At Aicura, we see it most often around difficult conversations. Through coaching, reflection, and practice on real workplace situations, we help managers learn to recognise and interrupt it, and we treat that as a leadership skill that can be developed.
Thinking ahead is not the problem. Psychologist Edward Watkins reviewed the research on repetitive thought and found it can be constructive, helping people prepare, plan, and recover from difficult events, or unconstructive, feeding anxiety and low mood. Which way it goes depends partly on how you are thinking, and again, that part can be learned.
The loop, from Monday to Friday
The meeting in your head has three acts. The first begins the moment the conversation goes in the diary. Rehearsal slowly turns into prediction, and each run-through makes the worst version feel a little more likely, although nothing new has happened. You are preparing for the person you imagine, and the person who walks in on Thursday may respond quite differently.
Underneath most of that rehearsing sits a quieter fear about what happens afterwards. Will they think less of me? Will this damage the relationship? What if I get it wrong? Before you have even walked into the room, you have started to question yourself, and that doubt is what keeps the loop turning.
The second act happens in the room. Part of you is there, and part of you is watching yourself, checking your performance against the script you wrote at 2am. Attention divided like that has a cost. You listen less closely, and the one thing the other person said that could have changed the conversation goes past you.
The third act begins as the door closes. You edit your lines, find the better answer, and hold the conversation again with the benefit of hindsight. Researchers call this post-event processing, and it can outlast the anticipation. By Friday, a twenty-minute conversation has taken up most of your week.
Recognising it, and breaking it
The clearest sign of rumination is repetition without new information. If you have been through the same scene several times and nothing in your plan has changed, you are in the loop. The questions give it away too. “Why does this always happen to me?” keeps it turning, while “What do I want them to understand by the end?” moves it on. And notice when it arrives: on the commute, in the shower, in the hour before sleep, the moments when nothing useful can be done with the thought. One test works well. Has the last ten minutes of thinking produced anything I could act on? If it has, that was preparation. If it has not, it was the loop.
Breaking it starts with that shift from why to how. Watkins’ review identifies the level of abstraction as one of the factors that separates helpful repetitive thought from unhelpful, and in practice that means trading “Why am I so bad at this?” for “What is the first sentence I will say?” From there, prepare once, on paper, and then stop. When the loop returns, you can tell yourself, truthfully, that the work is done.
The third technique sounds odd until you try it. In a series of studies published in 2014, Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who reflected on a stressful task using their own name or “you”, in place of “I”, reported less anticipatory anxiety before giving a speech. Independent raters judged their speeches to be better, and afterwards they engaged in less post-event processing. “Sam, you have prepared for this. Say what you came to say, and then listen” puts a little distance between you and the worry, and distance is often enough to think clearly.
Try this before your next difficult conversation.
Write down three things.
- What do I really need to communicate?
- What am I assuming about the other person’s response?
- What would a good outcome look like for both of us?
Three questions, answered once, can change a conversation before it has even begun.
Each of these helps. Each is also hard to keep up on your own, in exactly the week when the conversation matters most.
What coaching changes about Thursday
Let’s go back to that week, and imagine you are working through it with an Aicura coach.
On Tuesday, the conversation you have been rehearsing alone becomes the subject of your coaching session. Your coach asks what you want the other person to understand by the end, and how you will open. When you describe how they are going to react, your coach asks a simple question: is that something they have said, or something you expect them to say? Most of the weight of the 2am version sits in the gap between those two. You leave with a plan you have worked out yourself, and the rehearsals have less to feed on, because the questions you kept asking now have answers.
On Thursday you walk in with that plan and with attention to spare. You ask more questions, and you listen to the answers. The person opposite talks more than you expected, and this time you hear the thing that would have gone past you.
Friday arrives, and you may still find yourself replaying parts of Thursday’s conversation. Coaching does not switch that off overnight. Something has changed, though. Instead of spending hours on what you should have said, you are beginning to ask what you have learned and what you will do differently next time. That is the conversation you take into your next coaching session. Your coach asks what you noticed, what you will keep, what you will change, and when you will next get the chance to try it.
That is feedforward, and it sits at the centre of how we coach and review progress at Aicura. Traditional feedback asks what happened and what could have been better, which hands a ruminating mind more material to work with. Feedforward asks what you will do differently next time. It points your attention at the one conversation you can still influence, and it starts from the assumption that you can improve. The same questions then find their way into your own one-to-ones, and your team starts to experience difficult conversations as something that leads somewhere positive. Progress looks like that: the replay gets shorter, and the learning arrives sooner.
None of this happens in a classroom. The theory you study for your CMI qualification gives you a name for what is going on, so you recognise the loop as it starts. Coaching works on the conversations you are actually facing that month. Reflection turns each one into something you learn from and then put down. Because the evidence for your qualification comes from your own job, the conversation you had been putting off becomes part of your programme. And the challenge comes from coaches who understand what managing people is really like, which is why it lands. We teach the subject, but more importantly, we develop the person who will use it.
Development at Aicura is meant to change what someone believes they are capable of, as well as what they know. The qualification matters. What it makes possible matters more: the conversation someone finally feels confident enough to have, the decision they stop putting off, and the colleague who feels heard because their manager has learned to listen differently.
What it changes beyond one manager
Rumination is a private experience with public consequences. A manager caught in the loop tends to delay the conversation, soften it until the message is lost, or avoid it altogether, and small issues grow while that happens. Research for Acas, published in 2021, estimated that 9.7 million UK employees experienced conflict at work in 2018 to 2019, and that 56% of those affected reported stress, anxiety, or depression as a result. The same research put the annual cost of conflict to UK employers at £28.5 billion, with around 485,800 employees resigning each year because of it. Those figures cover conflict in general, rather than rumination specifically, but they show what is at stake when difficult conversations happen late, are managed badly, or, even worse, not at all.
The manager who stops rehearsing at 2am starts holding those conversations earlier, while the challenges are still small. Their team learns that difficult topics get raised and dealt with, and people stop waiting for problems to become serious before mentioning them. That is the chain we build into every programme: individual growth becomes stronger leadership, stronger leadership becomes a better team, and better teams change what the organisation can achieve. It is also why we see development as something to invest in before the crisis, while it can still prevent one.
Working with Aicura
No two people arrive at Aicura with the same experiences, confidence, or challenges, so we start with the person. We want to understand what they are trying to achieve, what is holding them back, and what making progress would genuinely mean to them. That is what developing people first, the belief Aicura was built on, looks like in practice.
From there, we work with the learner and their organisation to shape a route that fits the person, what the organisation needs from its managers, and what the qualification asks of them. The route belongs to the learner, and it moves as they do. We keep the organisation close as the programme progresses, so it sees the change in how someone manages as well as the learner feeling it.
We also stay. Some of our relationships with organisations now span several years and several cohorts, and our relationship with learners carries on after their final assessment. We aim to be the development partner an organisation comes back to, cohort after cohort.
Behind all of it sit three commitments we call the AICURA Way: to be the best place to learn, the best place to work, and to offer the best in quality. For a learner, that means a welcome that makes it easy to start, a coach who knows your situation, and support that is there when work gets difficult. For an organisation, it means a partner that sets itself a standard and asks to be judged on it. One team. Every person. Exceptional experiences.
If difficult conversations are where your managers get stuck, our CMI Level 5 in Professional Coaching is a good place to start. It builds the skills in this post and the ability to coach others through them, on a route shaped around the learner and their role.
Book a discovery call and we will talk it through with you, and will tell you honestly if a different route would suit you better.
Thursday comes, and the conversation you have spent days worrying about lasts twenty minutes. Give those twenty minutes your full attention. The confidence you gain from having it could stay with you for years.
If the meeting in your head is running most of the day, or is affecting your sleep or wellbeing, speak to your GP, your employee assistance programme, or Mind.