Out of the spiral
You know the spiral. A conversation from Tuesday, still playing on Thursday. An email you’ve reread nine times before sending. A decision — not even a big one — that’s been circling for three weeks and is no closer to landing.
From the outside it looks like nothing. From the inside it’s a full-time job.
Here’s what makes it so hard to put down: the spiral feels like work. It feels responsible. Surely thinking about the problem is better than ignoring it? And every loop ends with the same promise — think it through once more and you’ll have it. So round you go. The answer never comes, but it always feels close, and that’s what keeps the wheel turning.
And if you’re clever — and the worst spirallers I’ve met are the cleverest people in the room — you’re at a real disadvantage. A strong mind can knock down any conclusion it reaches. You build the case for option A, and your mind promptly builds the case against it. You will never win an argument against yourself. You’re too well matched.
Meanwhile the cost adds up. Evenings lost to replays. Sleep lost to rehearsing conversations that will never happen. The people in front of you getting a distracted version of you, while your head holds another emergency meeting about something that ended on Tuesday.
I spent years in that meeting, so let me tell you what I eventually learned. A spiral isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a safety behaviour. The mind circles because somewhere along the way it was handed a job it can’t do — making you feel safe. So it does the only thing it knows: check, re-check, run one more simulation. The spiral has no bottom because it isn’t trying to reach one. It’s trying to keep you occupied.
That’s why the exit isn’t where you’ve been looking. You’ve been trying to get out through the bottom — one final, perfect thought that settles everything. The exit is sideways. Out of the head and into the body: feet on the floor, one slow breath out, the actual room around you — things you can see, hear, and touch right now. The present, which is the one place the spiral can’t follow you.
Sixty seconds of that won’t solve the decision. But it interrupts the machinery — and a mind that is shown, gently and often, that it’s safe to stop checking will, over time, stop checking. Not because you argued it down. Because it finally got the message.
None of this is a character flaw. You didn’t choose the spiral, and you’re not weak for being caught in it. Nobody ever showed you where the exit was. Most people go their whole lives without being told there is one.
Showing the body it’s safe to stand down is the whole of the work I do now, and it’s what The Way Home is for. It’s my membership: live sessions every week, a growing library of short guided practices for exactly these moments, and a small community of people walking the same road — most of them thinkers, most of them tired of the meetings in their own heads. It’s £27 a month, and you can cancel any month.
The spiral promises you an answer. It’s been promising for years. Come and learn the sideways exit instead.
— Adam