I can spot catastrophising in seconds. Just not always my own.

A few days ago, in the final week of three weeks off, two relatively small things landed at once. A property issue hit another bump, and a completion statement arrived with a charge on it that I didn't believe was mine. Neither was catastrophic. My brain disagreed. Within minutes I'd gone from this needs checking to this is all going horribly wrong, with a genuinely irrational thought sitting underneath it, what if I lose everything.

I spend my working life helping CEOs slow down, separate fact from fear and make better decisions under pressure, and it turns out being able to do that for other people doesn't make you immune to losing access to it yourself, particularly when your guard's down. What actually helped was having someone think alongside me, not reassure me, just ask enough good questions that I could hear what I was actually saying. And that's when I realised I wasn't reacting to the estate agent or the extra cost, I was reacting to uncertainty, because my brain had spotted something it couldn't control, decided that meant danger, and started predicting the worst in an attempt to protect me.

There's a name for this, and it isn't a personal failing. Daniel Kahneman spent a career mapping the two ways our minds work, and what happened to me that afternoon is a textbook case. System one is fast, automatic and emotional, the part that took an unresolved email and jumped straight to worst case without pausing to check anything. System two is the slower, deliberate part that actually looks at evidence, and it takes real effort to switch back on once system one has got hold of something. Kahneman also has a phrase for exactly what my story column was doing, WYSIATI, what you see is all there is. We build a confident narrative from whatever limited information we have in front of us and quietly ignore everything we don't yet know. It's also worth knowing that losses are felt roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains, which goes some way to explaining how a modest, entirely resolvable query on a completion statement turned into losing everything within the space of an hour.

Once I could see that clearly, I did the thing I've been asking leaders to do for years, which is genuinely much easier to hand out as advice than to remember to use on yourself. Two columns, one headed reality, one headed story. Reality only gets what's objectively true, an email arrived, a figure was quoted, a conversation hasn't happened yet. Nothing a completely neutral third party couldn't also agree was fact. The story column is where everything else lives, and it's almost always the longer of the two. The problem is that the story can feel every bit as real as the facts sitting next to it, sometimes more real, because your body reacts to the imagined future as though it's already happening. Separating the two doesn't make the fear disappear, but it does stop the fear being allowed to masquerade as evidence.

I'm not the only one this catches out, and it isn't only about big uncertainty either. I was talking to a leader recently who'd got quietly fixated on a colleague in his Saturday class, convinced she was territorial about her usual spot and irritated with him for taking it. He'd started arriving early just to avoid the friction. When we unpicked it, she wasn't doing anything to him at all, she simply had a preference she wasn't very good at voicing, and the whole story he'd built around it turned out to be almost entirely fiction. It's a smaller example than mine, but the mechanism is identical, a brain with a bit of spare capacity finds something to loop on and treats the loop as fact until someone asks it to check.

That reframe matters too. Richard Schwartz's work on Internal Family Systems talks about these reactions as protectors rather than flaws, parts of us that developed for good reason and are simply still operating on old information. Rather than fighting the reaction, the more useful move is to acknowledge it, thank it for trying to keep you safe, and then go back to the facts. Thank you, I know you're trying to protect me, I've got this now. It sounds a little unusual written down, but it works precisely because it stops you arguing with yourself and lets you get on with what's actually needed.

There's also a reason both of these examples happened when they did, mid break, guard down, nothing urgent to solve. There's a piece of occupational stress research called the perseverative cognition hypothesis, which found that simply thinking about a stressor can be just as taxing on the body as the stressor itself, and that struggling to properly switch off from work thinking is often what keeps the stress response running long after the actual demand has passed. It's a useful explanation for something that seems backwards at first, that winding down doesn't switch this mechanism off, it just moves the target. When the big, real problems quieten, the same machinery goes looking for smaller ones instead, which is exactly why a completion statement and an exercise class spot could occupy so much space in two otherwise fairly relaxed weeks.

For years I thought the goal was to stop this happening altogether, so whenever it did I'd get annoyed with myself for not knowing better, which just added another layer of stress on top of the one that was already there. What I'm starting to realise is that this probably isn't the most useful measure of progress anyway. The spiral still happens sometimes, but I don't believe it for as long, and that feels like the more honest thing to track. A few years ago something uncertain could sit in my head for most of the day. This time it was closer to an hour before I was back with the facts.

I think leaders are often particularly hard on themselves about this, assuming the presence of the wobble means they've somehow failed, when the more useful question is probably how quickly you find your way back.

Where does your own clear thinking tend to disappear, and how long does it usually take you to find your way back to it?

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs, MDs and leadership teams across the South East. You can find her on LinkedIn.