What is the noisiest thing in your life? For me, it is the rumblings in my own brain.
Statistics report that 60,000 thoughts a day run through our minds. And shockingly, 95% of them are the exact same thoughts as the day before — and 80% are negative. I’m not sure which horrifies me more: the sheer repetitiveness of it, or the fact that we are essentially smack-talking ourselves for most of the day. This cannot be good for our mental health, our self-esteem, or our ability to show up well for the people we love.
At this stage of life, we have earned a certain kind of quiet. We have raised children, built careers, navigated loss, and survived things we never thought we would. And yet the mind — that relentless, opinionated, recycling machine — doesn’t seem to get the memo. The second half of life brings its own particular mental noise: regret about the past, anxiety about health, worry about whether we still matter, fear of what’s coming next.
That noise is not the truth of who we are. It is just weather. And like weather, it passes — if we learn how to let it.
The solution falls into the category of easy to say, hard to do. But here are two practices worth trying:
Break the repetitive thought pattern. I first used this after my college boyfriend broke up with me — so it has a long track record. Name what you are obsessing over. When you catch yourself looping on it, give yourself a set amount of time to think about it. Five minutes. Then redirect. Each day, tighten the window a little more until you’ve loosened its grip. Slowly, but it works.
Practice moments of stillness. Not just sitting quietly while the mind keeps running — but training yourself to be still in all senses. Mind, body, and emotion together. There are many paths here: meditation, contemplation, centering prayer. When I suggest this I almost always hear “I can’t do this.” I understand that. The mind fights stillness the way a toddler fights bedtime. But like a toddler, it eventually gives in — and what’s on the other side is something close to peace.
This is the real work of this season. Not just staying busy or staying relevant, but learning to live inside our own heads with a little more ease and a little less static. The women I most admire aren’t the ones who have everything figured out. They are the ones who have gotten quieter — not smaller, just quieter — and found that the stillness holds more than the noise ever did.
Sixty thousand thoughts a day. Let’s make a few of them worth keeping.