What Am I Trying Not to Feel?

I’ll be honest with you: I overthink everything. So when I came across Tracy Ann Wood — a psychotherapist whose whole specialism is helping people get out of their own heads — I was fairly sure I was interviewing her for professional reasons and not entirely personal ones.

I’m still not certain. Either way, it was one of the more useful conversations I’ve had this year.

Start by sitting in the car

The thing that first caught my eye was one of Tracy’s videos, where her advice is simply this: when you finish work, sit in the car for a minute before you drive off.

Most of us jump in and go. But Tracy calls that moment gold, because it’s the one point in the day when nobody has your attention. No one wants anything. It gives your brain a bit of time to make the transition between work-busy and home-whatever-comes-next.

It doesn’t need to be long. A few minutes of actually noticing you’re in your body rather than in your head, and saying to yourself: right, I’m done with that, now I’m doing this.

Because otherwise we go from one thing, to the next, to the next.

Velcro and Teflon

Tracy’s view — and she says there’s research behind it as well as twenty-odd years of client work — is that we have an innate negativity bias. We’re not sat up in our heads being lovely to ourselves.

She puts it beautifully. The difficult stuff sticks like Velcro. The positive stuff, of which there’s plenty, bounces off like Teflon.

Non-stick.

So what do people actually hear in there? The inner critic. I can’t do it. I’m not very good at that. What on earth did I do there? We replay conversations. We decide people don’t like us. And it all gets a good deal darker at three in the morning.

We’re human beings, not human doings

I asked why we find it so hard to stop, and Tracy reckons society has quietly welded together two things that shouldn’t be welded: busyness and worth.

Being busy has become a badge of honour, a signal that you’re a worthwhile person. And we’re all at the effect of it — she’s seeing it in children now too, kept occupied every waking minute.

Her line on this is one I’ve thought about a lot since: we’re called human beings, not human doings. Much of her work is helping people come back into being.

Her clients are mostly women — high-functioning women in senior roles or running their own businesses, often mums, often looking after ageing parents as well. But she’s clear it affects absolutely everybody, and she’s seeing more men come forward than ever.

The one thing you can do

I put it to her straight: if I turned up saying I can’t cope, I’m bouncing from one thing to the next and getting nothing done — what’s the single thing I do?

Breathe. Which sounds almost too simple, given we’re all doing it constantly. But we’re not doing it consciously.

The technique is genuinely that easy: breathe in, then make your out-breath slower and longer than your in-breath. You’ve got two sides to your nervous system — an accelerator and a brake — and most of us have the accelerator jammed on. The longer out-breath engages the brake.

Anybody can do that. Right now, reading this.

And then the question that floored me

Once you’ve done the breathing, Tracy asks clients one question:

“What am I trying not to feel?”

I’ll admit that scared the wits out of me a bit.

Here’s her reasoning. Thoughts live in the head. Emotions live in the body. So when you’re stuck up in your head going round and round in spirals, what’s usually happening is that you’re avoiding feeling something.

The mind retreats upstairs and says: let me overthink this, so I don’t have to feel it. And then it’ll obligingly find you a hundred things to think about.

The bit I found genuinely reassuring is that Tracy doesn’t treat this as a failing. It’s a protective strategy, and a clever one. It’s just not one that gets you anywhere in the long run.

We think we’re over-feeling everything. Quite often we’re doing the opposite.

Therapy isn’t just nodding

We talked about whether people are more open about this than they used to be, and Tracy thinks so — she wouldn’t have gone to a therapist herself before she went into the field.

She’s also keen to correct the stereotype. Therapy isn’t someone sitting nodding at you. It’s helping you make sense of the thoughts and feelings that have got tangled up, like unravelling a big ball of wool. What that does is give you space in your head — room to work out what you actually want, instead of just running on the treadmill.

We also touched on how much we still separate physical health from mental health in this country. As Tracy put it: break your leg today and you’ll go to A&E, wait a while, and come out in a cast. It just doesn’t work like that on the other side. She’s right, and it’s still a bit sad.

The workshop: Tuesday 22 September

Tracy is running a live online workshop called Why Can’t I Switch Off? on Tuesday 22 September at 12 noon — deliberately at midday so people can drop in on a lunch break.

It runs around 70 to 80 minutes and it’s part learning, part sharing: why we end up living in our heads, why it kicks off at three in the morning, how it shows up in your life — and then, mostly, tools. A little toolkit to reach for next time your brain won’t switch off.

And you don’t have to be looking for therapy.

As Tracy says, therapy might not be for you, or you might not need it. You might just need the toolkit.

Where to find Tracy

Tracy is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist based in West Yorkshire, and she works online via Zoom — so the workshop and her sessions are just as open to listeners here in Cheshire.

You can find her at tracyannwood.com, read more about her story on her about page, or see what’s coming up on her workshops page.

She’s promised to come back on after the course and tell us how it went, so we’ll hear what people made of it.

In the meantime, I’m going to go and sit in my car for two minutes. Apparently it helps.