The Inner Layer: Overthinking & Self-Doubt
One day you want to quit.
Two days later you decide you just need a better job somewhere else.
By the end of the week you are lying awake wondering what you will do with yourself after retirement, which is decades away and somehow feels urgent at 1 am.
I came across a version of this recently, on a reddit post written by a mid-career professional asking a room full of strangers whether this was normal. Several years of watching layoffs. Work thoughts running most of the day. A mind swinging between three completely different conclusions and landing nowhere in particular.
It is normal. Not comfortable, and not something to leave running for years, but genuinely common among people decades into a corporate career.
Here is what I would want to say to the person who wrote it.
The swinging usually means three separate questions have collapsed into one.
Do I want to leave this job?
Do I want to do this kind of work at all?
What do I want the next twenty years to look like?
Three different questions, on three different timelines, needing completely different evidence to answer. Ask them all at once, and the pendulum swinging between confusion and anxiety is guaranteed.
Most of us were trained to respond to this by pushing harder.
Resilience, grit, keep going, it will pass.
Sometimes it does pass. Often the pushing is what keeps the pendulum moving, because you are adding effort without adding clarity while the real question stays unasked.
Slowing down has a bad reputation in corporate life. It looks like drift.
In practice, deliberately stopping to separate those three questions and answer them one at a time may be the most productive thing. It just does not look like productivity, so almost nobody does it.
Two honest caveats.
A pause only works if it is active. Stopping to think about it properly is different from stopping and hoping, which is avoidance with better branding.
And if the thoughts are running constantly, and affecting your sleep, your health or the people around you, that is worth taking to a doctor or a therapist. Career clarity and anxiety are two different problems, and I would not want anyone treating one as though it were the other.
The first one is where I work. I help mid-career professionals stuck in exactly that pendulum get to a decision they can stand behind.
If you recognise this, which of the three questions have you actually been asking?
