The Wise Mind Group

10/10/2026

You know the people everyone relies on? The careful ones, the ones who are prepared for anything? They’re also very often the ones quietly catastrophizing.

Some of us are simply born with a nervous system that’s more sensitive to threat and less responsive to reward. Walk into a rose garden, and this kind of brain notices the thorns before the flowers. That wiring comes with real gifts. It makes people conscientious, thorough, and excellent at spotting and solving problems before anyone else sees them coming. But a brain that registers danger loudly and good possibilities faintly is also more vulnerable to catastrophizing, anxiety, and chronic neuroplastic symptoms like pain and fatigue, because it’s always scanning for what could go wrong, including inside the body.

That makes catastrophizing especially hard to let go of, because for people wired this way it looks a lot like their strengths. Careful planning, attention to detail, anticipating problems, and enduring discomfort have often made them excellent at their work. Worst-case thinking feels like conscientiousness, so it rarely gets flagged as anxiety. And their persistence, the same capacity that lets them keep working on a hard problem long after others would quit, makes it especially hard to set down a problem that thinking can’t solve.

This is why the cost of chronically catastrophizing to self-trust lands so hard. When the only evidence you’ve allowed yourself to collect is that preparation and always getting it “right” works, you never get to find out that you, without the plan, are enough, and that you can survive getting things “wrong.”

10/09/2026

09/30/2026

All of us tend to respond to symptoms with fear, frustration, or fixing. These are the most natural responses in the world, so there’s no need to be hard on ourselves for them.

Yet it’s exactly these default responses that tell our brain and nervous system something is wrong, so it keeps sounding the alarm, and even turns it up, to get us to do something.

Many of us with symptoms are extremely good at fixing in every other area of life. We’re often conscientious, analytical, great at researching, making plans and checklists, and executing.

So even when we start to recognize our symptoms might be generated by the brain rather than a structural problem in the body, our first instinct is to bring that same fix-it energy to our symptoms.

Fixing might seem different from fear or frustration because we’re doing something. But the end result is the same: it reinforces to the brain that something is wrong.

The shift we want to make is toward curiosity. Start by simply noticing when you’re meeting a symptom with fear, frustration, or fixing. Take a deep breath. Silently ask: “What can I learn from this?” Let it be a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. If nothing comes to mind, no problem. Training ourselves to ask the question is the practice.

One more thing to watch for. Many of my clients are so outcome-focused that they’ll try a new practice a few times, notice nothing has changed, and quietly conclude it doesn’t work. If you catch yourself doing this, get curious about that, too.

Imagine doing a handful of sit-ups, then checking the mirror for a six-pack. You wouldn’t be surprised it hadn’t appeared, or decide sit-ups were useless. Strength builds quietly, through repetition, long before you can see it. Rewiring a nervous system works the same way.

09/24/2026

Who makes these changes?
Rumi

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

09/08/2026

If you could just add one practice to your life that would have the most impact, I believe it’s this one If you’ve ever seen me as a client or know me in real life you know I never shut up about how cultivating self-compassion is THE biggest life hack. Particularly for those of us wired for overcontrol who tend to be very hard on ourselves, harsh inner critical thoughts lead to nervous systems in a chronic state of threat (often alternating with overwhelm). Loving kindness meditation directed towards someone for whom it’s easy to feel loving or warm feelings towards gives our nervous systems a break because it moves us into social safety. The more we hang out there, the more accessible feels of safety become. The less time our nervous systems spend in threat, the more the volume on symptoms can turn down.

Have you ever tried loving kindness meditation? What did you notice?

09/08/2026

09/04/2026

My annual PSA for what do to if you’ve ghosted your therapist and really want to get back into therapy!

09/02/2026

When we’re feeling anxious, trying to convince ourselves not to be anxious through logic and reason just doesn’t work. Most the time it makes the anxiety even worse.

When my six year old wakes from a scary dream, I don’t ever try to reason with her that the dream wasn’t real because all she needs in that moment is the quality of my warm, reassuring presence. I bet you already know how to do this and do it all the time with people and animals in your life. Turning it inwards takes practice, but you will get better and better at it over time the more you practice. Anxiety isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s just your nervous system mistaking the mail carrier for a dangerous burglar. You already know how to meet it 💗💗

05/11/2026

Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don’t mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, “It’s hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there’s no one
to say what a good job you’re doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache.
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world’s heart.
There is no other art.



by Alison Luterman