FOMU & Overthinking
MY TIME: Calculating the Hidden Hours Stolen by Rumination
Replaying conversations, rewriting emails, and self-criticism take time. A workshop story about recognizing the cost of overthinking and rumination.
In a recent workshop, people sat with me to decode and reframe a pattern they recognized in themselves.
When I talked about the hours FOMU steals - the replaying, the rewriting, the self-criticism - one attendee typed two words: "MY TIME." Nobody has time, and yet the high-achievers I interviewed said they were losing 5 to 20 hours a week of THEIR time to a pattern running in the background. Webinar attendees put numbers to it too - 8 hours, 15+, around 20. One person said “too many to count.”
The moment you see it, you can’t unsee it, but you CAN interrupt the FOMU cycle. That's time back. That’s the peace that comes with it.
When we start challenging the beliefs and stories that have fed the pattern, we have a chance to get off autopilot and build new defaults. One webinar attendee recognized for the first time that “accountability is not punishment,” and another said “I’m better at giving compassion to others than to myself.”
I asked the room a simple question: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how over this cycle are you?’
The answers came fast, mostly 9s and 10s. The lowest was an 8. One person typed 11. Those numbers tell you everything you need to know.