A few days ago, I found myself stewing after a conversation that didn’t go well. It wasn’t dramatic, just one of those interactions that leaves a little emotional residue. I knew it wasn’t helpful to replay it, looping the dialogue in my head, rewriting my part, wondering what I should have said instead. But there I was anyway, hours (maybe days?) later, still caught in the mental swirl.
The interesting part wasn’t the conversation. It was what happened after.
At some point in my rumination, a memory popped up. I remembered a podcast I’d listened to a while back with Dr. Judy Sedgeman. I really respect Judy’s work, and in that episode, she said something like, “When you’re in a low mood, the best thing you can do is distract yourself. Look out the window, go for a walk, shift your attention.”
That sounded reasonable. So I tried it. I went for a walk. I stared at the trees. I looked up at the sky with all the hope of someone trying to outsmart a bad mood.
But the thoughts came with me. It didn’t work. Or at least, it didn’t work the way I thought it should.
That’s when I started to see something.
I realized that I had misunderstood what Judy was pointing to. I took her wisdom as a strategy—something I needed to do in order to change my feeling state. But I don’t think that’s what she meant.
She wasn’t offering a technique. She was pointing to a truth:
That our moods and emotional states are created by thought, not by events.
And that when we’re caught up in a low mood, it’s because we’re caught up in thought.
Trying to fix a mood by distracting ourselves can look helpful, but if it’s coming from a place of urgency or resistance (“I need to get out of this”), we are just pouring more thought into the already roiling thought-storm.
The more I looked at it, the more I saw that my suffering was coming from two illusions working together:
I believed my feelings were coming from the event—the interaction itself—instead of from my thinking about it.
I believed I needed to do something to fix my mood or get back to clarity.
That’s what made it sticky.
But when I saw those illusions for what they were—thought-generated, innocent misunderstandings—something softened. Not immediately, but gently. The mental storm started to pass, not because I tried to change it, but because I stopped believing it needed changing.
Peace returned on its own. Like it always does.
What I'm learning (again and again):
Clarity isn’t something I have to chase.
Well-being doesn’t need to be restored. It was never gone.
And the mind, left alone, knows how to settle.
Sometimes we don’t need to distract ourselves.
We just need to stop arguing with the clouds.