The whole point of the show
How to Stop Crashing Out
A crash out is what happens when everything you have been holding comes out at once, usually at the wrong person, usually over something small. Here is what we have worked out about it across a year of episodes, and what actually helps.
1) The thing that set you off is almost never the thing
Nobody crashes out over a dishwasher, or a Slack message, or a tone. You crash out because that one landed on top of a week of things you never dealt with. The last one is just the one that got the reaction.
If your reaction is bigger than the thing, the thing is not what you are reacting to. That is the first question worth asking yourself, and it is usually the uncomfortable one.
2) Give it twenty four hours
This is the rule we keep landing back on. If you are fired up, you do not send it, say it or decide it today. Not because your feelings are wrong, but because the version of you writing that message at 11pm is not the one who has to live with it tomorrow.
What to do with the twenty four hours:
- write the message you want to send, and do not send it
- say the whole thing out loud to someone who is not involved
- sleep before you decide anything
- come back to it the next day and see if you still mean it
Most of the time you will not. Sometimes you will, and then you say it properly instead of throwing it. More on that in the episode about the decision you keep avoiding.
3) Composure is a power move, not a personality
Nobody tells you that the calmest person in the room is usually the one running it. Not the loudest, and not the most right. The one who did not flinch.
The way we put it on Stop Crashing Out: staying levelheaded is not being cold, it is being in control of yourself before you try to control anything else.
It lands in your tone long before it lands in your words, which we take apart in the episode on sounding calm at work.
4) Know what sets you off, specifically
Not in general. Specifically. Most people can name the big obvious ones and miss the pattern completely, because the pattern is boring. You are worse on no sleep. You are worse when you have not eaten. You are worse on the days you had three things back to back and no gap.
Write them down for two weeks and it stops being a mystery:
- what happened
- what you did
- what else was already going on that day
That is the whole idea behind the Tear Shed Calendar, which we built because one of us was already doing it in her own calendar before we knew it was the show. You log the crash outs, and you watch the gaps between them get longer.
5) Spiralling is not the same as caring
Doom scrolling at 2am about things you cannot affect feels like staying informed. It is closer to avoidance with better branding, and it leaves you with less for the things you can actually change. That is the whole of Too Hot to Spiral.
Ask what you are going to do differently because of the thing you just read. If the answer is nothing, you are not informed, you are activated.
6) Some of it is the room, not you
If you are crashing out every week in the same job, or with the same person, it is worth asking whether you are the problem or whether you are in something that would do this to anybody. A workplace with a mandatory cooling off rule and a literal crying room is not a you problem. We go through how to tell toxic from culty.
When it is bigger than a bad week
We are two people with a podcast, not therapists. If this is happening constantly, or it frightens you, or it is hurting people you love, that is worth taking to someone qualified. Everything on this page is for the ordinary version, the one where your life is fine and you still lost it at your friend over nothing.
Don’t crash out. Level out.