So Be It: Science-backed self-mastery for success so you can prosper with purpose

You’re a Problem Solver, Therapy Hasn’t Worked - This Is Why

• Dr Amen Kaur

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Why smart, self-aware people get stuck in rumination - and how safety, not more thinking, creates change...

Tired of doing everything “right” and still feeling stuck?

This episode with Dr Amen Kaur explores a hard truth many capable, self-aware people face: when a sharp, analytical mind tries to heal emotional pain through more thinking, rumination takes over. It feels productive and addictive at times - but research shows it often magnifies negative emotion, narrows perspective, and predicts depression, anxiety, relapse, and stalled healing.

If you grew up intelligent, self-reliant, and undertrained in emotional regulation, your brilliance may actually be working against you - not because you’re broken, but because your nervous system never learned how to feel safe before solving problems.

In this episode, I share the turning point from my own journey- how insight kept piling up while real-life results didn’t change and ground it in long-term psychological research. Large-scale longitudinal studies show that rumination predicts the onset of depression (even in people who weren’t depressed to begin with), increases anxiety and trauma symptoms, and is linked to poorer outcomes in talk-based therapies when rumination isn’t addressed directly.

We break down what actually helps:
 • Why problem-solving fails when the nervous system is dysregulated
 • How rumination keeps you stuck in defense instead of healing
 • Why insight alone doesn’t create relief
 • How biological safety restores clarity, context, and forward momentum

You’ll learn how compassion interrupts the inner courtroom, why your body—not your thoughts—holds the signal for change, and how to recognize the exact moment to shift from thinking to sensing.

We also explore how rumination hijacks attention, causes you to miss real opportunities right in front of you, and keeps highly intelligent people stuck for years - not because nothing changes, but because their system can’t perceive change.

You’ll leave with practical, body-led prompts you can use today:
regulate first, name the feeling without judgment, then choose the next small, grounded action.

Your mind isn’t broken. It’s brilliant and overburdened.
Give it a safer body to think from, and clarity returns naturally.

If this resonates, follow the show, share this episode with someone who overthinks, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

🌿 Free Gift for My Listeners:
If you’ve been feeling stuck, overthinking, or ready for a calmer, more confident way to grow — I have a free masterclass for you.

It’s called “How to Reset Your Biology for Calm, Confident Success — Even If You’ve Faced Setbacks.”

You’ll learn how to release survival stress, regulate your nervous system, and grow from safety, not struggle.

🎁 Watch it free here → www.amenkaur.com/masterclass

Because you can only grow as far as your body feels safe to go — and it’s time to start again from calm, clarity, and connection. 🌸

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🧠 Best For: Empowerment, self-help, confidence, mindset, healing, manifestation, entrepreneurship, psychology-based growth, neurobiology, success without burnout.

⚖️ Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not replace professional advice.

If engaging in guided practices, ensure you’re in a safe, grounded space.
By listening, you accept full responsibility for how you use this information.

SPEAKER_00:

If you've done all the therapy, you've read all the books, the podcasts, you're listening to all the podcasts, and you still feel stuck. This episode is for you. Not because you haven't tried enough. I know you're trying so hard, and you're so super intelligent and you're researching and you're way above others in terms of your understanding, but because what you've been trying is actually making you stay stuck. And this is for a specific group of people. Okay. This is for the intelligent, this is for the self-aware. This is for those people that analyze. You're so sharp and you see things other people don't see, and you have a really deep understanding of yourself and you understand what your problems are, but you don't know what to do about it. You don't know how to fix it. And you understand that you have the understanding, but you still can't fix it. Now, I want you to think about this. If you grew up in a scenario where you were in a loving environment, or maybe you weren't in a loving environment, but you weren't taught emotional regulation. Like emotions weren't really talked about. You had to sort those out by yourself. And you're highly intelligent. This podcast is for you because more thinking will not necessarily bring more relief. Let's look at the science behind it. And this information that you're going to get today is going to be the most important information that you can have because more thinking will actually make things worse. I want to share something really personal with you. I personally did everything right. I went through difficult scenarios, I went through trauma. I was highly focused on positive mindset, did all the right things, got quite high up in my career and things like that. When things started getting wrong, because I was so into positive mindset and coaching and things like that, I thought, okay, I'm going to go and get help. And I did what most people do, which is like talk therapy. I started looking at my own patterns. I started looking at, okay, I keep doing this pattern where I do well, I really do well. And then something happens in relationships or something like that. And then I have to start over again. I go through a mini collapse and I have to get back up again. And I could explain all my trauma in detail in terms of I understand that I'm doing this because of this happened in my life in the past. But yet nothing was changing in my life. Like literally, the results in my life weren't changing. And I was used to if you actually change your mindset, your life should change. You should start seeing better results because I am quite results driven. If anything, I found that I was going down this rabbit hole of trying to understand what my problem was. And I felt more and more exhausted. And the truth is, I was more stuck. Like I felt like I was trapped almost in all these thoughts. It was all consuming like constantly. The more aware I was getting didn't mean I was becoming more free and happier and more like success was coming in my life. And I started at that time to think that there's something wrong with me. Like I just genuinely thought I know there's something wrong with me. And I was ashamed of it. Like I didn't want anyone to know that there was something wrong with me. It was like a secret. And I didn't even want to think it because I was into my positive mindset. I didn't want to think that there was something wrong with me. But it was like this feeling that was there all the time. Now I know there was nothing wrong with me. It was rumination. That was my problem. And this isn't just my experience. I have seen this from my clients time and time again. The highly intelligent ones tend to come to me because they don't know how to regulate themselves and how to stop their mind being taken over by something that happened in their past that's affecting their success moving forward. They're highly intelligent people. They want success. They know they're meant for more. They know they're meant to do more. They know they are supposed to do something great in the world with this incredible mind they have, but they are looping over something that happened in the past, and all their energy is going into what they did to them. And it's not just my experience, it might be your experience, and it could be something you've seen other people do. But we have seen it repeatedly in large-scale long-term research as well. Research in science is showing this as well. Long-titunal studies following people for six weeks up to five years show that rumination predicts the onset of depression, even in people who are not depressed to begin with. It might be that research and analyzing and looking at the situation is making things worse. And the research doesn't just stop there. The research predicts anxiety disorders, PTSD symptoms, substance abuse, and eating disorders, even after researchers controlled for initial symptoms. So if your mind keeps looping, I want you to really understand this. It's not because you're weak, it's not because you're not smart enough or intelligent enough, but it's because you are intelligent, you're trying to work things out and problem solve when it's not possible for you to problem solve in that way. Because something biological is happening within you. It's not a mindset or a thinking thing that you need to sort out. It's more a biological thing that you need to look at. And this is really important, okay. I really want you to understand it's not you, it's not that you've done anything wrong, it's just that you are missing a skill set from growing up, like emotional regulation when you were growing up, and you were blessed with a high level of intelligence, analyzing, thinking, problem solving. And this is really important, okay, to really get this. Because sometimes we can give ourselves a really hard time. That why do I do this? Why have I allowed this? Why do I allow people to treat me like this? Why can I not get out of this? Why is this happening to me? Especially for someone that ruminates. Questions come up all the time. Like you're always asking questions because you're highly intelligent. Rumination is considered a transdiagnostic process. This means it cuts across diagnosis. It's not who you are, okay? That rumination that you're doing is not who you are. It's a process that your nervous system learned from a young age. It's like a survival mechanism. When you were younger, maybe it was your intelligence that got you through and helped you solve problems and kept you safe. And here's the part most people don't know. Okay. Studies show that elevated rumination at the start of treatment predicts poorer outcomes in cognitive behavioral therapy. I really want if you've done therapy and you're finding it is not helping you, if anything, it's making things worse. And look, cognitive behavioral therapy is really good for those, for people that need the space to think. But if you're a really good thinker and you're someone that's highly intelligent, you probably don't really need cognitive behavioral therapy because you're probably ahead of the person that's talking to you, as in the therapist, because you're highly intelligent. Studies are showing that elevated rumination. So if you're someone that is likely to ruminate at the start of treatment, it means that at the beginning of the treatment, if you have that, you will have poorer outcomes in cognitive behavioral therapy. The more you keep talking, the worse it's going to be. That includes longer time to remission, reduced likelihood of recovery, and higher rates of relapse. This is why some people just stay in talk therapy for like ever and they keep talking about it, but they're not actually making progress. They're just because what it is is they haven't identified that the problem is rumination and not the problem itself. Okay. Let's just really look at this. So let me give you an example. I remember I got into a taxi, and this was a couple of years ago, and Saxi Driver was talking about his relationship with his partner, and he was talking about it as if it was really bad, and I could see in his body language, and not that I could see the whole of his face, but you could tell that he was really upset through his voice and everything that it really hurt him how his partner had treated him. And I was like, Whoa, it must have happened quite recently. He's obviously going through a lot. And I said, When did it happen? When did this divorce happen? And he's oh, 10 years ago. And I was like, Whoa. So, how many times is this person talking about this problem? And it's obviously ruminating in his mind, he's highly intelligent, and he's ruminating over this, and he's probably not meeting his potential because he's ruminating. And it's consuming him, but it's 10 years ago. So this is a really good example of what this study is saying. It says that it's longer time to remission, reduced likelihood of recovery, and higher rates of relapse. So even mindfulness-based CBT shows its pattern. If rumination doesn't reduce, symptoms don't improve. So if therapy hasn't helped you, it doesn't mean that therapy is bad or that you can't be helped. I really want you to get this. CBT is good in certain circumstances, but it might not be the right thing for you. If the mind was never where healing needed to happen, it means the mind was never where the healing needed to happen. Okay? So it wasn't the mind that was the problem. Your mind is super amazing, but that's not where the healing needs to happen. Rumination isn't about problem solving. Another study shows that rumination actually magnifies the negative emotion that started the problem in the first place. And it prolongs sadness, anxiety, anger, heaviness, okay? It actually impairs problem solving. This is a study. If you ruminate, the more you think about the problem, the m less likely you are to solve it. That's the problem. Because the way the mind works, the more you think about something. Say if, you know, you've never really thought about swimming pools, whether they're healthy or unhealthy. But the more you think about whether a swimming pool is healthy or unhealthy, the more polarized you become. You'd be like, oh no, swimming pools are a really great place to be because you're getting healthy, it's really good, exercise. But say if you think about something in a different way, and you think, Ashley, there's chlorine in there, there's lots of people that come into swimming pools. It's not the right thing. People should be swimming in the sea. The more your mind will become polar polarized about it. You'll be like, yes, this is it. That one experience that you might have had with someone turns into a story, and that has a meaning, then. Yeah, it becomes personal to you. You really embody, you really sense that, and that story then turns into a story about you. This is really important. That anything you truly, anything you really think about in a deep way means that there is a meaning behind it about how you see yourself. For instance, if someone was mean to me, then I will feel like, hey, that means that I'm there's something wrong with me. The more I think about it, the more it becomes about me, how they treated me, and what that means about me. And the more that happens, the more I have to feel like I have to defend myself in my own head. And then I'm ranting and raving in my own head and I'm ruminating. I noticed this so many times when I'd replay certain moments over and over again. You'd think I was crazy. I do this a lot when I was in the car. This is years ago. I was so stuck in that rumination and in the car. If I was by myself, I feel like it was time where I could really rant and rave in my head. Not because I wanted answers, but because I was defending myself. That this, what they had done, was so wrong to me. And they, how could they, and all this stuff? Because I didn't want to feel the pain underneath, or I wasn't taught emotional regulation growing up. I you my parents were loving, but I wasn't taught emotional regulation. It was like you be strong and you carry on, kind of thing. So I wanted, I was ranting and raving because I didn't have the tools to be able to regulate the pain. But when I stopped analyzing and I caught myself, oh my god, what am I doing? I'm literally talking out loud in in a car like I'm going crazy. And I allowed myself to feel the hurt. Okay, what is this really about? Why am I defending myself? What am I defending myself against? I was like, oh my gosh, I'm really hurt. I'm actually really hurt. And I looked at that hurt without judgment, with compassion and understanding towards myself. Yeah, it's understandable. The good friend would be. Like it was bad what you went through. Something shifted, something changed. Not clarity from thinking and but actually wisdom from feeling. Like I could get that, okay, I get what I'm really hurt about. I'm hurt because yes, someone can do something bad, there's evil in the world. But to stand back like this person did and not do anything and just watch while someone was bad towards another human being and not do anything and not step in, that pain really hurt me. I really felt like this deep pain. Like, how could you watch another woman be hurt like this and do nothing? It just felt so wrong. And then I really understood a quote. I really understood this quote by Edmund Burke. The only thing necessary for triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. And I really deeply understood the pain of that. Edmund Burke was trying to get across, the importance of it. And that's why we've experienced over the centuries and things like Hitler is that's evil when good men do nothing. Good men and women. Here's a quote that I think Satguru captures perfectly. This is someone that is quite spiritual, and he says that the mind is a powerful tool, but it when it runs compulsively, it becomes a suffering generator. And that's basically in a nutshell what rumination is. The solution to compulsiveness isn't force, it's awareness, it's consciousness. So when consciousness comes online, the loop loosens. Yeah, that's not all of what he's saying, but I'm trying to explain it. He talks about put the switch on and then you bring your consciousness back. And what we've got to do is allow ourselves to come back online, to connect back to the real you. And research shows that rumination reduces sensitivity as well to context, to really understanding the full context of stuff. And this is true, right? You can understand that just from a science background or just looking at science. When we're looking at doing research, you want to research something in a full context. You want to make sure you've got enough numbers, you want to have a control, you want to test based on full information. But when we're in our mind and we're ruminating, we're losing that ability to have the full context. So we can come away with skewed results. And there's actually been a study where if people are ruminating, they've put five pounds or money on the floor, and they see people, there's certain people that walk past and don't even see, they're so stuck in their head. And then there's others that actually see the money and they pick it up. So what rumination does, and research has shown this, is that you miss opportunities. You don't register change, and you can't learn from new evidence. So even though you're highly intelligent, rumination is such a problem because it's taking away your intelligence, which is so annoying for an intelligent person because it's, I know I should do better. I know I'm so intelligent, I should be able to do better at work or build a better career or whatever it is that you want. But because you're stuck in rumination, it's like you can't see opportunities like you used. Do. And that's why people can feel stuck for years, not because nothing has changed, but their system can't perceive the change. That's why it's such a shame, if you ask me. It's so sad when I see people that are highly intelligent who have got so much potential and they're meant to do something amazing with their mind, which is incredible, but they can't do it because something has happened that has triggered trauma and they need to process that emotion. So here's the shift that changes everything. You don't need to solve your life from a dysregulated state. Problem solving only works when your nervous system feels safe. So say if you're in rumination, first regulation, right? Create the space to regulate. When you feel happy, that is the only time you're allowed to problem solve. Not problem solve something that creates negativity in you, but problem solve something that helps you move forward. Yeah. To become the person that you're meant to be. Then you take action. So if you notice yourself looping and you're doing, you know, what I used to do, and you can say, Oh, I'm doing an ummon where I'm going through and thinking about and ranting and raving over something and defending and going over something in my head. Don't loop and think, how do I fix this? What could I have done differently? Ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? You know, what is it that I'm trying to defend or explain or protect myself from? And can I meet that feeling with compassion and not analysis? Really meet that feeling with understanding and know that there's hurt. That's where the shift begins. Your mind isn't broken, your mind is brilliant. If you're going through this, your mind is brilliant and you are meant for more. It just learn to protect yourself in a way that no longer works. And when you can stop obeying every thought, your body and its biology has space to be heard. Because your biology and your body is trying to tell you, I am hurt. That's where the real clarity comes from. And that's where you can really start to shift. Now, if you're interested in making 2026 your year, you are ready to stop ruminating and being in your head, and you want peace and you want to meet your potential where it should be, then I invite you to look in the show notes and to click on the link for my masterclass, my free masterclass, and listen to it because you will gain so much understanding about your biology and about how you can really shift and become the person that you're meant to be. Because you are meant for more. If you're this intelligent, it's just that your emotional regulation and your biology is holding you back from becoming who you are meant to be in your career, is holding you back. So let's get you to where you meant to be in 2026 and download and listen to the masterclass and start that change today. I want to send you so much love and understanding and compassion because what you've been through, whatever it is, has been tough. And I understand that you are in that thinking, and I want you to know that you're brilliant. But bring love and compassion and understanding to yourself because that is the key to unlock your greatness. I'm sending you so much love. Till next time.