LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Maura Aaron Smiley, and this is the Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection

of mental health and work and how we can all do both better.

Ever have one of those days where you're just jolted awake, an hour, maybe even two hours before your alarm goes off?

Your mind is flooded with everything you've got to get done from your

morning routine, the people to keep track of, your work meetings needing to get the boiler fixed.

And it doesn't stop there because you might also be worrying about whether you use the right

words in a meeting last week, whether your partner is mad at you, whether

you'll ever be good enough. Ah, the twisted comfort of overthinking. You might have seen the

factoid going around the internet as of late that in fact, not everyone has a constant monologue

going on in their head. Well, I definitely do.

And it's something I can relate to today's guest about as well.

Meredith Arthur is chief of staff at 220, an in-house incubator at Pinterest.

And she wrote the book, Get Out of My Head, Inspiration for Overtinkers in an Anxious World. I started by asking Meredith

if she considers herself an overthinker and why? I would say actually that I'm in recovery.

I'm a recovering overthinker.

Before I knew that I actually had generalized anxiety disorder, I was diagnosed at age 40, which is now seven years ago, in the middle of a very intense slew of startups.

But before that, I would proudly describe myself as an overthinker on social media.

Was it because I thought it made me smart? I don't know. I just know that I spent a lot of time

thinking about things and rehashing. And I didn't understand that that was something that I should work on.

How do you know you're recovering?

Well, I think it is one of those things like all recovery where you're sort of always in the state of recovering.

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