Overview of If Your Mind Won’t Be Quiet, Listen to This
This “best of” episode of We Can Do Hard Things is a deeply personal and spiritual conversation about anxiety, disordered thinking, and learning not to live inside your own head. Glennon Doyle shares how a relapse into bulimia and a mental-health low point led her to revisit The Untethered Soul and rethink her relationship to her thoughts. The core message: your mind is a tool, not your home—and peace comes from noticing thoughts rather than obeying them.
Main Themes
Living in the wrong place
- Glennon describes her mind as a “haunted house” full of nonstop judgment, control, catastrophizing, and self-attack.
- The central shift she describes is realizing the problem may not be that she is “losing her mind,” but that she is living there.
The “inner roommate” and nonstop mental chatter
- The episode explores the idea that the mind is constantly narrating, judging, and assigning meaning.
- Glennon and Abby discuss the “inner roommate” concept: an internal voice that comments on everything, argues with itself, and tries to keep you safe through fear and control.
- The key insight is that these thoughts are not necessarily truth—they’re mental noise.
The self beyond thoughts
- Glennon distinguishes between:
- the thinking mind,
- emotions,
- and the deeper self that notices both.
- She argues that the true self is the observer, or “the you in there,” which is not defined by age, gender, conditioning, or passing thoughts.
- This framing connects to spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, and concepts like the soul or consciousness.
Key Metaphors and Ideas
The touch tree
- Glennon revisits her “touch tree” metaphor from Untamed:
- in survival, you leave a recognizable tree as a base and return to it repeatedly.
- She uses this to describe how we should return to a stable inner center instead of wandering too far into our thoughts or outside demands.
The GPS analogy
- The brain is like a GPS: useful when given a destination, dangerous when allowed to drive on its own.
- Glennon says she trusts her brain to execute tasks, but not to lead her life.
The three-ring circus
- The mind, emotions, and outer world are all happening at once.
- The spiritual task is to notice all three without mistaking them for your true identity.
Eden, judgment, and exile
- Glennon links mental judgment and constant sorting into “good/bad” with the biblical story of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
- For her, the fall from Eden symbolizes the mind’s tendency to judge and control instead of resting in peace and wholeness.
Practical Takeaways
How to work with a noisy mind
- Notice when you are thinking: “Oh, I’m thinking again.”
- Treat thoughts as passing events rather than commands or identities.
- Don’t try to win the argument inside your head—step back from it.
- Use practices like meditation or yoga to rehearse returning to awareness.
A healthier approach to stress and activism
- The episode strongly emphasizes that inner peace is not passive.
- Abby and Glennon argue that acting from a calm, centered place makes you more effective in changing the world.
- The goal is not to ignore injustice, but to stop being ruled by panic while confronting it.
Stop accepting everyone else’s assignments
- Amanda frames this as refusing to automatically take on the emotional “assignments” of other people, the culture, or every outside disturbance.
- Instead of reacting to everything, ask:
- “What part of me is disturbed by this?”
- “What do I actually choose to do here?”
Right-sized responsibility
- The only real project, they suggest, is yourself.
- You can’t control the whole world, but you can decide what you take in, what you act on, and how you show up.
Notable Insights
- “The problem isn’t that I’m losing my mind. The problem is that I’m living there.”
- “You will never be free of problems until you are free of the part of you that has so many problems.”
- “We are trying to fix what’s out there instead of making it pleasant in here.”
- “Nothing is okay, and there’s a place where everything is okay.”
- “We will be happy, so everything will be perfect.”
Bottom Line
This episode is a call to step out of compulsive thinking and into a steadier, truer place beneath it. Glennon frames that shift as both a mental-health survival strategy and a spiritual practice: notice the mind, don’t obey it, and return again and again to the deeper self that can hold peace, dignity, and clarity—even in a chaotic world.