I spent four years running a complete infrastructure rebuild at SurveyMonkey. Rebuild that touched every system, every team, every bit of politics in the company. And culminated in an audit, followed by an IPO—while completely undiagnosed. I didn't know I had ADHD yet. I just knew I was anxious all the time. And I was good enough at self-reflection and analysis to treat that anxiety like a system to debug.
I could tell you exactly what set it off. A vague Slack message from the CTO. A meeting I hadn't prepared for. The gap between what I'd promised and what my org actually shipped. I could map the whole chain and hand it back to myself like a postmortem: root cause found, ticket closed.
Except the anxiety never closed. It just got better documented.
That's intellectualization—turning a feeling into an essay about the feeling instead of an encounter with it. And if you got good at your job by being the sharpest analyst in the room, there's a good chance you've been doing the same thing to your own inner life for years, and calling it self-awareness.
The trap smart people fall into
This pattern is simple and a little uncomfortable: highly analytical people turn therapy—and reflection in general—into a purely cognitive exercise. They can name their attachment style, narrate their trauma responses, produce a tidy theory of why they are the way they are. None of it moves anything, because explaining a feeling and feeling it run on different circuitry.
Cognitive reappraisal, the "reframe the situation" tool most therapists and coaches teach, genuinely helps. It also happens to be the exact hiding spot a sharp mind is built for. You reframe your way around the feeling instead of through it, and call it progress.
There's a neurological piece to this, too. The brain regions involved in narrating and analyzing (the default mode network) and the ones that flag something as emotionally relevant (the salience network) aren't the same as the ones that register what's actually happening inside your body—a process called interoception.
For a lot of ADHD brains, that interoceptive signal comes in weaker or noisier than average, which overlaps with something clinicians call alexithymia: real difficulty identifying and naming what you feel, not just reluctance to talk about it. If the internal signal is faint, the brain does what it's good at instead. It analyzes.
Why this hits ADHD leaders harder
For the leaders I work with—VPs of engineering, CTOs, founders—intellectualizing isn't a character flaw or a failure of self-awareness. It's the exact same machine that got them promoted, pointed at the wrong target.
Pattern recognition. Fast synthesis. The ability to build a coherent model out of incomplete data under pressure. That's the job. Point that machine at your own nervous system and it will produce a brilliant, plausible, completely useless model of your anxiety instead of an actual meeting with it.
Which is why the standard advice—"stop overthinking it," "get out of your head"—doesn't really land with this crowd. Telling an analytical brain to stop analyzing is like telling a chef to stop tasting the sauce. The fix isn't less thinking. It's building a second channel that doesn't route through language at all.
Four ways to actually get in the body
Ask where, not why. When something spikes—frustration in a meeting, dread before a 1:1—resist the urge to ask "why am I feeling this." Ask "where do I feel this." Chest, gut, jaw, neck. Get a one-word answer before you're allowed to start explaining anything.
Give yourself a two-pass limit. If you've analyzed the same feeling more than twice, you've stopped gaining insight and started avoiding the thing. Set a hard rule: two passes of thinking, then switch to a body check. No third lap.
Run 30-second scans at transition points. Not a meditation practice, just data collection. Before you join a call, before you open Slack, before you walk into that meeting—thirty seconds, head to toe, notice what's tight. You're building a signal where there used to be static.
Use a physical anchor in the moment. Feet flat on the floor. The temperature of your coffee cup. One slow exhale longer than the inhale. Small, boring, and it works precisely because it doesn't require a single thought about why you're anxious.
None of this replaces working with someone whose job is to interrupt the loop—a therapist or coach who notices when you're narrating instead of feeling, and asks you to drop into the body instead of handing you a better story. That outside interruption matters more than any technique on this list, because you cannot out-analyze your own blind spot alone.
I delivered that project at SurveyMonkey, the company passed the audit, and went public. I also burned out, and no amount of detailed analysis stopped that. What eventually changed things wasn't a better explanation of my anxiety. It was learning to feel it while it was happening, instead of writing the postmortem in my journal afterward.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's worth a conversation. Not to help you analyze your ADHD more precisely—you're already excellent at that. To help you catch it in your body before it burns you out.
Sources: Intellectualization—Psychology Today; What Is Alexithymia and How Does It Relate to Adult ADHD?—New Age Psychiatry; Intellectualizing Emotions in ADHD—Neurolaunch; Making Sense of Interoception—Harvard Medicine Magazine