"Thinking about it is working"

Look at your three lines from chapter 1. If your head was at work at nine, what was it doing there? I'd guess it was going over. The conversation again. How the thing will look if it goes wrong. Whether you should have said something, and what. That's the fret, and it's worth separating from the other thing your head could have been doing, which is the working-out.

Mark Cropley and colleagues asked 268 white-collar workers about what they did with work in their heads after hours, and found three kinds of thinking that came apart cleanly. The first they called affective rumination, which is going over the emotional side of work, how bad it was, how it'll go. The second they called problem-solving pondering, which is thinking that turns a problem over looking for a way through. The third was detachment, which is not thinking about it at all. The point is that the first two are different things. From the inside they can feel identical, because both are "thinking about work". They aren't.

Dawn Querstret and Mark Cropley then asked 719 workers about the same three kinds and about how tired they were. Affective rumination, the fret, was the strongest predictor of work-related fatigue, both the day-to-day kind and the kind that builds up. Problem-solving pondering, the working-out, predicted less fatigue. Their conclusion was that it isn't thinking about work that wears people out, it's the type. That's a survey, so it can't tell you which came first. But it fits what you'd expect if the fret spends energy and the working-out earns some of it back.

Here's a test I'd suggest, and it's mine, not theirs. At the end of an evening at the desk, ask whether you could write down one thing you now know or will do that you didn't know or hadn't decided at five. If you can, some of it was the working-out. If you can't, and there's usually nothing, then the whole evening was the fret. Having the meeting again with better lines produces no line you'll use. Imagining the project failing produces no step that stops it failing. The spreadsheet that reconciles behind your eyes doesn't reconcile on the screen.

There's a version of the working-out that does happen in the evening, and it's real, and chapter 12 gives it a place. But it's rarer than it feels, and a study by Abbas Firoozabadi and colleagues found that even evening problem-solving only helped recovery for people who were good at steering their own thoughts, and made it worse for the rest. For most of us, on most evenings, "thinking about it" is the fret wearing the working-out's clothes.