There’s something magical that happens when your hands are buried in the soil, your knees are covered in grass stains, and the sun decides to peek through the clouds just enough to warm your back. Gardening has always been a source of peace for me—but lately, I’ve come to realize it’s been something more. It’s therapy. It’s a mirror. And oddly enough, it’s become a metaphorical battlefield where I fight my most persistent mental habit: overthinking.
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s a Tuesday morning, a rare day off, and I’ve decided to finally tackle the wildly overgrown patch in the corner of my backyard. The weeds have been having a party, and clearly, I wasn’t invited. I put on my old sneakers, grab my gardening gloves, and head out with the determination of someone about to perform minor surgery on their lawn.
Within minutes, I’m elbow-deep in dandelions and creeping charlie. And that’s when it starts.
Not the weeding. The thinking. The overthinking.
“Should I have started with this corner? Is this the best tool for this? What if I pull something I actually planted on purpose last year and just forgot about?”
Ten minutes in, I’m not just pulling weeds—I’m pulling at threads of thoughts that unravel into anxious spirals. What started as a chore has turned into an existential examination. Am I doing enough in life? Should I have sent that email differently? Did I say something weird to my friend yesterday? The thoughts bloom faster than the weeds I’m trying to remove.
But then, something interesting happens. I stop caring.
Not in a careless way, but in a liberating, freeing kind of way. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth dandelion root, my brain gets tired of spinning. My body takes over. The rhythm of weeding—dig, twist, pull—starts to quiet the noise.
There’s a strange clarity that comes when you’re physically engaged with the earth. Weeding, as it turns out, is incredibly grounding (pun very much intended). As I moved from one section of the garden to the next, I noticed the same thoughts circling back, like persistent crabgrass. But this time, I just noted them and kept going.
Maybe that’s the first lesson: not every thought needs a resolution. Some just need to be acknowledged and then left to decompose like a pile of compost.
There’s a mindfulness to gardening that you can’t fake. Plants are honest. They don’t lie. They tell you exactly what’s wrong if you know how to look. Too much sun, too little water, roots too crowded—there’s always a reason. That kind of honesty is refreshing when you’re someone like me who can get caught up trying to read between the lines of every social interaction or email subject line.
In the garden, there is no passive-aggressiveness. There are no vague texts to decipher. A wilting tomato plant doesn’t hold a grudge. It just needs more water.
And then there’s the satisfaction. Oh, the satisfaction. There is nothing quite like yanking out a stubborn root that’s been choking the life out of your marigolds. It’s visceral. It’s real. It’s proof that you can, in fact, remove things from your life that don’t belong there.
It’s hard not to draw parallels between weeding and mental clarity. Every time I clear a patch of invasive plants, it feels like I’m reclaiming a bit of my headspace, too. The visual transformation mirrors the internal one. That corner of my yard looks better, and I feel better.
Of course, overthinking doesn’t just vanish with a few hours of yard work. It’s not that easy. But it does shift. Gardening reminds me that some things take time. You don’t plant a seed and expect fruit the next morning. You nurture. You wait. You adjust.
So maybe the same goes for mental health. Maybe clarity doesn’t come from solving everything at once. Maybe it comes from showing up, getting your hands dirty, and trusting that progress is happening, even if you can’t see it yet.
I’ve started to notice the difference in other areas of my life, too. When I’m stuck in a loop—should I text back now or wait, is this the right decision, am I good enough—I try to channel that same gardening mindset. What do I actually know right now? What can I do in this moment? What can I let be?
Weeds will always come back. That’s just how nature works. But now I see that not as a failure, but as a reminder. Maintenance is part of life. The goal isn’t to have a perfect, pristine garden. The goal is to keep tending to it.
Some days I’m more present than others. Some days I let the crabgrass win. But every time I go back out there, I come back a little lighter. A little more okay with not having all the answers.
And maybe that’s the point.
So yes, I am literally weeding out my overthinking. It’s a process. A messy, moody, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of process. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because in the end, clarity doesn’t bloom in the noise. It grows quietly, stubbornly, in the dirt—right alongside the weeds.