Stuck in your thoughts? How Somatic Coaching helps expats in the Netherlands with overthinking

When you move countries, many of the predictable patterns that your brain relied on to feel safe fade into the background. A new culture, a different job, changing relationships and a shifting sense of home and belonging become your new reality. While you may no longer feel like the same "you" from before, you still have plenty of decisions to navigate that are crucial to your life here.

Have you ever found yourself going over the same decision, difficult conversation or next step again and again? You may be hoping that thinking more will finally bring clarity. As you replay scenarios, you search for answers that fit the new you as an expat in the Netherlands.

But when uncertainty is high, overthinking can sometimes leave us feeling less prepared to move forward.

When thinking becomes a loop: Why expats experience decision fatigue

Overthinking is often described as being in your head, like buffering when the Wi-Fi drops. A client once put it this way: “It’s like being trapped in a room where the walls are made of my own thoughts. I can see the door, but I struggle to reach it.”

In my coaching practice in The Hague, I’ve worked with clients of 17 nationalities. Languages, cultures and stories differ, but overthinking speaks every language fluently.

Whoever I meet, similar patterns appear:

• A spiral pulling you inward or down
• Paths folding into a maze with no visible exit
• A bundle of knots circling back on themselves

AI-assisted improvisations of real overthinking patterns

Do any of these speak to you? You might try to think through every possible outcome to avoid making a mistake. It creates the illusion of control, even when little has actually been resolved.

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Overthinking lives in your body too. Your nervous system is constantly responding to what it perceives around and within you. When something feels uncertain, you might notice your jaw tightening, your shoulders rising, your breath growing shallow, or a knot forming in your stomach.

The cost can be tangible: presence in your closest relationships, trust in yourself, opportunities you step away from or simply how comfortable you feel in your own body.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’ll know that telling yourself to “stop overthinking” works about as well as trying to “fiets” out from under a Dutch rain cloud. You pedal harder, and it follows you anyway.

So instead of thinking your way out of the loop, what if you let your body lead the way out?

Listening to the body: Finding your way forward

Overthinking patterns are shaped by lived experience, what the nervous system learned to protect us from, limiting beliefs and the weight of other people’s expectations. It takes shape over time, mostly below conscious awareness, in the places we hold our breath without knowing why.

Maybe it’s the knot in your stomach, the tightness in your chest or the scratch in your throat. The instinct is often to drown out these sensations and search for answers elsewhere. But clarity often hides closer than you think, and rarely in someone else’s framework. It tends to surface when you slow down, quiet the noise and listen from within, accepting yourself just as you are.

Carl Rogers famously said: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” I’ve seen this play out in practice: when we stop fighting our thoughts and self-judgements and start trusting ourselves, growth tends to follow naturally.

What if you give yourself that same judgement-free space? Perhaps open yourself up to experience your senses as if for the very first time, play with your breath and let your awareness loosen the loop enough to find your own natural way forward.

How Body-Oriented Coaching helps expats move forward

On paper, the realities of the leaders and professionals I coach look different. But most know what it feels like to be paralysed by an unmade decision, or being stuck without a clear way forward.

When overthinking keeps getting in the way of the life you want, whether at work or closer to home, you don’t have to work it out alone. A conversation with a coach might make a difference.

The real value lies in partnership: working to find your own answers rather than following someone else’s advice. That partnership can open new perspectives and new possibilities.

In my practice, I find Somatic or Body-Oriented Coaching works particularly well for overthinking. It integrates body sensations and nervous system signals with your thoughts and emotions. Instead of adding more insight on top of an already crowded mind, it offers the gift of slowing down enough to listen beneath the thoughts. 

Following what the body already knows. Bringing patterns into lived, felt experience rather than just conceptual understanding. Creating the conditions for self-acceptance in your body-mind, rather than through affirmations or verbal commitment alone. Now, alongside your conceptual understanding, you also have a felt sense to guide your way forward.