When your head gets loud, make something with your hands. It turns the volume down.

Thinking your way out of a loud mind tends to give the mind more to work with. Physical making occupies a different part of you: the hands need attention, the material pushes back, and the looping thought loses its audience. It is not avoidance so much as changing the channel the effort runs on.

Keep something available that requires your hands and very little planning. Bread, a sketch, a repair, a scale on an instrument. Twenty minutes of it will usually lower the volume more reliably than twenty minutes spent trying to reason with yourself.