The teaching schedule as it stands. What happens in each crit, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
Every crit runs on a provocation, an activity, and a discussion with no scripted answer. Bring what each one's brief below asks for; nothing else is assumed. All of them open with the same ten minutes of guided attention the lectures do.
A concept only gets named here after you have produced the thing it names. So the early crits are about the symptom you already recognise, the over-read message, the spiral with a funny ending. The argument the course is named for does not arrive until week 5, once you have your own examples to hold it against. Lecturesexplains that ordering and the research behind it.
Several involve saying something out loud about your own thinking. In all of them you can pass, at any point, without giving a reason. Nothing you share is marked, and nobody follows up.
The second half is partly yours to set. Afterthe anonymous thread, every technique students reported gets collected, stripped of identifying detail, and put to a vote on the forum. From the following week we try the room’s picks one at a time. So the back half of this list grows out of what the cohort actually found useful, not out of what the teaching staff guessed.
All twelve weeks are listed anyway, so you can see the whole semester rather than half of it. The back-half crits are marked provisional and are the teaching staff’s best guess at what the vote will land on. Treat them as a plan, not a promise. If the room picks something else, the room gets something else.
There is no class in the mid-semester break, between weeks 6 and 7. The forum post is due then, and it is the only thing due that week.
The layered "OK"
The opening crit. The group overanalyses a two-letter reply until it runs out of road, then works out where it could have stopped.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The reveal
Everyone brings something small they overthought; the room guesses the ending before you tell it.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Ten minutes, guided
The one technique with direct evidence against rumination. A meditation teacher runs it properly, once, after which the ten minutes are yours to keep or ignore.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Deliberately slow
We rush without deciding to. This crit halves the speed of three ordinary actions and finds out what that does, including the one where the evidence says the opposite of what everybody assumes.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The sandwich
Building an incubation slot on purpose. Everyone makes and eats a sandwich in silence, with nothing else running, to find out what a mind does when you finally give it nothing.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
How you stopped
The other half of the reveal. The funny, undignified and occasionally brilliant things that actually got you out of a spiral, collected into something the room can steal from.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Aim it at the good
The same overanalysis, run on a best-case scenario instead of a worst one. Overthinking as a skill you can point, not just a habit to suppress.
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
The worry appointment
The room's first voted pick. Booking a fixed slot for worrying, postponing everything into it, and finding out whether a loop will actually wait.
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
If, then
Turning a vague intention into a rule with a trigger in it. The room writes if-then plans for its own spirals, then tries to break them.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Write it out
Fifteen minutes of writing nobody will read, followed by the meta-analysis saying it barely works. The most recommended technique on the thread, held to the same standard as everything else.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
When it helps
The crit that argues against the course. Cases where more analysis genuinely was the right call, and how overthinking behaves differently in a group than it does alone.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Just find out
The last crit. Take a prediction you have been circling, design the cheapest possible test of it, and for some of you, run it before the hour is up.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027