Make November's Mercury Retrograde Work For You, Not Against You By Doing These 5 Things
A Mercury retrograde in Sagittarius? Yeah, that's a mess. But it's also an opportunity.
Design: YourTango | Photo: max-kegfire from Getty Images, Canva As if 2025 hasn't been wild enough already, Mercury stations retrograde in Sagittarius on November 9, 2025. The planet of communication, technology, and thought stays retrograde all the way until November 29, just in time to finish out the year with a bit of wobbly weirdness — and maybe make Thanksgiving dinner even more awkward than usual.
Mercury retrograde is typically greeted with dread, as miscommunications, misunderstandings, technology failures, and general weirdness tend to be everywhere, stirring all our metaphorical pots. But as with all zodiac goings-on, they are also an opportunity. You just have to know how to leverage the energy and ask yourself the right questions.
Echo, a professional tarot reader and astrology expert at spirituality website Tarotap, says November's Mercury retrograde in Sagittarius will have all the weirdness and confusion you expect, but with Sagittarius' fiery, philosophical bluntness putting an extra bit of heat beneath the usual impacts. Therein lies both a hazard and an important opportunity to pause, look inward, and interrogate the stories we're telling ourselves and whether they actually align with who we are.
“When Mercury moves through Sagittarius, the energy isn’t about chaos, it’s about clarity," Echo says. "The retrograde invites us to notice where our beliefs might have drifted out of alignment with our lived reality. It’s a chance to rewrite our story with more honesty and less noise."
As Joan Didion famously said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," and it is our brains' job, in fact, to constantly create narratives that help make sense of our feelings and the world around us. The problem is, those stories are all too often nonsense. For instance, we blame ourselves for others' mistreatment of us because it's easier and often safer to do so, degrading our self-esteem in the process.
During Mercury retrograde, when clarity, solid intellect, and good communication tend to go out the window, our innate ability to mislead ourselves gets an extra boost. However, the following five rituals can help cut through this so we can emerge from November's Mercury retrograde with clarity instead of whiplash.
5 ways to make November's Mercury retrograde in Sagittarius work for you, not against you:
1. Rewrite your narrative
Echo suggests jotting down one core belief you've carried all year. Perhaps it's that you'll never find a new job, or your relationship will never get better, or you'll never be able to pursue your life's purpose.
Once you've written it down, Echo suggests asking yourself "what truth wants to replace this?" and then pulling a tarot card (there are myriad websites that will draw a tarot card for you if you don't own a deck). Let the card's message guide your rewrite of the narrative you've been holding onto, and practice telling yourself a new story — and don't let the chaos of Mercury retrograde dissuade you from it.
2. Listen to your inner voice
Each evening, spend 10 minutes in quiet with a notebook and pen beside you. If you need help getting your brain to settle, some deep breathing or meditation exercises can help you focus.
Once you've gotten to a quieter place, write the first sentence that surfaces from the calm. According to Echo, "these are often the messages Mercury wants you to hear," and they're just as often toxic narratives that need replacing (perhaps with the tarot exercise above) as they are insights.
3. Use anchor object
Because of the way Mercury retrograde messes with our communication, both in our understanding of others' words and in the way we speak to ourselves, it's often a time of heightened conflict. Wires get crossed, and patience often frays along with them.
Echo recommends choosing an item that represents clarity to you, perhaps a crystal, a favorite pen, a shiny coin, or whatever makes sense to you. Then keep it within eye-shot when speaking or writing during the retrograde. It will act as a visual reminder to slow down and think carefully before responding to others, to avoid misunderstandings.
4. Audit yourself
Echo suggests revisiting all of your journal entries, social media posts, emails — any of your communications — for the past three months since the last Mercury retrograde ended in August to see if any patterns emerge as far as those narratives you've been telling yourself.
Perhaps it's the topics you were discussing, or just merely the tone. Either way, ask yourself if those narratives are actually true and aligned with who you are and who you want to be or if they're rooted in old, outdated, and negative versions or views of yourself.
5. Practice gratitude
The hard truth is that no matter how much of this ritualistic turning inward you do, SOMETHING is gonna go sideways during the Mercury retrograde in Sagittarius, even if it's something insignificant. That's just the nature of the beast!
But nearly every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes, and Echo suggests countering the chaos by looking for and naming one positive outcome that arose from each delay, mishap or miscommunication that arises. It's a way to reframe the retrograde as guidance rather than punishment.
“Mercury retrograde doesn’t want to break your plans," Echo says. "It wants to strengthen your awareness. When we stop resisting its pauses, we begin to hear what life has been trying to tell us all along.” If nothing else, it will help us not lash out at Uncle Frank when he starts bloviating over the Thanksgiving turkey!
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
