Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

The ancient Stoics understood these principles well, with Epictetus saying, “Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.” We have power over our minds, not outside events. So, if we continue to focus on outside events that we don’t have power over, the conclusion is obvious—we repeatedly experience powerlessness and therefore anxiety.

Many of us have become habitual overthinkers because it gives us the illusion that we’re doing something about the problem we’re overthinking about. So, if James is worried about his health, it’s natural that him overthinking endlessly about the various causes and solutions makes it seem like he’s trying to get to the bottom of the issue. But the truth is that overthinking often doesn’t lead anywhere, because the overthinker gets trapped in the cycle of analyzing, rejecting, and reconsidering different possibilities. It’s like scratching an itch that just won’t go away. You can scratch it to feel some momentary relief, but it won’t make the itching stop despite how good scratching might feel.

Remember that forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not the other person. When you forgive, you are releasing yourself from the stress and energy of resenting and blaming the other person.

Stress and anxiety are not the same thing. Psychologist Dr. Sarah Edelman explains that stress is something in the environment, an external pressure on us, whereas anxiety is our internal experience of this pressure.

If we hope to successfully tackle overthinking, we need to take a step back rather than trying to work through the problem from inside our own rumination.

More alarming than this, overthinking can completely warp your perception of events in time, shaping your personality in ways that mean you are more risk averse, more negatively focused and less resilient. When you’re constantly tuned into Stress FM you are not actually consciously aware and available in the present moment to experience life as it is. You miss out on countless potential feelings of joy, gratitude, connection and creativity because of your relentless focus on what could go wrong, or what has gone wrong.

A 2010 paper published by Killingsworth and Gilbert titled “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” found that the brain is ultimately spending as much time stewing over what is not happening as it is over what is happening.

In other words, though it might not feel like it in the moment, a big cause of anxiety can come down to intrinsic factors within you as an individual.

People who are not subject to anxious overthinking have mastered a particular attitude to life that’s characterized by flexibility, focus, resilience, and beneficial action. Put your awareness

We all live in a highly strung, overstimulated, highly cerebral world. Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress. Endless analysis of life and of self is usually unwanted, unstoppable, and self-defeating. Ordinarily, our brains help us solve problems and understand things more clearly—but overthinking does the opposite.

The first thing you need to remember is a mantra called the 4 As of stress management. These are avoid, alter, accept, and adapt. Avoiding things entails simply walking away from things you can’t control. Some things are simply not worth the effort and are best removed from our environments

When you relax, your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure drop; your digestion and blood sugar levels improve; you moderate stress hormones in the body; you reduce fatigue and muscle pain; and you increase concentration, good sleep, and confidence. And all this spells less anxiety and rumination. Combined with other techniques in this book, relaxation is a powerful tool for mitigating the stress of living.

In fact, the moment he has that thought, his head is filled with seemingly millions of examples of all the times people have criticized him.

exacerbated

the brain is ultimately spending as much time stewing over what is not happening

Stress is a fact of life, but overthinking is optional!

Marcus E. Raichle is a neuroscientist who coined the term “default mode network,” which can be

Many of us have become habitual overthinkers because it gives us the illusion that we’re doing something about the problem we’re overthinking about.

He then puts a magnifying lens on all his flaws and starts turning each of them over in his mind, wondering why he is the way he is, tortured by the fact that he can’t seem to just “let it go.” After an hour of this, he realizes with despair that he is no closer to making a decision

So, it’s worth getting to the root of these thoughts, beliefs, and expectations and asking whether they lead to the kind of emotions and behaviors you actually want. If not, they can be changed.

the overthinker gets trapped in the cycle of analyzing, rejecting, and reconsidering different possibilities

then puts a magnifying lens on all his flaws and starts turning each of them over in his mind, wondering why he is the way he is, tortured by the fact that he can’t seem to just “let it go.” After an hour of this, he realizes with despair that he is no closer to making a decision about his health issue, and instantly feels depressed, sinking into a storm of negative self-talk where he tells himself over and over again that this always happens, that he never sorts himself out, that he’s too neurotic . . . Phew! It’s hard to see how all of this torment and mental anguish started with nothing more than James noticing he had a weird-looking mole on his shoulder! We all live in a highly strung, overstimulated, highly cerebral world. Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress. Endless analysis of life and of self is usually unwanted, unstoppable, and self-defeating. Ordinarily, our brains help us solve problems and understand things more clearly—but overthinking does the opposite. Whether you call it worry, anxiety, stress, rumination, or even obsession, the quality that characterizes overthinking is that it feels awful, and it doesn’t help us in any way.

Anxiety always lives elsewhere. It lingers around in the past, worrying about what has already happened (i.e., is out of your control, see attitude 1), or floats uselessly into the future, imagining a million stressful possibilities. But conscious awareness and useful action don’t belong elsewhere: they live in the present.

So, what’s really happening is that worries are controlling you rather than you controlling them. A stressful thought comes along and cracks the whip, and you instantly obey. The mistake we make is to think that if a negative thought comes along, there is no other option but to focus on it. Remember our brain’s negativity bias and our information-processing software that literally evolved to amplify bad news? It tells us that the threatening and scary thing always takes precedence.

When you forgive, you are releasing yourself from the stress and energy of resenting and blaming the other person.

For example, if you overthink consistently, your body will be flooded with cortisol and other stress hormones. This can leave you on edge, and in fact cause you to overthink even more, adding to the stress, changing the way you feel about yourself and your life.

Many overthinkers are at the mercy of an overactive brain

In 2000, Christine Heim and colleagues suggested that sexual abuse in childhood had the effect of “sensitizing” women to stress in adulthood, meaning their physiological response to stress was actually heightened compared to other people.

Consider this: Siamese cats possess genes that give the coat its characteristic coloring. The genes, however, are not set in stone, but rather express themselves conditionally in relation to the environment because they are temperature-sensitive. They are “switched on” in colder areas of the body (the brown tail tip, nose, ears, and feet) and turned off in warmer areas. If you raise a Siamese kitten in a very cool climate, it will be darker brown. In a warmer climate, it will look lighter. Thus, two cats with the same genetic makeup end up with a different phenotype, i.e., physiological expression of those genes.

They are desperate to solve the “problem,” not considering that their appraisal of what is a problem is in fact the problem.