UpJourney: How to Stop Overthinking Everything

(Featured contributor, find the complete article at https://upjourney.com/how-to-stop-overthinking-everything)

KRISTEN RUTH SMITH Author, The Overthinker’s Guide to Love: A Story of Real-Life Experiments Turned Practical Wisdom

Overthinking, in any capacity, stands upon two pillars: a projection of the mind out of the present moment into the future or past, and a propensity to assign imagined meaning to plain facts. Neutralize these underlying habits and we neutralize the overthinking.

Let us tackle the issue of imagined meaning first. Perhaps the most familiar example of this is the caricature of the woman who, upon receiving a post-date text, immediately calls up her girlfriend to parse the ‘real’ meaning of the happy face-clapping hands-eggplant emoji string.

Or, perhaps your friend seems quiet at a party, and you find yourself running a football-style-post-show-analysis of the incident wondering whether you unwittingly did something to offend him. In these cases, and the thousands like them, the facts of the encounters remain constant, but the experienced overthinker can extrapolate dozens of possible nuanced meanings from them.

This litany of interpretations, however, exist only in the imagination of the overthinker and are not, in actuality, getting us any closer to truly understanding the encounter.

To combat this habitual thought pattern, we have to catch ourselves doing it.

We have to recognize the worry, the repetition of thought, the mind returning to the issue like a dog to a bone. Only then can we parse fact from fantasy.

I’ve found the best way to do this is to literally speak the facts aloud as though reporting the events Dragnet-style. Just the facts, ma’am. “I walked into the living room. I saw Jon across the room and waved. Jon nodded to me and went back to his conversation.” Period.

If you hear yourself beginning to use emotion words, you’re out of the realm of facts. Try again. Getting the story distilled to what you actually know to be true will help quiet the overthinking imagination.

Focus on the now.

Turn now to the second part of this equation. Whether a particular overthinker’s personality tends toward repetitive rumination over a past encounter or feverish pre-planning for all possible future outcomes, the solution is the same. Return to now. Simple, perhaps, but not always easy.

Again, you first must catch yourself in the momentum of the overthinking. From that realization, you can consciously retrieve your time-traveling mind by taking a simple account of your surroundings, the feel of the chair under you, the breath in your lungs or the beat of your heart. These realities of present moment awareness leave no room for overthinking.