How to Actually Stop Overthinking

Why haven’t they texted back? Did I say something wrong? Maybe they’re mad about something I did. I made that joke last time, they hate that. Damn, I should get ready. Why does my back hurt? Maybe this is a health problem or from my workout. What should I wear? Damn, what were they thinking? I should have meditated this morning. No wonder I’m thinking so much.

I think a lot of us overthink a lot, and there’s a bunch of reasons why we do so.

Overthinking, rumination, whatever you want to call it, it’s this process of just thinking over and over and over again about a situation very irrationally. And a lot of times, we try to justify the emotional irrationality with logical facts about the situation that we’re overthinking about, and it just perpetuates the overthinking.

When you overthink about a situation, your entire focus is on that situation or that thought process. You only have time or energy to focus on other things in your life. A health problem of some kind, or you’re overthinking about what this person said, and then these other areas of your life are being neglected just because you’re super focused on whatever you’re overthinking about.

Here’s a quote on overthinking: “Overthinking can be a way of trying to control a situation and to feel more confident about what to do next. The brain attempts to reduce your anxiety by cycling through possible scenarios and attempting to predict what will happen.” Yeah, exactly. The brain wants to anticipate what’s coming up next, and this is very common in type A people, perfectionists, high achievers, people like that. If you’re someone that has high standards for yourself, you can start overthinking about the actions you’re doing. You can start overthinking about, “Oh, I’m not doing this morning routine that I should be doing because successful people do it.” Some people that overthink a lot, they always need structure, they always want to know what comes next, and they hate unknowns because you’re not able to be good in the unknown.

This overthinking starts clouding your mind, and it starts bothering you, and then you start just living in this constant perpetual mode of overthinking. It’s very important that we look for ways to work around this so that overthinking doesn’t become a predominant thing that happens in our life. If your brain is constantly at 100 miles per hour, I mean, enjoying life becomes very difficult.

First way to reduce overthinking significantly: Start loving the unknown. Earlier, I talked about type A people, type A personalities, people that are high achievers, people that have high standards for themselves. You need to get okay with the unknown because life is filled with unknowns. A lot of things can happen at any given moment. To be okay with the unknown is to start structuring your day a little bit less, do different things, do new things, do things that challenge you. You’re going to start getting used to unknowns and being a little bit more comfortable with unknowns.

Next lesson: the need for outcomes. Be less outcome-dependent. And this just means being spiritually detached from things and situations, being spiritually detached from what you want. I know it’s a contradiction because you want this outcome, you want this to happen, but being okay with it not happening and in your mind being prepared for it to not happen is okay. In fact, a lot of times when we want to reach a certain area of our life, we’d be okay with detaching from it. That way, this doesn’t consume us at all. At all time.

Next, learn to love failure and making mistakes. Failures can teach us a lot about things. I mean, I’m sure there are things you failed at in the past that you’re glad that you failed at it because now it’s literally made you who you are today. Failure is character-building. Character-building is everything. If you look at society today, people aren’t developed because they don’t fail enough, right? They don’t go through hardship enough to build some sort of resolve and character. So because of that, they’re stagnant. But when you embrace failure, you start developing like crazy. And also, failure builds your humility and it manages your ego. If you’re really moving up in life, you want to have things that do ground you when you’re achieving great things but you’re still grounded.