Overthinking is something we all do, whether it be to the extreme or just small little things that pop up in life. But whatever it is and whatever it comes from, it can drive us crazy.
At least I can talk for myself and say for me, it used to drive me crazy.
You see I use to have an extreme overthinking issue that would cause me stress, worry and anxiety over the smallest issue.
But somehow I managed to end my overthinking, so that’s why I’m writing this now, to try and explain to you how to stop overthinking.
So in this article we will be discussing how to stop overthinking. And covering such points as;
- What mechanical thinking is compared to overthinking
- How mechanical thinking is used
- How we can stop overthinking in certain situations
- Where overthinking comes from
- And the overall prevention of overthinking
So let’s get started…
Overthinking is basically just taking one small thing and thinking about it beyond the facts that you actually know about it. This can be prolonged to the extreme of exaggerating or dramatising your thinking about it until it’s so big you’re having a panic attack and crying on the floor.
When you are unsatisfied and unable to relax with or accept the outcome of any situation, you think and think and think about it.
Basically it’s being a stubborn drama queen, refusing to accept the facts of life, just because it’s not how you want it to be.
But when you feel calm inside or when you feel calm about a situation, you feel no need to continue thinking about it.
But when you feel disturbed, upset, fearful, unresolved or are unable to accept the outcome or situation, you cannot stop thinking about it.
So why do we do this? And how do we stop overthinking?
To stop overthinking altogether, you need to understand the purpose that thinking fulfils – as actual mechanical thinking – not the overthinking pit we all fall into.
Thinking is useful as a mechanical process! Reliant on certain facts and information from which we formulate and determine actions, and navigate practical mechanical situations in life, its purpose is realised.
Say cooking, building or driving for example.
You can’t cook, build or drive purely on a feeling. You need factual mechanical information – or thinking to do so.
For example; if I want to cook something, I will read the cooking instructions and then follow them. No extra thinking is needed. Any extra thinking, like thinking about how I could mess it up, is all overthinking is. And it is indulging in this overthinking that will make me do the exact thing I was worried about. If I just went about cooking without overthinking or worrying about everything, the likeliness of me to mess up will be very little.
Daily tasks like this or following instructions like the above is what plain mechanical thinking is useful and needed for.
But we tend to take it a step further by trying to use thinking for non-mechanical things.
Like understanding or resolving anything deeper than the action level of life.
Thinking cannot resolve the level of living problems – of sadness, grief or sorrow, of understanding or knowing yourself, or all the unknowable things like the future, or every thing that falls into spiritual, religious or mystical answers to life.
All this is where thinking becomes fantasising. No longer related to known or knowable facts, and so it becomes very ineffective.
And this is where thinking needs to stop, because from this point on we go into overthinking.
What we need to understand is the difference between basic mechanical thinking and fantasy thinking, which is the thinking that overthinking is made up of.
As stated above, mechanical thinking is just the very basic thinking we use in life. For cooking, building, driving and so on.
We need mechanical thinking, for mechanical purposes – opening a car door, cooking a meal or building a house.
But once we start fantasising or thinking about things that don’t exist, things that we cannot touch, like we can with a car or a meal or a building, then we go into fantasy.
Then when fantasy is believed to be real or taken seriously, then that is using thinking for what it is not meant for. Believing the fantasy is real, is harmful and disconnected from and unrelated to reality, and has no grounding in anything real.
From there we can easily slip into overthinking in search of meaning in that which does not exist and so cannot be found, and so that thinking has no natural way to end.
Mechanical thinking also stops once the task is done or once its purpose is fulfilled and so does not become disturbing overthinking. Its usefulness is also its meaning and is definable by the related facts of life it is used for. Without usefulness in real life, thought remains a meaningless fantasy without a natural end.
I cook my meal, finish cooking my meal and eat it. The thinking about cooking stops, because I am no longer cooking. That thinking has a real and tangible outcome in life which satisfies and ends that thinking in the factual outcome of eating.
But if I continue thinking about the cooking after I’ve stopped, whether it be all the things I could have done, or should have done, or all the mistakes I made, these are things that I cannot do anything about now, so therefore I cannot satisfy and end that thinking.
Then I’m going into fantasising, into mystical thinking, into insatiable overthinking.
This is not needed. This is harmful.
All overthinking is driven by an underlying distress.
Either current daily distresses or old unresolved hurts or distresses that we have dredged up. Say a conversation you had a week ago. Or a death you’re still trying to deal with.
Because we usually resort to overthinking when we are in pain. Whether it be to try and numb out or suppress the feelings that we are going through, or exaggerate them for our own distressful, dramatising purposes.
The solution to your overthinking is not more thinking. That’s like assuming that feeling sick from too much ice cream can be solved by eating more ice cream. It is only adding to the problem.
The solution is the last thing you want to do, but the thing you need to do, and that is, simply feel the underlying physical disturbances, whether they be nervousness, anxiety or whatever feeling is beneath all that thinking – deeper within the body of you – by feeling all of that, the thinking – the overthinking – will come to an end.
So you can’t just read this blog and suddenly your overthinking will just stop. You need to put some effort in and do this, you need to feel the disturbance, and this way, resolve it for yourself.
So what starts overthinking?
Nearly anything can trigger it, whether it be a feeling, a stressful environment, a comment made about you or even an idea you picked up from someone or something.
And we can pick up ideas, thoughts and information from the environment around us so easily in our current daily life. Especially with people being in such a state of social anxiety, there is a constant undercurrent of overthinking activity going on around us all the time.
We are constantly churning out thoughts after thoughts, in various forms of colours, intensity, images, complaints and comparisons, both from within our own distress – and also from distress we pick up from outside of us.
So it is so very easy for us to turn this constant churning of thoughts and constant flow of information into overthinking.
Let’s use me as an example.
Back when overthinking was a big issue for me it could pop up from anything. Whether it was a sudden worry about what I was wearing, what my teachers thought of my work, or even imagining if my stomach pain was caused by bowel cancer.
These thoughts would start with a single thought that would build up because of a sensation deeper in my body – which back then I didn’t understand was driving the thinking. Say I was feeling anxious, so rather than feeling the anxiety I would try and link it to something – the current school project I was working on for example.
And so I’d take that thought and run with it, and think and think and think till I was convinced that my teachers hated my project, and me.
In this situation – and I’m sure many of you have experienced this before – there is only one thing you can do.
STOP.
Just stop. Stop paying attention to all those thoughts, all those worries and just come back to the feeling of yourself – your gut-feeling – and just stay with that. In my example, I learned to stay with my deeper feeling of anxiety, and as that calmed down, so did my overthinking.
Because that’s the main reason I was thinking, to get away from the feeling of anxiety. So that’s what I needed to get in contact with.
Getting in contact with the deeper feeling of anxiety will stop the overthinking.
I mean I could be right, my teachers could have hated my work or my project. But my thinking wasn’t going to help me with that. The best thing for me to have done in this situation was, and still would be, to come back to the felt sense of me.
The other example is taking a thought or idea from someone else and applying it to yourself and letting that cause your overthinking, when it probably has absolutely nothing to do with you.
For example, me thinking that my stomach pains means I have bowel cancer.
Where would I have got this idea from?
TV shows, movies, social media, the media.
So I have a feeling – the stomach pains – I don’t want to feel or need a reason as to why I feel that way. So I take an idea or something I’ve picked up from elsewhere and attach it to that feeling, giving me a reason as to why I have that feeling and also a reason to not feel that feeling and just think and think and think about it – about why it’s there, until I am completely numbed out to the feeling itself and just stuck in a whirlwind of overthinking, which is all imagined.
But I have no facts.
Until you have cold hard facts about something you cannot worry or stress about it.
Until a doctor has told me I have bowel cancer or my teachers have told me they don’t like my work, there is no need for me to worry and stress about it. This worry and stress I cause myself is so very unnecessary.
It would be so much easier for me to just feel the anxiety, or feel the stomach pains.
Because overthinking, and thinking and worrying and stressing about something isn’t going to make that something better.
In fact it’s going to make it worse.
Worrying that I have bowel cancer isn’t going to make my stomach pains go away. I needed to feel the stomach pains, go deeper into the feelings that I was ignoring, and from there, I have the pure hard facts of what I am feeling and no need to overthink them.
Because that’s what we do with overthinking. We take one small situation or feeling and dramatize it, over analyse it, until it has become a WAY bigger deal than it originally was, and in fact really is.
How does this help us in any way? We basically just created and imagined a fake situation to avoid or numb out the feelings we didn’t want to feel, and just caused ourselves distress.
This is going way too far. This is using your imagination to create something that hasn’t even happened, and we harm ourselves by doing so.
So STOP.
And come back to the facts.
I have stomach pains. And there is nothing wrong with having those pains, it’s normal to have pains just from whatever we do in life each day. Until I have pure hard facts of something really wrong, there is nothing to gain from making stuff up. That’s what overthinking is and I’m just being dramatic.
Stick to the facts you have. Stay with them. The facts will save you and the overthinking will become irrelevant.
How to deal with overthinking in the moment.
So in my struggles with so-called overthinking, I have come to the conclusion that the best or should I say the easiest way to stop overthinking in that moment is by…breathing.
This won’t help what drives your overthinking issues, but it does help stop your overthinking in its tracks, which is a good place to start.
As soon as you find yourself starting to over-think something, starting to dwell on an experience or a situation or even a feeling.
Take a deep breath.
And rather than thinking, focus on your breathing. The longer you focus on that, the smaller the overthinking becomes.
Just notice the way you’re breathing.
Focusing and noticing reduces your thinking down to thoughts only on breathing.
So once you have done this…you still need to go deeper…
Deeper than just focusing, into really feeling your body breathing and feel your lungs breathing. Come back to the feeling of you, as your lungs or body breath. Until you are no longer thinking about breathing but are deeper in the physical feeling of it.
Because just focusing on your breathing is still thinking. So in going deeper into the feeling in your body beneath the thinking, you will resolve the distress or worry which is deeper inside you and making you overthink.
And then your overthinking will fade away.
Now you are really feeling the stress or the worry or whatever is going on for you in that moment, rather than dramatising it or numbing it out with overthinking.
Because that is what overthinking thrives on.
The deeper secret, the unknown reason making you want to think so much, is that your thinking helps you avoid how disturbed you feel inside.
But avoiding your disturbance doesn’t solve your distress or that underlying urge to think and continue thinking.
So stop giving the overthinking your attention.
Overthinking is just like a small child, it will scream and cry and throw a tantrum trying to get your attention. And like a child crying, there is an underlying pain or disturbance felt deeper inside causing the child to cry – or you to overthink.
So there is a deeper reason to why that child is crying which by crying it is trying to communicate. Your overthinking – like crying –indicates that you are hiding something underneath or deeper inside you that needs your attention.
NOT the crying or thinking, but how you feel beneath and behind that.
Like a child can cry itself into hysteria, you can think yourself into hysteria, anxiety or stress. It’s ONLY once you feel the underlying feelings driving it, will the overthinking then come to an end.
So try this out for yourself. Next time you find yourself starting to overthink, starting to go down that rabbit hole…
Stop.
And feel the feelings that are behind the overthinking. The nervousness, the worry, the distress, all of these feelings that need to be felt, to disperse them.
Because thinking and thinking about something in order to suppress or cover up how you really feel will do nothing but cause you more anxiety, more worry and more distress. That distress you just generated though thinking then adds back into the anxiety or pain driving your thinking, which then drives more overthinking. So you just get stuck in that cycle.
You need to go deeper behind the thinking, into the feelings in your body and feel them, stay with them and in turn, your overthinking will fade.
This is how you will decrease the unnecessary stress and worry that you bring into your life by constant overthinking. This is how you will end the cycle.
Trust me on this one.
Or … try it out for yourself and solve this problem yourself. Prove it for yourself.
So whenever you can’t stop thinking or you are just stressing over something or you are being driven by too much thinking, the solution is simple.
It is to feel that which is unsettled, disturbed or just overlooked deeper within the body of you.
In doing so you will feel and know a true and real sense of you, as you are right now, untouched by what others think. Then you have a chance to know yourself as you really are. And you will like that real you.
It is that simple.
