Have you ever laid in bed replaying the same conversation
or same situation over and over and over in your head because
you feel like it just should have gone differently?
Because you feel like you made a small mistake?
And you just sit there thinking about it over and over, running
through different scenarios, running through how the next
conversation may go and you find yourself sleepless.
You find yourself driving yourself crazy with your own
thinking. If that sounds familiar, I'm
right there with you. I've spent years dealing with
that exact same feeling, that exact same situation, and I've
been trying to figure out how do we stop overthinking?
My name is Ethan Jewell and welcome back to Feel Your
Feelings. Now, before anything else, I
want to remind you on this podcast, I'm not a doctor, I'm
not a psychiatrist, I'm not a professional in the mental
health industry whatsoever. And today I'm not going to
preach the science of it all at you.
I'm not going to come at you from a clinical perspective.
Instead, I'm going to talk to you as somebody who understands
what you're going through, as somebody who's been through it.
I've been struggling with my mental health for the better
part of six years, and I have tried and tried and failed many
different ways to get better. And I'm finally more on the
healing side and I want to start the conversation about mental
health. So thank you so much for being
here. Today we're going to talk about
the topic of overthinking. This is an incredibly widespread
problem and I don't think a lot of people think of it as that
much of a problem. I think a lot of people actually
identify themselves within overthinking.
They identify themselves like I am an overthinker, I am an
anxious person, and there is a level of identity or comfort
that comes within finding something like overthinking that
you struggle with and identifying yourself within
that. But The thing is, overthinking
is not just something to identify with.
In fact, it's dangerous and it messes with your mental health
more than you may know. It messes with your sleep, it
messes with your ability to function day-to-day, and it
could be eating away at you without you even realizing.
So today we're going to talk about what overthinking really
is and why we do it. Then we're going to talk about
the harms of overthinking. And then finally, we're going to
go through a list of like 7 solutions that I put together
for you to try. Now, these are not guaranteed by
the book, easy to do solutions. I'm not telling you that you're
going to watch this episode and be able to 100% cure your
overthinking, but instead I want to give you the tools to be able
to move forward and figure out on your own what works for you.
Because ultimately, the journey of healing is about learning.
It's about finding yourself. It's about learning what works
for you. So the first step of learning
what works for you is information.
To start, overthinking is more than just thinking too much.
In psychology, it's called rumination.
It's when your mind keeps looping through thoughts about
the past or the future without reaching a solution, grounding,
or action. When we overthink, we analyze
every single detail, we think about every single outcome.
Usually these thoughts trend negative and we just start
focusing on what could go wrong, what is wrong with us, what
we're doing wrong, and it becomes torturous.
It doesn't help it, it hurts. Many people think that they're
just preparing for the future, or maybe they're thinking
through the past, but really ruminating it does more damage
than good. Research shows that it can
reduce decision making ability because you're stuck in analysis
instead of action. It can increase anxiety and
emotional distress. It disrupts sleep because
obviously if you're of thinking, you're not sleeping.
It also uses mental energy without solving anything.
It feels productive because you know you're thinking through
things, you're thinking about the future, you're thinking
about the past. But realistically, it doesn't
lead to clarity, it just drains you.
This isn't just a personality type, it's a cycle that keeps us
trapped in fear of outcomes or in the pain of the past instead
of moving towards solutions. So if it's so painful, why do we
do it? Let's look at actual
psychological reasons of why we overthink the first one.
Fear. OK, Fear of mistakes or
uncertainty. We overthink because we're
afraid of getting it wrong. When the outcome is important or
it feels important, the brain tries to kind of cover all the
angles. It tries to think of all the
possible outcomes. It feels like a productive way
of preparing, but there's no finish line in these thought
loops, only more worry. Another reason is maybe if you
struggle with perfectionism, if perfect is the end goal, nothing
is ever good enough. And that leads us to think and
think and analyze and try to prepare for this unrealistic
outcome of perfection. Next, it might be trying to
regain control. When life feels unpredictable,
our mind ruminates to feel like we do have control, but it's
just an illusion. We may be feeling like we don't
have control, and that's OK. You're allowed to not have
control of every aspect of your life.
But our brain doesn't like that. It wants to be prepared, so it
tries, it's very best to take control by thinking way too
much. And although that feels like
control, instead it's just worry.
Overthinking it doesn't make you smarter.
It doesn't prepare you. It keeps you stuck.
It keeps you stuck in the same loop over and over and over
again. And the danger with that loop is
when we get stuck thinking of the what ifs, all of the
negative outcomes. It can become a self fulfilling
prophecy. If you are thinking about
healing your mental health, but you're worried about, oh but
what if I'm not good enough? What if I don't actually heal?
And you find yourself overthinking all of this instead
of taking action. The actions that you do take
will be influenced by the negative thoughts that you have
been repeating in your head over and over again.
So now let's get to the part that all of us are here for.
How do we actually stop overthinking?
I want to remind you, none of these are guaranteed.
You should try all of them in your own life.
And if one works, stick to it. That is how healing progress is
made. So first, it sounds silly and
cliche, but the first one is mindfulness and presence.
These are two buzzwords that we hear often in the mental health
community that you need to be mindful of your feelings, that
you need to be mindful of what you're thinking.
And it sounds a little quite ridiculous, but it isn't just a
buzzword. Many studies show that
mindfulness breaks rumination by bringing attention back to the
present moment. And this is something that I
personally learned in therapy. My therapist taught me how to
sit with feelings or thoughts and bring attention to them.
And by doing so, it can get rid of these thought patterns and
loops that we become stuck in. So here's how to do it.
You sit quietly for three to 5 minutes in a quiet room.
You could put headphones on, noise cancelling, but no noise.
Just sit and quiet and focus on your breath.
And when your thoughts distract, you gently bring your focus back
to your breath. Just think in and out and focus
on that breathing. It's not about stopping the
thoughts, it's about not getting lost in them.
So when a thought comes up, when we begin overthinking and we
start thinking about something that has happened or something
that could happen, you just bring your focus gently back to
your breath. This teaches your brain that
yes, those thoughts can exist, but we don't need to ruminate on
them. We don't need to sit there over
and over thinking. And the amazing thing about this
is you can do it almost anywhere.
The moment you find yourself over thinking, you can have that
awareness given by that knowledge of those thought
loops, and you can stop yourself and you can sit down and bring
your attention back to your breath instead of getting caught
up in those thought loops. Next, you can set a dedicated
worry time. I know this sounds a little bit
silly, but instead of letting worry flood your whole day, you
can schedule a specific time for it.
Research shows that compartmentalizing worry trains
your brain that it has a designated space to think, so it
stops invading all of your time. It's difficult to stop
overthinking in its tracks, but it's much more manageable to
allow yourself to overthink in smaller chunks.
So instead of overthinking throughout your entire day,
maybe you set a 10 minute timer and you think through all of
your concerns and your worries and your ruminations during that
window, and then when the time's up, you tell yourself that's it,
and you move on. This may take some time to train
your brain to actually have an off switch, but once you do, it
becomes a very powerful way to hold your overthinking within
one smaller window instead of your entire day.
Another powerful tool you can use is you can challenge your
thoughts. Overthinking often creates
unrealistic or exaggerated thoughts, but cognitive
techniques can help you question them.
So instead of just accepting all of these thoughts, instead of
just accepting the rumination and letting yourself get worried
and anxious and not be able to sleep because of it, you can ask
yourself, is this thought fact, or fear?
Am I catastrophizing? What evidence supports this
thought? By doing this, you directly
challenge your overthinking, and instead of letting it just
completely run wild, you can potentially stop it in its
tracks and really be able to narrow in on where that thought
is coming from. Instead of just accepting that
thought as truth, you can figure out whether it's just coming
from a place of fear, if it's coming from a place of worry, if
it's coming from an anxiety. And by doing that, you take away
the power of overthinking, you take away the power of those
thoughts just running wild through your brain, and you take
back control to yourself. Another method is to journal.
I will always recommend journaling.
I think it is incredibly powerful and incredibly
underrated. Writing down your thoughts can
help your brain externalize and organize them instead of just
tucking them down. Research shows that writing
worries helps reduce stress and mental clutter, so you can set a
short timer and just write everything on your mind without
judgement. You know, don't reread it
immediately. Just write it down and release
it. This is very similar to the
cognitive benefits of therapy. You are getting out your
thoughts. You are getting out your
feelings, and then you are letting them go.
You are letting them exist. There is so much power in being
able to let go of your thoughts and let go of your feelings
instead of holding on to them and thinking through them and
ruminating on them over and over and over again.
You don't need to overpower your feelings, you don't need to
fight them, you don't need to overpower these thoughts and
push them out of your life completely.
You just need to learn to rein them in a little bit.
And journaling is an incredibly powerful way to accept those
thoughts and the fact that you're having them and be able
to put them onto something tangible like paper and then let
them go. Finally, you should practice
self compassion. And I know this sounds
incredibly cliche, but people who overthink often judge
themselves harshly. Research shows that self
compassion reduces rumination and improves emotional
resilience. So talk to yourself like you
would a friend. Understand that it's OK to feel
this way and you are doing the best you can with what you know
right now. That compassion can break up
this cycle because often overthinking comes with guilt.
You start thinking about a situation in the past and how
you could have done things differently, and you feel guilty
that you didn't handle it correctly.
Or you start thinking about something in the future and you
start doubting yourself. If you practice self compassion,
it breaks down that guilt and it breaks down that doubt.
It breaks down the shame that you have related to your
feelings, and it allows you to handle your overthinking from a
much more neutral position, which is a powerful position to
give yourself. It gives you an upper edge, it
gives you an advantage. Instead of being lost within
your overthinking, you can become a little bit more neutral
and come at it from a realistic standpoint.
This compassion, this softness to yourself can completely break
up the cycle. Overthinking isn't a flaw.
It's often your brain trying to protect you from uncertainty,
mistakes, or fear. But it's also not an identity.
Thinking endlessly doesn't solve problems, it just kind of
repackages them. And what stops that loop isn't
shutting your mind off, it's redirecting your mind with
intention. So I strongly suggest that you
try one of the methods that I recommended today, or maybe do a
little more research and try something entirely different.
But what matters is you take action against your
overthinking. So try journaling, try self
compassion, try to release those feelings and release those
thoughts instead of pulling them closer and looping them over and
over and over again. What matters is you try healing.
Your mental health is never going to be a perfect linear
journey. You will fall back and slip up
many times over and over again. But what matters is you keep
trying because you are capable. You are capable of healing and
you are capable of controlling your overthinking.
This overthinking doesn't define you, it's just a pattern, and
patterns can be changed with practice, grace, and awareness.
You're not alone in this, and you can train your mind to stop
torturing you with overthinking and live your life with more
clarity. That's going to wrap it up for
today's episode. If you need help feeling your
feelings, you should check out my music on all platforms under
the name of Ethan Jewel. I almost guarantee it'll make
you cry. Also, if you enjoy this podcast,
a great way to support me is to get merch.
I just dropped a merch line. This hoodie is one of them.
You can find it at ethanjewel.myshopify.com or at
the link in the description. So thank you so much for being
here. Thank you for understanding that
you're overthinking does not define you.
And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings.
I'll see you next time.