Do you lie awake overthinking every decision?

It’s 3 a.m. and your mind has decided to build a PowerPoint presentation on all the things that could go wrong with your meeting with your boss tomorrow. You just want to sleep, but no matter how many possible catastrophes you plan against, your mind doesn’t seem to want to find the rest you are so desperately seeking.

Insomnia, chronic stress, depression, and anxiety have all been linked with chronic overthinking.

The trouble is that no matter how much you want to stop, no matter how much you know that thinking has expired its point of usefulness, you can’t seem to stop.

This is the tragic reality of overthinking. It’s not something you can turn on or off; it’s a pattern of the mind, closely resembling an addiction.

So rather than telling you to “look on the bright side” or “just stop thinking about it” (advice that seems fine on the surface but in reality is quite damaging), here is some real talk on what causes overthinking and what you can do about it.

The Roots of Overthinking

Your mind’s number one job is not to make you happy, it’s to keep you safe.

For the mind safety is predictability and predictability is found in patterns of the past. For many chronic over thinkers, thinking become a way to protect themselves from the anxiety of an unpredictable environment.

So it runs off patterns that it has picked up in the past. For example:

• The alcoholic numbs away their problems.
• The social media addict distracts themselves from their problems.
• The overthinker tries to out-plan their problems.

The relentless mental activity of the mind is nothing more than a very sophisticated defense mechanism aimed to protect you from pain and keep you alive. In short, you don’t really have an overthinking problem, you have an avoidance problem.

This also explains why the typical advice of positive thinking doesn’t work because thinking positively is simply trying to replace one strategy of defense with another.

The Path from Overthinking to Feeling

There is a famous story about a king that places a huge rock on the road and watches how people interact with it. He watches people go around the boulder, over the boulder, and even turn around and go back on the path that they have come. But only a select few are willing to move the boulder.

The story goes that the king watches that those that move the boulder find treasure underneath.

The insight is that the treasure that you are avoiding lies directly underneath the feelings that you are avoiding.

So what you need now is a commitment to practice a new path of engaging with your self, one that has been talked about as the path of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

It’s a little difficult to get started and requires a good amount of practice, so here are 3 techniques you can try.

1. Drop an anchor to the present: At regular intervals or when you feel the storm of overthinking taking over, simply stop and name three sensations that you can name right now. The weight of your feet on the floor. The texture of your shirt against your skin. The cool air entering your nostrils.
2. Name the feeling, not the story: Often, overthinkers get caught in long, elaborate stories. But one solution to that is to compress that story down to a single word (and then ignore the story completely). If you can, what is the single-word emotion? Is it fear? Is it sadness? Insecurity? Shame? Simply placing a name on the raw feeling without getting lost in the “why” creates space.
3. Set up sensory snacking rituals: Overthinking thrives in the world of the abstract. Throughout your day, create tiny 30-second intervals where you anchor yourself to the present. When you drink your coffee, start smelling it. When you brush your teeth, feel the bristles, and when you leave your office, take one long, deep breath.

These are simple, practical ways that you can train your mind to value direct experience over mental abstracts and not get lost in the maze of your mind again.

If you are looking for more hands on advice and guidance, why don’t you take a look at our life coaching. People that have walked the path of mindfulness and can teach you to do the same.

Find out more: https://integrativecoaching.co.za/
Book a session: https://integrativecoaching.co.za/book-discovery-call/