How to stop overthinking?
If you and I are within the same anxiety spectrum, it’s almost convenient to say that overthinking makes us nervous. And yet it is the only thing we do, in hopes we are preparing ourselves for the future if we are already familiar with it.
I’ve faced the negative effects of overthinking so many times in my life. When I was a child, I thought too much. When I grew up in my teen years, I’m still thinking too much. Needless to say, I feel like I can’t change.
News flash to me: I can.
How To Stop Overthinking?
So there should be some formula, right? Some formula to make sure that we live our life as it is, in the present, and not worry about the things that might or might not even happen in the upcoming future.
If overthinking has been a regular habit of yours since long (like it has been with me!) then you might believe that it might be really hard to come out of the never-ending, stress-inducing loop. But good news that is that it isn’t impossible.
Technically, we can do some things that can definitely help us train our minds to stop overthinking and live in the now.
How to stop overthinking?
Understand the things that are within your control and those that are not. Understand the things that matter to you, and those that do not. Then create a mental list of all these things. Once you get a clear idea of these differences and learn how to focus on things as what position they hold in your list, you'll start seeing what things and people truly matter, and start ignoring what don't.
Here’s a brief explanation.
Our Lifestyle In Four Boxes
There are two types of things in life. (Okay, there are many. But I’ll use only two here.)
They’re divided on a few basis, but we’ll take this one up first.
- Things that matter.
- Things that don’t matter.
The things that matter to you might not matter to someone else. Completely acceptable. And at the same time, the things that don’t matter to you might hold some importance to others. Completely acceptable too.
It all depends on who you are and what you want.
Things that matter are like mental and physical health, family, and closed ones, your happiness and satisfaction, your dreams and goals, etc.
Then there are things that don’t matter. Like your number of followers on a social media site, how much you scored in that test, what the other people say about you.
You also need to understand that when I talk about things that “matter” to you, I don’t mean things that you are stupidly crazy about. Take, for example—your number of fans on a social media site. You might be eager to increase the number, and you might be upset if you fail or are a little unsuccessful in doing so. But at the end of the day, it’s just a material figure and wouldn’t seriously hurt or harm you. That is why it is taken in the category of things that don’t matter (otherwise, of course, the number of views on my blog matter a lot to me. We all want to get famous, you know.)
Then there’s this other basis too on which we can divide things:
- Things that we can control.
- Things that we can’t control.
The things we can control are usually the small, insignificant ones which don’t really matter. Because if these things mattered and we could control them too, then wouldn’t it all just be too easy? Wouldn’t life be too fit?
So, that’s the reason why—the things that really affect us, that really have a say in what course our life takes on—these things are not—ever—in our hands.
These are the things we can’t control.
“It hurts because it matters.“
They just happen and we can do nothing to stop them.
Bad things happen in life. People fall out of relationships and someone really close to you hurts you. We get tested frequently, and sometimes our will gives up before we reach the end.
These are the things that hurt the most.
So, on this basis, I can conveniently make a table listing all the four things.
You can choose the outcome, mostly because you care about these things.
These are probably the easiest things out there.
All within your hands and interests. You can choose to make friends or not (friends matter to you). Your health too, matters to you and is generally within your hands, unless you neglect it for too long. Then it’s in the doctor’s or God’s hand (depending on whom you believe in.)
You can choose to be happy or you can choose to be sad (you can! You have full say in whether you feel that innate happiness or not. You might whine and argue here that some things make you sad and you can do nothing to prevent them, but we’ll come to them later).
Right now, what you need to understand is that whether you live your life happily or regretfully, it is completely within your hands.
“You don’t need to take life so seriously. You’re never going to get out alive.”
Another thing that matters and something you can control is your social position in life. What you become is important to you. And you can choose it—by working hard. That way you can create your own destiny (moreover, introducing yourself to your passion and keeping yourself busy will take your mind off other things).
These were the easy things, probably the easiest.
Then there come the harder things in life, where we need to stop for a second, breathe, and think.
Things That Don’t Matter, but You Can Control Them
Let’s take an example.
Other people’s emotions.
People you don’t care about, strangers, even someone who is a part of your family but you never formed a bond, so for you, they don’t exist, whatever. But if those people are truly emotional and have some sensitive triggers, and one comment of yours can either make or break them, then these people come in this category.
Remember, they have to be people you don’t know, or you don’t have a strong connection with.
Some things that don’t really matter to you, but are within your own hands—are all trivial. Like, what movie you watch on the Friday night.
Seriously, who cares?
At what time you wake up in the morning (it doesn’t really affect you much). You decide what you want for dinner.
All these things are there—to give you the idea that yeah, you do have control over some things in life.
That’s the irony too—you don’t really care about these things and still life has granted you the choice to have them according to you; but you’d rather have control over some other things in life.
This brings you to the next distinction.
Then there come the most important things in life.
The Things We Can’t Control
These are the biggest things in life, but we can’t control them—alas!
A loved one in the hospital, going through severe health issues, and you hope everything goes alright. That is the only thing you can do. Your loved one matters to you, and yet you can’t control what happens to them.
These are the things you think about the most, so much that you go over the board. Mostly this happens because we can’t do anything to change them. Can you save your loved one from the illness just with a click of a switch?
And as humans—we always have this impulsive urge to be in charge of everything. We are all control freaks, just on different levels.
But we all have our own aspirations for that perfect life, and we get angry or upset when things don’t go according to plan.
We want to take everything within our own hands.
We don’t trust easily, and when we do, we start expecting the world.
We don’t love easily either, and oh God, we shouldn’t—because when we love someone, we get over-protective and obsessed.
We want everything to be fine, and it mentally (sometimes even physically) affects us when things go wrong. In this way, we are just squandering our health and our happiness.
See how these are the most important things in life?
If anything goes wrong, it starts affecting our other fields of life and work.
The thing is—we need to tell ourselves again and again that we don’t decide the trajectory of life. At least, not the main, important ones.
We humans are not meant to be gods.
Whatever it is, Universe is testing you. And it’s just waiting to see you win. So, don’t think too much because worrying is like walking with an umbrella waiting for it to rain.
Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.
Things That Don’t Matter—and Things We Can’t Control Either.
It’s actually a pretty powerful basis to divide things, because surprisingly it holds too much substance in our lives.
There are things that don’t matter—the past and the future (They are illusions. Time is an illusion. Tomorrow never comes). And then there are things we can’t control—worrying and overthinking (at least not until you’ve trained your mind completely).
Merging the two of these things, we get—
Don’t matter, can’t control. Carefree attitude.
Overthinking the past, worrying about the future. Our minds are constantly either turning back or running ahead, they’re never standing in one place, never being quiet, even if just for a few seconds.
Our mind is always dreaming, regretting, being anxious, fantasizing, planning…
In one of my all-time favourite books, the Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson, it is said how—
At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
A very strong idea being given in there is in the form of a question. Whenever you are having an anxious thought, or are being disturbed, ask yourself—
“Would I rather be having this thought right now or would I rather have my peace?”
I think we should all just be selfish and choose our peace over this thought, whatever this thought is.
I don’t mean to say that you should stop feeling, like stop feeling at all, or that you should just bottle up all your emotions.
It is impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.
-Joyce Meyer.
But there’s this different between negative feelings and positive feelings, feelings that construct us, and feelings that destruct us. If we can learn the difference and learn how to avoid the unwanted feelings, then it’s all done already.
Your Overthinking Is An Illusion
But at the end of the day, it isn’t necessary that what we feel or think or worry about is going to happen. It isn’t necessary at all that these feelings will affect the real course of future.
But surely, and most definitely can they affect your life. Your mental health is always at stake.
Time is always ticking by—whether you’re looking or not, and all of the minutes or hours that are spent in thinking about these things are never coming back.
These are the four things our life is mainly divided in.
Whatever we do, falls in any one (or more too) of these categories. At the end of the day, it is not about preventing your emotions. Heart has been broken too many times and people have hurt us bad.
So controlling your emotions is imposisble. And we can’t just do it too masterfully—like hard, stone-faced, heartless personalities.
What we just have to do is reach the point where our emotions stop controlling us.
