Overthinking: Get out of your head and back into life
After a long day, with lots of paid and unpaid work, it should be a treat to finally lie down in bed, a good book in hand, the eyes starting to get heavier and slowly drifting off to sleep… But WAIT! Was there a typo in the Facebook post I published today? The client is not the easiest to work with — he will be so angry if there was one. Now that I think of it… Was it even a good post? Maybe people don’t get the joke. When I left it was doing okay. But that was 6 hours ago, and my work phone is on mute. It should be on mute! I deserve a break. I must sleep now. It doesn’t matter that much anyway… But what if there was a typo? I will be fired.
If this — or like this — is the way you fall asleep almost every night: Congratulations and welcome to the club! You’re officially an overthinker. In a generation full of people pleasers, overachievers and “imposters”, the root of most of those syndromes seems to be overthinking.
Overcoming overthinking
Don’t get me wrong, thinking is not a bad thing. There would be a small number of high-quality content on the web if the creators would be mindless about it. But it should be done in a healthy and limited manner. This isn’t easy, once we start going into our rabbit holes of minds. And just like Alice, we must find our way out of it ourselves. No one can help us. But how do we get strong and mindful enough to stop, hold on and turn back towards the light?
Be aware of the darkness
Overthinking is not just interfering with falling asleep at night. It increases the probability of getting mental health problems and doesn’t help finding solutions for the issues you’re thinking about. So, the first step to get out of the rabbit hole is the hardest: realizing that you’re even in one.
Close your eyes and count to three
When you are finally aware that your mind is getting lost in your thoughts, take a deep breath. Psychologist Ashley Carroll suggests that controlled breathing exercises can support shifting the focus and getting out of “the cycle of ruminating”.
Afterwards it might help to try and look at the objective evidence of your situation. Remove all the emotion that stops you from looking at it rationally. Hopefully you’ll recognize that the negative thoughts are exaggerated and would only take you down a spiral.
Search for a glimpse of optimism
The real goal of thinking usually gets lost when overthinking: finding a solution. If you’ve been there, you know how easy it is to get from one pessimistic thought to the next. One of the most difficult parts of climbing back out of the abyss your mind fell into, is to turn around and search for enlightenment. If your thoughts are circling around something you have control over, think about specific steps you could take to tackle the issue. If the problem is out of your control, like natural or societal disasters, try to focus on the aspects you can control, like your own actions, attitude and effort.
Get a safety net
Some researchers suggest sports, meditation, or monotonous activities to prevent overthinking. What helps me best is to sit down before I go to bed, take a pen and write down what could eventually occupy my mind later. If it’s to-dos, possible to-dos, or worst-case-scenarios: Writing it all down, somehow helps me to get some clarity and structure. If you’re a text-based person, it might also help to literally put every word you think on paper. When researching this article, I found that writing down negative thoughts and then throwing that piece of paper away, they become less meaningful, research suggests.
Whatever your solution might be for preventing overthinking and getting out if you already started falling, the most important thing to realize is that overthinking itself is never a solution. It might appear to help thinking about the same issue over and over again, but without an optimistic thought in mind the key to the solution gets out of reach. And you’re the only one to give you potion or cake to make you reach it.
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