Overthinking is exhausting!
Do you feel like you're an Overthinker?

Do your thoughts, worries, plans, and sometimes just nonsense occupy your mind without your permission? Can't sleep because your mind is running overtime? Waking up worried, sometimes for no apparent reason?

Is overthinking even a real thing? I mean, maybe the pain and self-criticism you feel about overthinking results from unfair conceptions you've gathered throughout your life and even throughout history?

You, my friend, are not alone. Therapists are very familiar with "I can't turn my mind off!" - a common complaint that lands on their sofas and Zoom calls every week. "I just overthink everything, and I never get relief!"

In this episode, we'll spend less than 15 minutes giving "overthinking" some genuine curiosity.

You might say we'll overthink it! But no worries, it'll be brief and calming.

Some ideas to consider:
Is overthinking a flaw?

What do you believe, when you ask inside, would happen to you if you simply allowed your thinking and feeling to happen - without the criticism or brake pedal?

Fun journal option:
Answer this question in as many ways as you can imagine💛:
Overthinking is part of my life because….
 
Check out the episode for examples of how to do this for yourself.
Please follow Seriouslyourself, leaving a review or a comment. I'd sure appreciate it!

For more help calming your worry and being the unique human you are inside - check out my website at ingridyhelanderlmft.com
You can also get my ebook/workbook at:
calmyourworries.com

Transcript: Episode 1, Overthinking
Hi there, come on in. This is Seriouslyourself, the podcast and I'm Ingrid Helander.

Today in our chat, our conversation, I'd like to talk about and consider overthinking. Is this a term that's familiar to you, overthinking? Do you ever say "I'm just overthinking it," or "I'm so tired of overthinking, I can't stop myself." Yeah, a lot of people do.

I hear it pretty often in my office and I thought it'd be interesting today to step back from the worry about overthinking and the concern and that it's a problem and just wonder about this thing we call overthinking. You might even say we're going to kind of overthink it. Okay?

In my experience, when someone laments about overthinking it usually means that they're worried or concerned about something and they just can't push those thoughts away, right? So, therefore any thought about this concern, this problem is considered overthinking because they don't want to be thinking about it at all. So instantly we have a little definition in that it's a thought that because it is unwanted becomes too much, right? Something anything is too much.

So, it kind of plays out like this, right? A concerning thought comes up and you might as the thinker also feel anxiety in your body and then you find yourself criticizing yourself for those very thoughts and feelings that you're experiencing because maybe they're uncomfortable, right? They're unwanted. And the criticism inside which is trying to help stop the worry, stop the overthinking in fact may actually increase the sensation right? Both in your body and your mind because now you're feeling criticized and generally we don't like that feeling so much.

So the process then kind of creates this little feedback loop where you feel bad. You think thoughts that you're uncomfortable with, then you criticize yourself for feeling bad and for thinking those thoughts and you get more of them and so on. Does that sound familiar to you?

There are other types of overthinking. They probably have similar roots, but one is kind of hyper-planning. People will say, "I can't stop planning for whatever, a conversation, a vacation," um something that they don't want to do uh whatever it is that they can't stop that feature in their mind. And another overthinking type of thing is ruminating, or we might say obsessing, about maybe an interaction that didn't go so well or an encounter that you had that you didn't feel like you handled it exactly the way you wanted to and so because you maybe can't go back and fix it instead, you go over and over and over it in your head.

So one thing that's interesting to look at with overthinking is when it happens to people, I often hear "I'm fine until I get to bed at night or even an hour after I fallen asleep and then I wake up and I cannot stop myself." It's kind of like the conscious mind combs and the subconscious mind then steps in to think about something that's been bugging. The other time the overthinking can happen and people talk about a lot is first thing in the morning, their eyes are open or barely so and wham, that ruminating thought, that loop of criticism and anxiety will start and we're overthinking.

So let's ask a few questions here first. Do we really overthink? Is it actually a real thing? In other words, whoever decided what was the appropriate amount of thinking? And if we do, what are potential routes of that phenomenon, why would that be happening? I've heard many people in the last, oh, I don't know, decade or to say, "well this is a product of us having too big of brains," and there is some truth to that, but I think we can take it more personally than that.

Let's look at it a little more on a personal experience, but also zooming out of it. So we can see this didn't necessarily just start with one person, namely you. Is it possible you could have inherited a fear of too much thinking from your family or from society, is it necessary, important or is it just habitual to criticize your own mind and your thinking even by using the term overthinking? Is overthinking a flaw?

Let's imagine for just a minute that no part of you, including your overthought or your self-criticism is actually trying to harm you and I think this is true though, it can feel lousy and even if it can cause trouble in our outside lives inside us, these tendencies to do things that we find uncomfortable are always benevolent. They're trying to help you. They're trying to help you avoid a pain or a shame or something that feels far worse than what they actually might be causing (they think, these parts of us) when the truth is they're probably making things worse because they're not listening to the higher energy in the system which is yourself, you. So if we look at this like, maybe the overthinking is trying to help you and maybe it's kind of a learned behavior, right? Then let's not only overthink it, but let's feel it and get really, really curious and creative. It's just for fun. Remember it's just for fun.

Alright, so let's complete this sentence: Overthinking is a part of my life because blank, blank blank. Right, do it with me. Overthinking is a part of my life because... Some part of me believes it will actually help me. I'll figure it out this time if I just overthink it right? That makes sense, doesn't it? That a part of you would think if you keep thinking about it, you're certainly got to figure it out this time. Or how about this Overthinking is a part of my life because I was taught that my worries were silly and unproductive. And so those thoughts, those worried thoughts were always shut down in my system and in the outside world because they were unproductive. And so I couldn't ever actually resolve them, they just learned to circulate and recirculate in my mind. Or how about this one? Overthinking is a part of my life because I didn't have a lot of power to do what I wanted or to make changes in my life as a youngster. And so I learned to voice my powerlessness in this way of just ruminating and worrying. The worry goes around and around without any action at all. Or here's one overthinking is a part of my life because I'm a deeply feeling person who was taught that my feelings, especially those of anger or anxiety were a problem and they were unacceptable. Right? So I just shoved them down over and over and over again. And now what I'm supposed to be relaxed and my brain that says shut him down, shut him down is sort of offline.

Bingo. There they are. We could get even more curious actually, and we could look at the world, right? The eras of the world and society. And we could say possibly somewhere in my biology is the history right of the oppression of say women, right? Not just women, but we'll take women as an example. So women were not supposed to be thinkers or changemakers, right? They were set up at a certain point in history by the patriarchy just to serve. Their thoughts and feelings were discouraged and even persecuted. Overthinking in silence was all they could do, and when they appeared anxious or complained about their status, they were told later on maybe in the eras of history, that they were hysterical or some other equally diminishing term, right? So their thoughts and feelings were deemed wrong. And so any thinking in that context, societally would have been overthinking or we've all been mostly raised to process everything with our minds in Western society, right?

And we are to ignore as completely and as often as possible, the sensation in our bodies, Our brains have been the only trusted source of information and our bodies get dismissed in this way and poor brains, right? Our systems need to work with our wholeness, our mind, our body, our spirits, all sensation. And so this poor brain trying to overthink in an effort to solve a problem that it really can actually not know the answer to, right, because the information is stored in the body, that we've been taught very carefully to cut off. You know, there's so many possibilities for this issue that people call overthinking and I'm wondering what you've come up with. I'm wondering if there's little suggestions or wondering inside you, let's say, oh, I think maybe that's a possible route of my overthinking and maybe it's not overthinking at all. Maybe if I relax into it carefully and with a lot of patience and compassion for myself, I could learn something. So take a second now to really appreciate that you are a wise and complex being, your whole self has been set up for survival from the get-go and remember that you are always more than you know.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Seriouslyourself. To help treat yourself well each week, go ahead and subscribe to Seriouslyourself wherever you listen to podcasts and please share this link with anyone you love who might be seeking a little more truth and delight in their lives. If you just can't get enough and you'd like even more goodness, you can become a part of Seriouslyourself, the membership community. You'll receive a monthly magazine, personal gatherings and cool little treats delivered right to your mailbox, find out more about that on my website, ingridyhelanderLMFT.com. And thanks to those who make Seriouslyourself special. Our wonderful music is Midsummer from the album Flood by the fabulous Joel Hollander. Seriouslyourself is produced by Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, Executive pProducer. The ideas and inspirations come from beautiful humans like you, that I feel lucky to know. And I'm Ingrid Helander. Take good care of yourself. See you next time.