Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,25

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Next Steps

1. Can you think of a time when you “wobbled” while making a decision? How could the situation have been different if you had sped up?

2. When have you had to make a decision between two good choices? How did you ultimately decide? Are you deciding between two good choices right now?

3. Can you think of a time when you knew what to do but didn’t want to do it? What was that experience like? How did you move forward?

4. Do you tend to beat yourself up when you make small mistakes? Do you tend to dwell on what went wrong? Take a moment to think about what you’ll do—and what you’ll tell yourself—next time you’re tempted to berate yourself for a small mistake.

7

Tend Your Garden

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” writes the French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Well, when it comes to your mind, you are what you think.

Our lives reflect what we persistently think about. Where we choose to place our attention directly affects the way we experience the world around us and the people we become. As Winifred Gallagher writes in her excellent book Rapt, “Your life is the creation of what you focus on—and what you don’t.” Gallagher’s observation is hard-earned. Rapt begins with a cancer diagnosis—of a “particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind”—but upon leaving the hospital, Gallagher has a realization. It would be easy for the disease to monopolize her attention during her treatment, but she could choose to focus on her life instead. And while that year wasn’t the best of her life, it wasn’t her worst. That is the power of focus.

With our thoughts, we make our worlds. This is why two people can experience the same thing in vastly different ways. When we were in high school, a friend and I both lost ten pounds (that we didn’t need to lose) during the same semester. We worked out together, but one of us was focused on outward appearances while the other was focused on getting in shape. And, not coincidentally, one of us became cranky and critical through the process, and one of us grew calm and confident. (I won’t tell you who was who; it will make me look bad.) Our actions may have looked the same from the outside, but our experiences were quite different—because of where we chose to place our focus.

What we pay attention to affects more than just our inner experience, because those thoughts don’t just stay in our heads. What we think directly influences what we feel; our thoughts and emotions cannot be separated. We cannot just choose to feel happy or relaxed or excited or mellow, because those emotions are rooted in our thoughts. What happens to us is often out of our control. But what we think about what happens determines how we feel, and subsequently, what we do about it.

Because our thoughts cascade into our feelings and actions, what we think about matters. When we nurture positive thoughts, we feel good; when we nurture negative thoughts, we feel bad. The nature of our thoughts directly affects not only the content of our experience but also our quality of life. This isn’t value-neutral. When we feel good, we are kinder, more creative, more expansive in our thinking, more open to possibility, and just more pleasant to be around. When we focus on the negative, we not only feel bad but also make ourselves more and more the type of people who overthink, because negativity fuels the mental spin cycle.

If we think positive thoughts, we’re more likely to take positive action. This doesn’t mean we have to be thrilled when unwanted things happen, but it does mean there are helpful and unhelpful ways to think about a situation. If we think negative thoughts, we’re less likely to take satisfying action.

You Get to Choose What You Think About

Here’s the important thing: you get to choose what you think about! This was a revelation when I first read Renovation of the Heart fifteen years ago, by philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard. In it he writes, “What we feel and think is (or can and should be) to a very large degree a matter of choice in competent adult persons, who will be very careful about what they allow their mind to dwell upon or what they allow themselves to feel.” It may not feel like a choice,