Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,26

but sources both sacred and secular agree that while we can’t perfectly control what we feel and think, we have more power than we give ourselves credit for.

And not only can we do it, but if we want to spend less time overthinking and more time thinking about the things that matter to us, we must learn to tend our thoughts with care. For this, I’ve come to embrace a metaphor I first encountered in Gallagher’s book Rapt. She recommends you treat your mind “as you would a private garden and [be] as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.” We must learn to tend our own gardens.

Many of us, not realizing the vast impact our thoughts have on our lives, don’t pay much mind to the garden we’re cultivating. This is a mistake. Attention is powerful, and we can use ours for good or ill. Our thoughts can be our allies or our enemies. We can focus on our fears, our worries, how others have wronged us. We can, in true perfectionist style, focus on the small things we screwed up, the ways we fell short. We can replay unpleasant conversations and unfortunate situations in our minds. Because our thoughts drive our feelings, we can have a pretty good life and still feel miserable. Or, as Gallagher and countless others have discovered, we can face unpleasant circumstances and still experience peace and joy. It all depends on what we choose to focus on.

John Milton writes, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of Hell, a hell of Heav’n.” By choosing our thoughts with care, we can cultivate a garden we actually want to spend time in.

What to Do If Your Brain Gets Stuck on the Bad Stuff

Great, you may be thinking. I’ve been trying to choose my thoughts with care, and it’s not working so well. What do we do when it feels like we can’t choose our thoughts because our brain is stuck in the spin cycle of overthinking—and we don’t know how to get free?

In this book, we’ve been defining overthinking broadly—as repetitive, unhealthy, and unhelpful thoughts that make us feel bad while accomplishing nothing. Now we’re going to home in on a specific type of overthinking called rumination, so called because the repetitive thinking it describes is similar to the digestive process of animals classified as ruminants, such as cows, that rechew their food to aid in digestion. Rumination may be good for cattle, but for us, nothing good comes of mulling over unworthy issues at length. Instead, rumination hijacks our focus and makes us miserable. When we ruminate, we can’t shut off our brains. Our thoughts go round and round; we feel stuck, like a hamster on a wheel. These negative thoughts—and resultant emotions—damage both our ability to think clearly and our general sense of well-being.

When we ruminate, we focus on our problems in an unhelpful way. If we were focusing on solving our problems, that would serve us well. But that’s not what we do when we ruminate. We go over and over the problem, without searching for a solution. And when we think negative thoughts, we feel bad feelings. This is why rumination is deadly; it affects how we feel and then, subsequently, what we do.

Rumination not only prevents us from solving our problems but also causes its own problems. When we ruminate, we generate worry and anxiety out of proportion to the matter at hand, and then we may even begin to overthink our overthinking. The worst part is that much of this inner agony is wholly unnecessary.

Left unchecked, the situation grows worse over time. The more we overthink, the more we reinforce those thought patterns, making it that much harder to extricate ourselves. If we’ve been overthinking for decades, we’ve effectively been blowing dandelion seeds all over our garden, then fertilizing the weeds.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Change is possible; we can learn to reinforce positive thought habits. We can learn to better control our attention, although to do so, we may need to experiment.

Strategies to Interrupt Overthinking the Moment It Happens

How do you overcome a lifetime of overthinking? How can you learn to redirect your thoughts to more fruitful pathways? Make a plan for what to do when these thoughts pop up—because they will pop up. You need strategies to interrupt rumination when it happens, to eradicate negative thoughts and put a stop to the overthinking.