Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,5

exploratory journey the way avid readers do: I visited the library and bookstore, stockpiling resources on health, meditation, and mindfulness. And I started paying a lot more attention to what I thought about.

As I read, I was surprised to discover how much control I could have over my thought life. The capability had been there all along, but I hadn’t realized it. I began to not only understand what it might mean to make my thoughts my ally but also, for the first time, see how I could do so.

You Can Learn Strategies to Stop Overthinking

I’ve had many conversations with women who tell me, “I wish I could stop overthinking,” but they don’t try to do anything differently. They don’t believe it’s possible, so they don’t attempt to do anything about it. I know what this feels like, because I was one of them. My doctor’s offhand comment made me realize that I had the power to change. Once I knew I could, I began to explore how.

And knowing how changes everything. We won’t look for a solution if we don’t believe one exists.

Quite recently, my own false assumptions have shut me off from solutions. We have a family minivan, which isn’t everyone’s dream car, but I like a few things about mine. Topping my list is the camera feature that helps me back up and change lanes safely. I love it, but it used to be fickle. The camera is supposed to display only when I’m in reverse or have my right blinker on, but sometimes it wouldn’t turn off when it was supposed to and the display would light up even though I didn’t want or need it to. It was incredibly frustrating, but there was nothing to be done about it.

Or so I assumed.

But then last winter, my sixteen-year-old got his learner’s permit. At this point, we’d owned the minivan for over a year. One day when our son was behind the wheel, he flipped on the turn signal and felt a button he hadn’t noticed before. He asked us, “What does this button do?”

Will and I didn’t know about that button; we didn’t know what it did. We told him to hit it and see what happened.

Can you guess what the button did? Of course you can. That button turned off the camera.

For over a year, my inability to turn off the camera had been frustrating me to no end, but I didn’t know the means to turn it off had been right there the whole time. Because I never dreamed there was a solution, I didn’t look for one. The answer had been literally at my fingertips, but I didn’t know it.

When it comes to overthinking, the same thing is true for many of us. We’re bothered by it, but we don’t do anything about it because we don’t know change is within reach.

Of course, reducing overthinking is not as simple as hitting a button on the turn signal. If only! But we do have strategies at our disposal, and we’re going to learn how to use them.

I like to think about wrangling my thought life the same way I think about learning to drive. (It’s funny that I keep using car analogies, because I’m not a car person. But the analogy works: the car is a complicated piece of equipment and so is the human brain.) To drive safely, a driver needs to learn basic practices to operate her vehicle: She needs to know how to start the ignition, check her mirrors, use her turn signals, and engage the parking brake. She needs to know how to clean her windshield, put gas in the tank, and change the oil. But that’s not all. She also needs to know how to respond to what’s happening in front of her—to swerve around a stalled vehicle, brake for a pedestrian, deal with a tailgater, or handle an emergency like a flat tire. These skills keep the car and driver functioning smoothly and enable the driver to respond to trouble when it arises.

The same goes with overthinking. Sometimes we need to defend against an active instance of overthinking in the moment. When we notice we’re caught in a negative thought pattern, it’s like seeing a stalled vehicle in our lane. We need to change course, and quickly, to avoid unpleasant consequences. In subsequent chapters, we’ll learn strategies to overcome active instances of overthinking.

But to stop overthinking on a persistent basis, we want to develop the skills and habits