Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,57

much happier.

From Lose-Lose to Win-Win

The point of these small shifts is peace and joy. Overthinking here is lose-lose, but we are doubly enriched if we can put the practice aside and stop thinking ourselves out of happiness.

Next Steps

1. What are some examples of simple abundance in your life?

2. When it comes to simple pleasures, do you ever catch yourself thinking, I don’t deserve this? How can you change that inner dialogue?

14

The Ripple Effect

I change myself, I change the world.

Gloria Anzaldúa

In this book, I’ve sought to convince you that what you think about matters. By changing your thought life, you can fundamentally change the way you experience the world. What you do with your minutes and hours adds up to a life. My hope is that this book equips you to spend more of those minutes pursuing healthy, helpful, and life-giving thoughts that spur you to take actions that are the same.

How we think—that is, what we think about, what those thoughts mean to us, and what we choose to do about them—determines, to a considerable extent, what our lives are like. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “What is life but what a man is thinking of all day?” We are cultivating the person we are and will become, one thought at a time.

We all want lives that could be described as well-lived. But when we spend our time overthinking, that is what we’re doing with our life. Overthinking is not just a nuisance; every minute we spend overthinking is a minute not spent on the things that matter.

When I discuss overthinking with other women, so many of them hate that they do it and say they would like to stop. At the same time, they may not consider it a pressing issue. But I fear they underestimate overthinking’s effect on their lives—on all our lives. While we tend to think of overthinking as a personal problem, the truth is that our individual thoughts, decisions, and actions don’t affect only us; they create a ripple effect that impacts the people around us and carries far and wide.

One of my favorite writers is my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, who has written extensively about the ecological health of our world and our duty to tend it with care. “Small destructions add up,” he writes, “and finally they are understood collectively as large destructions.” Berry is speaking of the health of our mountains and oceans, but I’ve come to understand that overthinking has a similar effect on our lives. At best, overthinking is a waste of effort and energy. At worst, it wreaks havoc on our thought lives. Overthinking does no one good and does many of us active harm. These small destructions add up, and not just in our own individual lives. The cumulative toll for all this overthinking is vast.

What if instead of wasting our time overthinking, we focused on the good we might do? Small destructions add up—but so do acts of renewal. What if we sought out these small acts of reclamation? How great might the ripple effect be for our families, our communities, our world?

We Are Continually Creating the World We Live In

At my church, we regularly sing a song in which the chorus repeats, “God will delight when we are creators / of justice and joy, compassion and peace.” The first time I heard it, I was captivated by the idea that we don’t have to settle for merely yearning for these things; we can also create them.

We can create justice in our small daily interactions. We can create love and joy, right where we are. We can practice compassion and embody and experience peace. We can create all these good things right in our own lives that affect those around us, who in turn affect their communities, who go on to impact our whole world.

We can be creators of justice, love, joy, compassion, and peace. But when we take a look at the world around us, it’s clear these things don’t just happen; we have to think about them—and then act on those thoughts. We need to ask ourselves important questions, such as What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of world do I want to live in? How can I—in my own small way—make that happen?

I’m reminded of a time Will and I went to Costco together, which hardly ever happens. We’d just pulled our freshly packed minivan out of the parking lot when we hit a red light. Right there on