Overthinking: The Thief of Your Peace and How to Reclaim It - Ep. 243

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast. As a human, you have a job to do. In fact, you have four jobs to earn and manage money, to attain and maintain health and fitness. To build and sustain personal relationships. To find meaning and make a difference. None of these jobs are taught in school, and that is what this podcast is designed to do To educate us all on living our most fulfilled lives through the mastery of these four jobs. I'm your host, dr Jade Tita, and I believe we are here living this life for three reasons, and three reasons only To learn, to teach and to love. In this podcast, I will be learning, teaching and loving right along with you. I'm grateful to have your company. Here's to our next level. What's going on everybody? This is Dr Jade Tita. I am your host of the show, and welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Now, if you went on Google and you searched the number one thing in personal development that people are needing help with, what do you think it would be? I've done this recently and that's why I'm doing this podcast. The first thing that comes up if you go into Google Keyword Tools, which is a tool that allows you to look at what people are needing help with. You will see that one of the first things that come up, if you put in how to blank and you start scrolling down, you'll get a lot of answers like how to change a tire, how to change your oil, how to work with Word and Excel and different things like that. If you keep scrolling down, you eventually get to the personal development issues. The first two that pop up is one is how to stop overthinking and the other is how to stop procrastinating. These are somewhat linked, but we are going to cover this idea of overthinking in today's episode because it's a really big one and it goes with another huge issue that it's highly related with, which is anxiety.

Speaker 1: 2:43

Let's begin to talk about overthinking. Overthinking is not really the problem. It is your reaction to overthinking that is the problem. Let me explain this really quickly. Many people overthink. Many people have things flying through their head all the time and they simply move on from it and they don't overthink about overthinking. Oftentimes our brains will attach to particular things and then it becomes an issue. Let me give you an example of this.

Speaker 1: 3:14

Let's say that you have an itch on your leg and you're sitting there and your photo is focusing on the itch. The more you focus on the itch, what happens? The more you focus on it, for a time, it gets more and more intense, doesn't it? Part of the reason that it's becoming more and more intense is because you believe that you need to solve this, and you know how to solve it. You believe All you have to do is reach down and scratch it.

Speaker 1: 3:48

If you've ever had something like this happen, where you have a scratch in the middle of your back, somewhere where you actually can't reach it, and you don't have anybody to scratch it for you, what are some of the techniques that you will use? Well, if you focus on it too much, it's going to become agonizing. You're going to start squirming around a little bit. It's going to become really a problem if you are focusing on it in a way that I need to solve it. Another way to think about this is try to distract yourself. I'll think about something else other than the itch in the middle of my back. Invariably, you come back to that. There's another way to solve it, though, and that is this idea that it is not an itch, that this itch is interesting in some other way, that you begin to really look at it where it is. Oh, it's right in the middle of my back, slightly to the right. Isn't it interesting how an itch actually feels, like it's pain? What is it trying to tell me? If you really just go in and begin to try to have a conversation with this itch, instead of trying to solve the itch, the itch begins to change in some way. If you've ever tried this with something like a headache or an itch or something like this, it oftentimes not always will go away. That's how come?

Speaker 1: 5:13

I say oftentimes, the issue with overthinking is not that you're overthinking, it's that you're reacting to overthinking as something that you need to stop, instead of reacting to overthinking as a symptom, a sign, an opportunity to learn something about yourself. Which brings me to the next aspect of overthinking, which is that a lot of people who tend to overthink Part of the problem is that they have a story about life that forces them to overthink. Let me break this down for you. Oftentimes this comes from childhood development. Let's say that early in your childhood you had an anxious parent, someone who was very anxious and worried about money or about the way they looked to the outside world, or about their physical appearance, or about their health, or about controlling what you do, whether you're making messes or making good grades, or your haircut is appropriate or you have the right clothes on or you're behaving appropriately in front of other people.

Speaker 1: 6:22

If you've ever had a parent like this or a sibling like this, but especially a parent, then you can know that you can become hyper-vigilant. The story becomes that you are not okay and you always need to be on the lookout for solving the problem. If you can solve the problem first, maybe it won't trigger their anxiety, which then triggers your anxiety. But now, as an adult, you don't look at it as something that happened in your childhood or this developmental issue. You don't look at it like oh, there's a story underneath this, the story of I need to make everyone like me or I need to make the right decision, otherwise I'm going to go broke and not have safety and security. Or I need to make the right decision because I will not be accepted or belong. Or if I don't make the right decision, I'm going to lose control.

Speaker 1: 7:14

And oftentimes, when we think about overthinking and the anxiety that can come with it, the big issues with it are usually control. Overthinking is a big issue with anxiety and overthinking. You overthink because you're trying to gain control, and overthinking is a problem because you're trying to gain control, in the same way that an itch in the middle of your back is a problem because you're trying to solve it in some way, and oftentimes what happens there is lack of clarity is a big issue as well, and this oftentimes has to do with the fact that you can't control other people's perceptions and control the future, and so you have a lack of clarity about how people might behave towards you if you make one decision, or what might happen to your safety and security, your money situation, your health situation if you make a different decision, and so overthinking is really about these aspects. This is the first thing that I want to draw your attention to, and I want to make this more tangible by giving you some real world examples from my life, and so let's do a recent one, where, in the last this must have been, I don't know five years ago now, maybe six I was on a cross country road trip which I used to do a lot, driving from Los Angeles back to North Carolina, and I decided that I had never really hiked to the Grand Canyon or been to the Grand Canyon, never really seen it.

Speaker 1: 8:46

So I was like you know what? I'm going to drive up to the Flagstaff area, stay in Flagstaff and then get up early and go for a hike through the Grand Canyon. And for those of you who know the Grand Canyon and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but it was the South Khabib or South Khabab trail that I went on and it was the middle of the summer and of course I looked at the hike and there was two hikes down this mountain, because it's basically a reverse mountain. Right, you start the hike going downhill and then you got to come back up, and so the downhill hike was a mile and a half to the first point and a mile half back up. That was three miles. And to me I'm thinking to myself three mile hike, that's not an issue at all. Let me do the six mile one, the one where it's three miles down and three miles back up, because in my head I'm thinking you know six miles. Whatever.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Long story short, the day before, as I'm driving across country, I'm fasting as I normally do, drinking a ton of water, not realizing that I'm setting myself up for some big issues when I go hiking, partly because I'm not well fed, my glycogen stores are depleted. I'm also probably hyponatremic, low sodium, because I've been drinking you know two gallons of water, probably while I'm in the car the day before. The other fatal mistake I make is I wake up early, or I don't wake up early, rather, and I start the trail late. So, without going through all the details, long story short, I am halfway through this hike, not even turning around to go back up, and I start to get into heat exhaustion and get in big trouble there and have essentially a near death experience where luckily I got found by a ranger and they got me off you know the mountain and out of there. Very scary.

Speaker 1: 10:37

But the reason I bring this up is that now I have a fear of hiking. You might laugh at that, but you might be like what do you mean? You have a fear of hiking, jade. Whenever I go out on a hike now by myself, whether there's people around or not, especially when it is hot, I will start to have a panic attack. My mind is fine but my body begins to react in panic because it remembers, has a body memory of that very traumatic near death experience in the Grand Canyon. And so what I'm illustrating here is that all of a sudden, my body and my mind, when this begins to kick in, begin to overthink, begin to go in anxiety, and it's all linked to a past issue, a past trauma. I'm wanting to control the situation and I wrongly think I'm out of control, and this can lead to panic and post traumatic stress is really what it is, and I would argue that overthinking is a form of post traumatic stress. We are just not aware of the stories that happen in our childhood development that make us prone to overthinking.

Speaker 1: 11:49

Now, another example is my old fear, which I now have control over, of airplanes, and what I realized is that I would get on an airplane and begin to freak out, and partly I used the approach that I'm going to teach you in this podcast of, instead of always freaking out, I began to. Instead of trying to avoid the itch, I started to pay close attention to the itch. I just started to pay attention to you know, why do I have this nauseous feeling? Why do I feel like I need to take a shit? Why do why? Is my brain running a million miles an hour? And also, funnily enough? I mean, I'm sure you guys can relate to this and I apologize, but you know I'm very open on these podcasts, but one of the things that happens when I get nervous is I feel like I have to have a bowel movement.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Right, I feel like many people will have this, and then, of course, you're on a plane, and so that stresses me out further, and so I started to pay attention to the fact that what is it really about? If I was sitting at home alone in a chair and I started feeling nauseous, I'd be fine. Or if I started feeling like I had to go to the bathroom, I'd be fine. Or if I started feeling any which way, I'd be fine. So what was really the issue? What was I reacting to? And what I was reacting to is that I was out of control, that someone else got to say you have to get up. When I tell you to get up, you have to put your seat belt on. You can't move. You know you're, you're under my control.

Speaker 1: 13:13

And so once I started realizing it was a control issue and that, instead of overthinking and getting all worried about all these things, am I going to be able to use the bathroom? Am I going to be out of control? How long is it going to be? Before we take off? When is the pilot going to turn the seat belt on? What was that seat belt sign off? What was that bump? Why are we hitting so much turbulence, all these things? I basically just learned to look at my reactions as a control issue and that, just coming to the conclusion that I'm not in control, and this is a time for me to practice mindfulness and the fact that I'm not in control, and it's okay, and sometimes even it's nice to have someone else Be in control, tell you when to get in line, tell you what to do, and I can just relax. There's nothing that I need to do and there's nothing I can do. And that helped me get over my fear of airplanes.

Speaker 1: 14:10

And the final Anecdote I'll tell you is recently my sister was telling me about one of her friends because we were talking about anxiety. It's another reason why I'm doing this particular podcast and what I was explaining is I was like look, what people don't understand is that anxiety and Overthinking that comes along with that is almost always a result of the inability to choose, make a choice and or the inability to own a choice. And she's like well, I don't quite understand that my sister. She goes because I have a friend who gets on the highway and Freaks out about making left-hand turns, and so this particular friend will drive all over the place to avoid making left-hand turns. It's sort of like an OCD or an obsessive compulsive disorder and this person will Freak out and get like a panic attack if they have to make a left-hand turn. You know how it is, where you pull up to a light, you got the green light, but there's cars coming the other direction and you have to pull out in the middle of the mid intersection and wait till they go so you can make your left-hand turn.

Speaker 1: 15:13

While this was freaking out, the this individual and she's like how is that? The inability to make a choice? And I'm like it's literally the inability to make a choice right, because she literally can't Make the left-hand turn. She's literally not able to make that choice and instead will make a different choice Right-hand turns, right hand turns, right hand turns until she gets where she wants to go. She's either going straight or right hand. I'm like it's literally the inability to make the choice to go left.

Speaker 1: 15:48

And so the idea here is, with overthinking, is that you want to realize that it's closely relinked to control or closely linked to control. Rather, it's closely linked to also clarity not understanding what is going on with the all the elements and this idea of I don't know if I make this choice, how bad is it gonna get right and getting caught up in this and Ultimately, in the end, when we think about this, scratch on the back. What is that really about? It's about not looking at what it can teach you, but again trying to exert Control. Okay, jumping in real quick because I have something that I am crazy excited about. That's been something in the works for a while now and this is the Dr Jade chatbot. Anyway, say what is that?

Speaker 1: 16:39

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Speaker 1: 18:17

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Speaker 1: 19:24

So how do we then deal with this? Let's get into the to-dos of how to deal with overthinking. We covered a couple already, but let's just review them. Well, the first thing is to uncover the story. What actually happened? What is it that happened? In other words, if I didn't go back and look and say why is it that every time I go on a hike now something that I used to love and look forward to I get nervous and anxious and my body freaks out. Even though my mind wants to go on the hike, my body starts having all these weird body feelings, my heart's racing, all this stuff. What happened Now? What I could do is I could try to distract myself, deny that it's happening, push through, just avoid going hiking and being like, well, hiking isn't for me anymore. Or I could go back and look and be like what happened Now? In my case it's relatively recent, five, six years ago. I know what happened, you know what happened. It makes sense to me. But in smaller things, like habitual anxiety and habitual overthinking, we don't know exactly what happened.

Speaker 1: 20:31

And we have to go back to our childhood and look how was my mother? How was my father? Did I even have a mother or a father? Who were my caretakers? What were my siblings doing? How was I reacting at school? What were the things expected of me, the things I expected of myself, what was going on? And a lot of this will come down to something that I talk about in this podcast, a lot that in childhood development.

Speaker 1: 20:56

We have two major needs that we need to deal with. First is safety and security issues. So between the ages of zero to 10 years old, we are very concerned with safety and security. So anytime someone is telling you you're not good enough, you need to be better, you're going to be punished. This is a safety and security challenge and everyone reacts to this a little differently. So you have to go back and look and say how was my safety and security challenged? And if my safety and security was challenged, how do I feel out of control in my life? And why? What are those stories Right?

Speaker 1: 21:39

Also, we have, between the ages of 10 and 20 years old, our teenage years, where it's all about acceptance and belonging, fear of judgment, fear of not fitting in, fear of being an outcast or ostracized, and then the overthinking that comes along with that. How should I dress? How should I do my hair? Oh my gosh, people didn't like these pairs of shoes. Like you know, they made fun of my accent. Am I too overweight? Am I pretty enough? Am I attractive enough? Am I? Where's my place?

Speaker 1: 22:08

All of this, if it gets stuck in your psyche, leads to overthinking and anxiety. And rest assured that, psychologically speaking, you might be 20 years old now, 30 years old, 40 years old, 50, 60, 70s, all the way up to 80s, but if you never paid close attention to your childhood traumas and your childhood patterns, in the way that you were brought up and how your stuck development has influenced the way you think, feel, choose and act, then you have missed something. This is one of the reasons personal development, self-development is so important, and so you want to first sit and go. How was my childhood zero to 10, and these issues around safety and security and control? How was my adolescence 10 to 20, and these issues around acceptance and belonging? And to what degree did I feel like I was safe and secure, that I was accepted and I belonged, and to what degree did I focus on trying to fix that through being hyper-vigilant, anxious and not knowing having clarity about who to be?

Speaker 1: 23:21

Now, that's the next part I want to talk about here, because not only do you need to uncover the stories, you need to also uncover the choices that you are struggling with, because the fact that I have an issue with hiking, or an issue with airplanes, or even an issue with being a driver, with someone being a passenger when someone else is driving, I can look at all these patterns and go. What's the common denominator? It's control. Why am I stressed out about being out on a hike when no one is around, or even when people are around, it's that I can't control. What if my body does something? I can't control. My legs lock up the way they did when I was in the Grand Canyon. If someone else is driving, what if a car comes and I can't get out of the way because I'm not in control? And so it tells me I'm not in control and so these issues that you struggle with it's in the patterns.

Speaker 1: 24:20

So you pay attention to the repeated patterns, the stuck emotions, the circumstances, the signs, the symptoms, and you will uncover that, okay, it's not just overthinking and anxiety. It's overthinking and anxiety when there's financial issues. It's overthinking and anxiety when there's issues centered around romance or career or the way other people see me and perceive me. There is overthinking and anxiety around health and fitness choices and my health concerns. There's overthinking and anxiety because I feel lonely and I don't know how to find meaning and purpose in my life. So I always like to think about it.

Speaker 1: 25:04

The four jobs that you listen to. Every single time you listen to this podcast, you hear that we have jobs to do as humans. I think we have four career slash, finance, health slash, fitness, personal relationships and romantic relationships and purpose and meaning, and so what you want to do is go. Where does the overthinking happen? Does it happen around finance? That would be a safety and security issue. Does it happen around personal relationships? That would be an acceptance and belonging issue. Does it happen around health and fitness? That would be a safety and security issue. Does it happen around purpose and meaning in my life? This would be a choice around freedom and autonomy and feeling like I matter and I make a difference, and so paying attention to the overthinking is critical.

Speaker 1: 25:55

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Speaker 1: 27:12

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Speaker 1: 27:47

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Speaker 1: 28:38

And let's get back to the show. And so let's get through then one of the techniques here that I'll talk about first, which is a mindfulness technique, and it's a technique of dissociating, and it will bring us right back to that itch that you have. Now. A lot of people are not used to this unless you've done mindfulness training and you canind can talkabisho in order to hold it back. You get time to change the way you stand at this point, but the ability to ignore an itch right is a skill that everyone should learn and it's not something that we ever talk about. Most people, they get an itch, they scratch it. It's automatic.

Speaker 1: 29:16

And if you're not used to mindfulness training, when you get an itch, you will immediately scratch it, and if you can't scratch it, it becomes agonizing and it starts to dominate your thought. And what do you do? You start overthinking about the itch, and so the itch is a micro example of bigger overthinking issues. And so what you want to practice doing with that itch is you want to practice dissociating and essentially saying this is not my body, this is not even an itch. What is this? Oh, that's so interesting that it is a little hot, it's a little cold, it almost feels like pain. Oh, isn't that interesting. Now I have an itch somewhere else. What's that itch like? I wonder what this is all about.

Speaker 1: 30:02

And you basically become someone who is a watcher. This may sound very familiar to you for mindfulness training. What do you do when you're doing mindfulness? The typical example is you're paying attention to your breath and this is a good way to do this as well where you essentially go I'm just gonna dive in to other body sensations and so you start paying attention to the itch, but then you go hmm, isn't this interesting? What other sensations am I feeling? Well, my body's breathing. That's an interesting sensation. I've got pain in my knee, that arthritis that's an interesting sensation. Oh, I can feel my socks on my feet and my bedroom slippers on my feet. I can feel the shirt on my shoulders Interesting. I can hear cars going by and all of a sudden, instead of being engaged in this itch and overthinking with this itch, you're just interested in all the different experiences you're having and you lose sight of the fact that you are a body and an identity for a little while, and this becomes a skill. You can begin to do this where you essentially move into the realm of mindfulness, detachment or what some people might call nothingness, where it's basically to say I am not really this body, I am simply energy experiencing other energy, and this itch and this breath and this weight from the shirt and clothes on my back are all just energetic inputs, and aren't they interesting? And ironically, in that process, the itch goes away.

Speaker 1: 31:42

Now take that example with the overthinking. So now you're overthinking about something you can begin to just simply ask questions. This is interesting, I'm overthinking this. What is this about? What is the story? I wonder if other people think like this. I'm just energy experiencing this. What is this experience telling me? Where do I feel it in my body? You get the point right, and so this is one of the first things you can try. And when overthinking is mild and anxiety is fairly mild, this can work incredibly well, incredibly well.

Speaker 1: 32:22

Now the other thing that you can begin to do, as this ramps up from mild to more moderate in intensity, is you can try breathing techniques, and there's two types of breathing techniques here. One breathing technique is a relaxing technique. Oftentimes, when you begin to overthink, it oftentimes means you're overstimulated in your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system. We all know what this is like. We could probably trigger overthinking in ourselves if we drank a gallon of coffee. You know what that's like when the body's just go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go go. So you can calm the sympathetic nervous system sometimes, especially when it's mild to moderate overthinking or anxiety, with slow breaths and especially slow exhales.

Speaker 1: 33:10

Now the most common technique is what's called the 478 technique. So it is a four-second inhale, a seven-second hold at the top and an eight-second long exhale. So it basically sounds like this Hold and then and you're doing this through the nose, I'm just breathing through my mouth so you can hear me. So it's big breath in, it's seven-second count in your head, two, three, four, five, six, seven and then long exhale Out and you basically do that for 10 breaths or so, and this can dramatically calm you. This is also a great technique, by the way. If you feel like when you go to bed, your mind's kind of wandering, you can go into this 478 breath technique, 47 inhale or four-second inhale, seven-second hold, eight-second exhale for 10 breaths or so, and oftentimes you're deeply in a relaxed state and you're no longer overthinking. And you can amplify this a little bit further by when you do the eight-second out. You can do a little hum like relaxing, and or just tell yourself calmly, relax as you breathe out. Now, what a lot of people don't understand is that sometimes, when this overthinking gets too much, right, it starts to get intense, that the four, seven, eight breathing and trying to relax yourself is just not going to do it. And this is where you can actually go with the intensity.

Speaker 1: 34:58

Oftentimes like to think, if You're in a severe situation and I like to think of a dog, right, if a dog attacks you and starts biting you, the best approach is not to pull away. The best approach is to shove your Arm or that body part into the dog's mouth to choke it so it releases you, right? If you can imagine, what most people will do is they'll start trying to pull away and the dog. This just makes the dog come harder. So what you want to do if a dog is biting your forearm, let's say, is you want to shove that forearm down the dog's throat. So the next technique here is similar to that.

Speaker 1: 35:36

If you're in sympathetic mode, we humans are designed Evolutionarily to respond to a sympathetic crisis with fight or flight, and so you can use a breathing technique that is more of a fight or flight technique, and the one I'll teach you here is something called billows breath, and so what you can do is you essentially breathe in, throw your arms up in the air and then let your arms fall down by your side and breathe out, and it's sort of a fast, hyperventilating Breath. Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see me do it. I'm gonna do it right now. You basically have your hands up by your shoulders, loose fists, and your fists are sort of in front of your shoulders. You breathe in and your arms go up overhead, like your arms are up, and then you just let your arms fall and out, right, and so it basically looks and sounds like this Now, try, I'm doing it with my mouth open because I want you to hear, but you want to try to do it with your mouth closed all through the nose, so it's reach up on the inhale, and when you come down in that breath, you're letting your arms almost slam onto your sides to force the breath out.

Speaker 1: 37:04

And this is a very intense breath. It is almost simulating running or sprinting, and you want to do 20 of those or maybe even 30 of those, and what you'll find is when you do those, it starts to clear your brain, in the same way that if you ran like crazy After a tough workout. Everything calms down, doesn't it? And so when you're overthinking and it's moderate to mild, if it's very mild, you can simply just watch it, explore it. It can go away by just getting mindful. When it gets a little bit more intense, to the moderate, you can use this four, seven, eight relaxing breath. But when it gets very, very intense, this is when you're not gonna be able to control it, sort of like a horse that is, you know, going into a full gallop, and so what you want to do is go into a full gallop with it. The billows breath will do that.

Speaker 1: 38:01

Now you can take this even further, what I oftentimes do, which is do something very intense. So sometimes when I get very stressed out, I Will set, take out my mobile device, set it for one to three minutes and do something very intense like push-ups for one to three Minutes. Why is that very intense? Because I can't do Push-ups for three minutes straight. I have to go as hard as I can and I have to rest and I have to go. Then I have to rest and have to go. It's like a mini workout and it stimulates my whole sympathetic system and sort of hits reset on my sympathetic system and then I can go and relax. Burpees will do this, push-ups will do this. Any intense exercise you can go get down into a squat and do pulsing squats. Now, if you're someone is like, well, jade, I'm not fit enough to do this intense stuff, then the billows breath is the next best thing. Do this breathing technique and notice when you're exercising it's one level up because you're breathing hard but your full body is working and one of the reasons I like the billows breath is because it's getting some of the body involved. Your arms are involved. You're doing something with that Very, very important. So those techniques are what you want to be thinking about when you are in a state of overthinking. Those are the techniques that you want to use.

Speaker 1: 39:19

One Mindfulness, pay attention to the overthinking itch. Go into this place where you observe and you get very curious. Think about what are the choices and patterns that cause this overthinking. What are the stories? Oftentimes, when you get very mindful and you're watching and you're just asking Tell me, overthinking, what are you trying to tell me? You'll spot these patterns right. This is how I spotted my issue with airplane. You know and you know this control issue. Now, if it starts to get more moderate, you can do the four, seven, eight relaxing breath. Now, this is where most people stop in their recommendations because they don't understand. When you get too sympathetic, Too overstimulated, too overthinking, too anxious, at this point You're being attacked by a lion and at that point you need to fight or flight. You need to run, you need to fight, you need to do something intense. That's where the billows breath comes in and the push-ups come in right. Very important.

Speaker 1: 40:18

Now, as we begin to wrap up this podcast, let's talk a little bit about part of the issue in Choices versus decisions. Now I know you probably think a choice and a decision are the same thing and they almost are Exactly the same thing, except for one small distinction. A decision is the process of considerations. Right, a choice is simply the act. It's simply making the act. So, for example, if I'm gonna make a decision about what I'm gonna wear today, I might go. You know what it's, the weather outside is a particular way. It's kind of cold. So I'm gonna definitely wear jeans and a long shirt and Maybe a sweatshirt on top of that, and I'm not gonna wear my flip flops. I'm definitely gonna wear my shoes, oh, but I'm going out to dinner later, so maybe I'll wear my dress shoes, and you know I look good in blue. Or you know, my girlfriend, you know, likes this particular shirt. So all that decisions, a choice is simply I'm wearing a blue shirt, I'm wearing a blue shirt, period, I make that choice now.

Speaker 1: 41:31

Some people are just very good about making choices because they've made those choices ahead of time. Most people, though, who are over thinkers, make decisions. In other words, what they're doing is they don't just simply make the choice. They have to decide every single time. Here's another example have you ever gone out with someone, or your partner or a friend where you're like you know what's on this menu. We're going out to eat and I know I've been to this exact restaurant with you before and yet they sit there making decisions. They go what are you having? Oh, that sounds good. Gosh, I had that last time, maybe I'll get this this time right. And they go through this whole decision process that you're kind of like look, you know we've been here before. Why is it taking you five minutes to order?

Speaker 1: 42:17

Those people tend to be people who overthink. Because they're making decisions, they want to know what you're getting. They want to know what the service the waiter or waitress likes. They want to know what's fresh. They want to know all kinds of things before they actually make the choice. Meanwhile, you're like I come here all the time and I get a chicken salad. That's just what I get. That's the difference. And so the idea here for overthinkers is to look at yourself and go when is it that?

Speaker 1: 42:45

I'm constantly making decisions? I'm constantly considering what other people think. I'm constantly considering is this healthy or not? I'm constantly considering Is this a smart use of my money or not? I'm constantly considering is this gonna be worth it? I'm constantly considering. I'm constantly considering. I'm constantly considering versus. I'm choosing. This feels good, so I choose. It's winter, this is what I wear 99% of time in the winter. We're at a Mexican restaurant. I get fajitas at Mexican restaurants. We're at an Italian restaurant. I get post-ad and Italian restaurant. We're at, you know, a Mediterranean restaurant. I get falafel at a Mediterranean restaurant.

Speaker 1: 43:26

Practice making choices, less decisions, more choices, and this is a Practice, and the more you practice just choosing, the less your brain will default to overthinking, because overthinking has become a pattern For you. It has become a habit for you, and especially as you unlock these stories in your childhood development, you'll realize that overthinking is a habit in particular situations for you. And so the final thing I would say is get very clear for yourself on making choices, taking definitive actions, right, and just Practice that. I make a choice, I act, I make a choice, I act, I make a choice, I act. I don't stress, stress, stress, stress, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, consider, consider, consider, consider. Then stress, stress again, consider, consider its act, choose, act.

Speaker 1: 44:22

One of the interesting things about this is that there's this old sort of saying leap and the net will appear. I Think this is something that people who overthink buy into and they go I'm gonna leap and the net will appear. But they know deep down that the net doesn't appear all the time, that you can't just eat Whatever you want and remain healthy, that you can't just spend your money how you want and everything's gonna be fine. The better approach is to think I'm gonna leap and weave the net as I fall. In other words, you actually do not know, and cannot know, the right course of action and the right choice to make Until you make the first choice.

Speaker 1: 45:04

And people who overthink don't quite understand it. They think that if they plan and they Think about it, that there'll be no issues Once the choice is made, and that is not true. The only way that you will be clear on an outcome is to take the choice towards the outcome. In other words, it's not leaping, the net will appear. It's leap and weave the net as you fall. In other words, trust that you can figure it out. And the more you do that, the more you make choices and figure it out and make choices and take the Actions and figure it out, the less you will overthink, and so that's the practice over the long run. So I gave you some acute things to do, some breathing techniques, some mindfulness techniques, some exercise techniques, but also you want to be looking at the patterns and things like that, and you also want to be looking at how do I make more choices and just get into the habit of being a chooser Rather than a decision-maker. So hopefully that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 46:09

So thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast today and I will see you at the next episode. You have been listening to the next level human podcast with dr J Tira. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure you subscribe and consider leaving a review. You make the biggest difference when you pass on your lessons and inspire others. That's why reviews like this are so powerful. Your words may be the only ones that resonate for someone else. Please remember the information in this podcast is for educational purposes only. Always consult your personal position or therapist for making any lifestyle changes. And finally, thank you for who you are in the world and the difference you make.