I’m an overthinker by nature. They always have been. I lay in bed as a child and replayed the conversation in my head, working on what I should have said. As an adult, running a business with my brothers, I can spin a small problem into a long mental movie before breakfast.
For years I treated this as a fixed point of personality. Just the way I was wired. Some people are calm. I think too much. End of story.
I haven’t exactly changed. These were three small habits that I started doing without really planning. They all sound too simple to make a difference. That’s part of why they work.
I started to notice the loop before I joined
The first thing that helped me was learning to recognize the feeling of overthinking before I was deep into it.
Overthinking has a particular texture. This is not real thinking. Real thinking is moving forward. He jumps to conclusions and stops. Overthought circles. Same question, same imagined conversation, same worst case scenario, and fifteen minutes later you’re somewhere else with the loop still running underneath.
I confused the loop with productive thinking. I would tell myself that I would figure something out. Most of the time I just tried.
Now, when I feel that certain pull, the one where my mind starts replaying or planning a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, I try to catch it early. Sometimes I say to myself: quietly, this is the loop. Not as a command to stop. Just a label. A tag is often enough to break the spell. As soon as you see it, the loop loses its disguise. He doesn’t think anymore. It’s a habit your brain has when it doesn’t know what to do.
A lot of overthinking continues because we don’t realize it’s happening. Naming it, even silently, puts a little space between you and the spin.
I move before I let the thinking begin
This is the most common of the three and the one I rely on the most.
I run most mornings. Not far, not fast. Just enough to make you plain tired. When I started doing this consistently, I noticed something I didn’t expect. On the mornings I ran, my overthinking was quieter for the rest of the day. On the mornings I didn’t, my mind found something to chew on by mid-afternoon.
I don’t know exactly what the mechanism is. I just know it’s real.
The body and the mind are more closely connected than most of us treat them. A still body trying to overtake a busy mind is a losing battle. Move the body first and the mind tends to follow.
When I can’t run, I walk. When I can’t walk, I get up from my desk and do anything for a few minutes. Tidy up the kitchen. Take my daughter around the apartment. Stretch on the floor.
The trick is to move before the mind has fully grasped what it wants to grasp. If it’s locked, movement still helps, but it’s much harder to start. You can be in bed at 6 in the morning knowing that a run would help, and instead spend forty minutes overthinking. I know because I’ve done it more times than I can count.
The smaller the difference between waking up and moving, the easier the whole day will be.
I write down the thought so I don’t carry it any further
The third habit is the slowest to be taken seriously, but the one that has changed the most over time.
If a thought keeps coming back, I write it down. Not in a journal, not as part of an exercise. Only for what’s nearby. The back of the receipt, a note, the notes app on my phone.
The writing is not for an audience, including me. I rarely re-read these notes. The point is to put the thought somewhere other than my head.
Holding a thought in your head is like holding a heavy bag while trying to do anything else. You can do it, but everything is more tiring. The thought keeps pulling you in, demanding your attention, and it comes back every time you put it down. Once you write it, your brain seems to accept that it’s been treated, even if nothing has actually been resolved. The thought stops circulating because it no longer needs to remind itself.
For decisions, I sometimes write down the question and the two options, and a line under each. Most decisions seem smaller on paper than they do in my head. The catastrophic version running on a loop is one of four reasonable scenarios and not the most likely.
In the case of worries, just writing them down often makes me realize that the worry is older than it is today. It’s been on repeat for weeks. This is useful information in itself.
What do the three have in common?
When you look at them together, what these habits have in common is that none of them are about better thinking. None of it is about replacing bad thoughts with good ones, or finding the right insight, or learning new frameworks. They’re all about moving the thinking somewhere other than the loop.
Notice the loop and name it. Move your body so your mind has less room to spin. Get the thought out of your head to stop it in its tracks.
I’m still overthinking it. It hasn’t gone away and I’m not sure it ever will. But the gap between the start of the loop and the moment I notice it is greatly reduced. And the moments when I’m completely in it and don’t know I’m there are rarer.
For someone who lived in those moments, that was enough.
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