Watch the video about how to turn your brain off and stop worrying all the time or read all about it below:
Today, I want to talk to you about how you can stop overthinking things.
I’m sure you understand it.
I myself understand it.
I’ve definitely been there myself in the past with my type of anxiety disorder.
And I know people – with social anxiety especially – experience overthinking.
So, a little bit about what overthinking is:
It’s when your brain gets thrown into a cycle where you can’t think a thought through to a logical and reasonable conclusion.
Think about it this way:
When you have a decision to make, you will often think about the pros and the cons of making that decision.
Now, what happens when you overthink is you kind of allocate everything in your brain to this big, momentous decision type of way of thinking all the time.
So, decisions such as, “Should I choose cappuccino off the menu?” Or, “Should I choose herbal tea off the menu,” become this big ball of energy in and of itself.
So, you start to think little things like, “What does this person think of me when I order this particular beverage?
“What would my mood be like later on if I order this beverage?”
“I’ve had headaches before from caffeine in the past, will it cause me to get a headache?”
And when these thoughts sort of come in one at a time and you can think them through, that type of overthinking isn’t really a bad or negative thing.
It’s when you are faced with a decision and often, ordering in a restaurant is something that causes a lot of people quite a bit of anxiety because of this issue – it’s like all of the pros and cons come in at one time.
It’s like your brain sends a message to every part of your body and every part of your energy field.
“Okay, we’re about to make a decision on this. Give me all the pros and all the cons you can possibly think of.”
And everything sort of comes in on top of each other.
And your brain, because it’s made up of different parts that perform different functions – so you’ve got the part of the brain that asks the question and opens itself up to possibilities and then you’ve got this other part of your brain that has to sort through all of those responses.
So, before you know it, you’re sitting there in the café, you’re faced with a decision, “Cappuccino or herbal tea,” and your brain is so busy trying to sort through the myriad of plusses and minuses and pros and cons that you can’t put a stop on that to get your answer out.
And the truth of the matter is, whether you order a cappuccino or whether you order a herbal tea, it’s not that big of a deal, really, in the wider scheme of things.
However, in that moment, because you’re being put on the spot, you have someone that’s waiting for your order, you probably are sitting there in the café with someone else and there’s a decision that you actually need to make, your brain goes into this overdrive of trying to sort through all the plusses and all the minuses and all the pros and all the cons that you can’t get your answer out and that’s what causes you to feel paralyzed and stupid an unable to talk and tongue-tied and ashamed and wondering what’s wrong with you, wondering why you can’t come to a decision and wondering why you overthink things all the time.
Let me just explain to you why this happens.
Why you get stuck in that – every decision you have to make becomes this big, momentous, over-the-top, “Oh, my God, if I don’t choose the right thing, the world is going to end,” kind of situation.
Basically, your brain and your energy field is something that you train and you are training it every single day whether you know it or not.
The way that you train it is by doing – it’s by living life.
So, if you have had to make big decision using pros and cons lists, thinking about the right and wrong, trying to tune in to how you feel, it’s something that if it’s done too much, if it’s done to the detriment of just getting an answer out there, it can be like a rut that you become stuck in.
It can be like playing a record, a broken record where it gets stuck on that one ridge on the record, so, it keeps repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself…
So, you use that same decision-making process for every single thought that you have.
Does anxiety make you overthink?
It can get worse when you start applying these decision making principle to thoughts in your life that don’t really need a decision made on them.
So, a lot of people who experience obsessive – compulsive type of behaviors and I myself have been one of these in the past, you start to think things like, “If I don’t brush my teeth three times on this side and three times on this side and five times in the middle, something really bad is going to happen.”
And then you get stuck in the, “Did I brush my teeth properly this morning? Oh my goodness, if I didn’t do it right, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?”
And your brain gets stuck in this mode where it can’t get thoughts out because it is so busy processing and churning thoughts within itself. As I said before, your brain is made up of different compartments and some areas override other areas.
So, when your brain feels that there is a threat looming, if you’re worried that you’re going to make the wrong decision, if you’re worried that something bad is really going to happen and if you’re just there overthinking a silly situation like a conversation you had with a colleague earlier in the day that you may have something that sounded a little bit silly but you can’t stop thinking about it, your brain is processing that as a threat.
So, that’s the first thing that you really need to understand is that your brain, because it’s been on this hyper mode of, “Oh, got to make a decision, got to make the right choice, got to the right thing, can’t do the wrong thing,” it applies this mode of thinking to everything.
And because your brain is seeing everything as a threat, it gets stuck in this mode and it’s your body’s way and your brain’s way of trying to protect you.
How to turn your brain off and stop worrying:
So, I’m an energy healer, as you may already know, and the way that I overcome these types of issues with the way your brain is thinking is by kind of going in the backend which is through your energy field.
It’s a little known fact that with energy, if you fix something in one part, it naturally – kind of like falling dominoes – affects all the other parts of your energy field as well.
So, it might not make logical sense to do something else like, “I can’t make up my mind about which bank I should be banking with, so I’m going to go and tidy my desk.” That doesn’t seem like a very logical decision to make but believe me when I say, changing the energy up in one area is absolutely going to impact the energy in another area.
There is also a logical reasoning for doing this and it’s really just sometimes, when you take your mind of the overthinking, it really helps to relax everything and then you subconscious can do the job that it’s supposed to do which is to sort out the conclusions for you.
So there is a logical basis behind it but really, when you think about it energetically, it’s just that fixing up one area is going to help other areas of your life absolutely.
So that’s one way that you can do it, you can fix one area of your life or put your attention in one area to help another.
The other way, and this is an area of healing that really is – people have described it to me as a little bit of a mind twist but the secret is that healing is all about accepting what’s uncomfortable for you.
So, people think healing is something that’s going to make your better, when in actual fact, what healing is, is accepting and integrating parts of yourself that you have tried to reject in the past.
That’s why you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing with your overthinking is that you’re trying to reject the wrong decisions that you’ve made in the past.
“Why do I overthink everything?”
So, the way to stop overthinking really and truly and long-term, is to allow the overthinking to be there. And I know that’s a paradox. I know that it seems like a real cop-out that I’m here saying – “Well, just don’t worry about the overthinking. Let the overthinking happen.”
But it’s true. When you acknowledge and accept that you’re doing this overthinking behavior, when you catch yourself and you think, “Oh, I’m overthinking this,” the idea is to NOT to try to push that overthinking away, it’s not to try to push through to a logical and reasoned conclusion.
It’s not about trying to make pros and cons lists. It’s really not about that at all.
It’s about saying to yourself, “Yes, I’m overthinking. Yes, I know what I’m doing is counterproductive. Yes, I know that I’m prone to doing this.”
And then taking a deep breath and being with yourself in that moment and accepting, “I’m overthinking right now, I’m stuck in a rut and I’m overthinking right now.”
And also telling yourself that that is actually okay.
It’s okay to be overthinking right now in this moment.
And you will find that as you just allow your energy to relax in the judgment of the fact that you’re overthinking and you’re overanalyzing things that should be really simple, you’re coming to this space of self-acceptance where you start to see clearly that although you’re overthinking in this moment, in the wider scheme of things, it’s not such a big deal.
That while you’re overthinking right now that in accepting it, you’re retraining yourself, you’re retraining your energy field to accept a new way of thinking and then you will find that you’ll come into such a space of self-acceptance and being okay with the fact that you’re overthinking that the overthinking doesn’t matter as much anymore and then you become a lot clearer about what your reasoned outcome actually is and it all comes from just letting go of the judgment surrounding your overthinking.
You think millions of thoughts every single day.
Thoughts come into your head, thoughts go out of your head.
Thoughts are energy.
They definitely are energy but there is no way that you can possibly get this wrong.
And I also encourage you to just take a wider lens view of the situation that you’re currently in by acknowledging and accepting that you are currently overthinking – and that is okay.
It’s because you care about what it is you’re thinking about. You care about what other people think of you and that makes you a good person and that makes you important and loved and needed in this earth and in this world.
So, I encourage you to just accept and allow and relent on the fact that you’re overthinking. Let it be there and then watch the magic as that overthinking energy lifts.
Love + light
Eva xo
PS – Download my free “Space between your brain cells” meditation to create some energetic room in your mind, to free you from repetitive, unhelpful thoughts.