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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Trenton
Read between
September 29 - September 30, 2023
the causes of overthinking are seldom the focus of overthinking.
All of these thoughts are the result of overthinking.
When stress is too great, however, it has the opposite effect and only works to deplete our psychological resources and leave us feeling unable to cope.
hypostress, this form of stress occurs when we aren’t being challenged enough by our environment. This just goes to show that to flourish, we don’t need a stress-free environment, we need one that’s optimally suited to our needs.
stress is something in the environment, an external pressure on us, whereas anxiety is our internal experience of this pressure.
We respond not to stress but to our perception of stress.
Our main goal in de-stressing is to pinpoint exactly what is going on in our heads when we overthink.
When we talk about stress-management, we are not necessarily talking about getting rid of stress entirely. It’s impossible! And we’re also not talking about numbing yourself out, becoming less perceptive, or being less aware. Rather, it’s about being aware without attaching anxiety-provoking narratives and judgments to that awareness.
All you need to remember is four techniques: avoid, alter, accept, and adapt.
If you can’t avoid a stressor, ask what you can do to change it.
Acceptance doesn’t mean pretending you don’t feel how you feel; it’s an acknowledgment that it’s okay to feel that way. Validate your own emotions and own them.
Acceptance
means we gracefully come to terms with what we can’t realistically change, so we can focus on what we can.
Adapting to stress means we change ourselves to better cope with life.
We all need some stress in life!
If we can pull our conscious awareness back into the present, we can halt some of this overthinking. And we can do this by checking in with the five senses.
five things in your environment that you can see.
four things in your environment that you can feel
three things that you can hear.
two things you can smell.
one thing that you can taste.
You are not your problems. You are not your failures.
For many of us, good stress management is simply good time management.
One mindset shift is to see rest and relaxation as important and worthy of your focus, and not just something you tack onto the end of a day once more important things are done.
Stress management is about removing those unnecessary stressors, but it’s also about proactively making room for those things in life that we enjoy and which refresh and regenerate us.
Using visualization helps us to change gears, slow down, and take more control over a runaway brain.
When we stress, our entire body responds—stress is not just something that happens inside our skulls. Overthinkers can be somewhat disconnected from their bodies and, for example, never notice that their chronic shoulder pain or teeth-grinding and their anxiety are actually one and the same problem.
CBT techniques will not help
if we do not have an adequate grasp on the ideas covered in the previous chapters.
Thoughts create emotions, which shape our perception and change our beliefs about ourselves and how we act.
How we feel is not because of what happens, but because of how we think about what happens. When we change the way we look at things, we change the way we feel.
The language that we use when we talk to ourselves makes as much of a difference as the factual accuracy of the statements.
The right attitude turns adversity and obstacles into an opportunity for creative solutions. Stress and worry can be channeled into planning and innovation.
The CBT techniques mentioned above as well as the mindfulness-based methods teach us how to sit with our emotions without judgment.
Rumination is anxious, unproductive overthinking.
Label thoughts as thoughts and personify
