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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Trenton
Read between
August 4 - August 25, 2023
Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress.
Thought is not an enemy. Our brain is an extraordinarily helpful tool, but when we overthink, we only undermine its power.
Marcus E. Raichle is a neuroscientist who coined the term “default mode network,” which can be thought of as everything the brain does when it does nothing in particular. When no task dominates, the brain ends up mulling over its place in the world and processes and reprocesses social information and memories in the interests of increasing survival.
This kind of research can be difficult, because when you think about it, there are two ways to “inherit” anxiety from parents—one is genetically, but another is in the parenting we receive, our early formative experiences, and so on.
You might have noticed that your overthinking is exacerbated by some very specific triggers. This can be your insecurities about your personal capabilities, your relationships with certain people, your physical or mental health, etc.
Simply trying to suppress your thoughts when they’re running wild often results in the opposite outcome.
life itself plays the biggest role in developing and sustaining anxiety. In other words, genetic predisposition + stressful precipitating events = overthinking.
stress is something in the environment, an external pressure on us, whereas anxiety is our internal experience of this pressure.
Work pressures, demanding children, an emotionally exhausting relationship, the never-ending stress of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, politics, climate change, the fact that your neighbor keeps making a noise upstairs, lack of sleep, too much junk food, that traumatic thing that happened to you last year, your low bank balance . . . It’s no surprise many of us are completely overwhelmed.
anxiety is a physiological, mental, psychological, social, and even spiritual phenomenon.
Also, that’s without mentioning the direct physiological effects of prolonged stress. From a systems standpoint, stress is a complex phenomenon that encompasses everything from the health and function of our endocrine glands and organs, to our adaptive behaviors, to our subjective experiences of our mood, and to the broader world we’re a part of.
it’s not “all in your head”—it’s all in your body, all in your behavior, and all in your world!
More alarming than this, overthinking can completely warp your perception of events in time, shaping your personality in ways that mean you are more risk averse, more negatively focused, and less resilient.
When you’re constantly tuned into Stress FM, you are not actually consciously aware and available in the present moment to experience life as it is. You miss out on countless potential feelings of joy, gratitude, connection, and creativity because of your relentless focus on what could go wrong or what has gone wrong.
gain conscious awareness of our thought process, be proactive about stress management, and learn real techniques to ground and focus our thoughts.
one of the best skills an overthinker can develop is to distinguish between awareness and anxiety—the
Anxiety: “There’s so much going on right now, and I can’t cope, and I’m about ready to scream! Nobody respects me. I can’t do this anymore. What did his message mean? Why is this happening?”
Awareness: “There’s a lot going on right now. My heart is racing and I’m beginning to panic. I can feel my thoughts racing.”
Remember that forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not the other person. When you forgive, you are releasing yourself from the stress and energy of resenting and blaming the other person.
Is this a “crisis” or a “challenge”?
“What good can come of all this? In what way is this situation a potential benefit to me?”
What are the most frequent causes of stress, i.e., what usually comes before a sudden rise in stress or drop in mood? How do these events typically affect your productivity? How do you normally respond to these events, emotionally and behaviorally, and is your approach working? Can you identify a level of stress that was comfortable and beneficial for your productivity?
when we overthink and ruminate and stress, we are out of the moment. We chew on thoughts of the past or entertain possibilities in the future. We think about “what if” and run our minds ragged on memories, ideas, probabilities, wishes, and fears. 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. To put it another way, the brain can carry you all over the place, but the body—and its senses—is only ever one place: the present.
You are not your problems. You are not your failures. If you can put distance between yourself and your life challenges, you gain perspective and untangle your sense of identity and self-worth from the temporary moment you’re experiencing.
The first thing you need to remember is a mantra called the 4 A’s of stress management. These are avoid, alter, accept, and adapt.
Lastly, if we can’t do much about the situation at all, we must adapt to it and learn how to cope with our stressor and reduce its damaging potential to a minimum.
So, whenever you feel panic overcoming you, look for five things around you that you can see, four things you can touch, three that you can smell, two that you can hear, and one that you can taste. Engaging your senses distracts your brain from overthinking.
Break bigger tasks into smaller ones and set mini-goals on the way to your bigger ones.
Think process rather than outcome. If you focus on daily helpful habits, you’ll achieve more in the long term than if you focused on quick results and perfectionism.
the time martyr is the person who accepts everyone else’s request and takes on too much obligation and responsibility—then suffers for it.
procrastinator has different challenges: delaying any action at all until it’s often too late.
distractor has a related problem—they start but are often derailed by distractions and find their attention going all over the place.
Me for sure
firefighter is always in a reactive state of mind, putting out “fires” all over and juggling a thousand things at once, often when a situation has reached a crisis point.
perfectionist, like the procrastinator, doesn’t get things done because nothing ever matches up to their image of the perfect outcome.
You need to be consistent.
Important tasks are those that have outcomes that bring us closer to our goal.
This distinction is what’s usually missing in a firefighter’s mindset, since they will see every task as urgent when it isn’t. You can start the technique by listing out the tasks and activities ahead of you, either for the day or the week. Now, assign each task one of four possible labels: important and urgent important but not urgent not important but urgent and not important and not urgent. Next, rank these tasks—in the above given order.
For important but not urgent tasks: Make a decision about when to do it.
For not important and not urgent tasks: Delete!
the way to have less stress in life is not to work less or to work harder, but to work more strategically.
Some studies have found that it is in fact our negative perception of our own worry, and not the worry itself, that leads to anxiety.
Just by slowing down and paying attention, you are more aware, giving yourself an opportunity for more agency. Simply by identifying our thoughts rather than running along with them unquestioningly, we think more rationally and more clearly, taking a big step toward breaking stressful mental habits.
“Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”
“If I can’t do this, what can I do? Why not open a café instead?”
Or what can i do to make it happen...
How many people mourn the passing of certain long-gone moments without realizing that this makes it impossible to appreciate the brand-new moment they have right now? How much energy and time is wasted worrying about potential futures that never come—as all the while the real, concrete present moment is dismissed?
Entertaining endless possibilities and choices may seem smart, but it can actually paralyze you and make your decisions less effective.
Trying to endlessly optimize takes us further and further away from our core values and gets us distracted with things that are important but not fundamental.
The emotion behind much overthinking is fear—fear of being out of control, of being overwhelmed, of failure, of impending danger, of panic, and so on.
This, this, this, 100x THIS!!!
Identify and acknowledge the emotion and experience it without judgment or interpretation Look at the thoughts this emotion is causing you to have, as well as the behaviors it encourages. Do you like these thoughts and behaviors, do they bring you closer to your goals, and are they in line with your values? Are they overpowering or working against you? If so, identify the opposite emotion. By trying to cultivate this emotional experience instead, you bring some balance to your state of mind and steer your thoughts and behaviors in a healthier direction. For a fixed period of time (whether it’s
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One way to gain distance is by labeling. Give the story a name. You could think, “Oh, here’s The Saga again,” anytime you recognize yourself being triggered into the same old tale of blame and anger. You can gain distance simply by observing thoughts and feelings, rather than being subsumed by them.
