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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Trenton
Read between
February 4 - February 28, 2023
We all live in a highly strung, overstimulated, highly cerebral world. Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress.
Endless analysis of life and of self is usually unwanted, unstoppable, and self-defeating.
The gist of overthinking is in the name—it’s when we think over, above and beyond what is beneficial for us.
Thinking is a marvelous gift. The ability to reflect, analyze, and interrogate even our own thought processes is arguably the single most defining characteristic of humankind,
causes of overthinking are seldom the focus of overthinking.
Anxiety is often found with other disorders, both mental (like depression) and physical (like irritable bowel syndrome).
There are no “anxiety genes” that destine you to a fixed fate you can never escape.
Is overthinking genetic? Yes. But it’s not only genetic. Life still weighs in on that seventy-four percent, which means that environment may play a bigger role. We can’t do much about our genetics, but we can do a lot about everything else.
Many of us have become habitual overthinkers because it gives us the illusion that we’re doing something about the problem we’re overthinking about.
It’s like scratching an itch that just won’t go away. You can scratch it to feel some momentary relief, but it won’t make the itching stop despite how good scratching might feel.
Another reason it can be so hard to escape this vicious cycle is that the anxiety causing our overthinking works in clever and mischievous ways. It feeds on our worst fears.
genetic predisposition + stressful precipitating events = overthinking.
Stress and anxiety are not the same thing. Psychologist Dr. Sarah Edelman explains that stress is something in the environment, an external pressure on us, whereas anxiety is our internal experience of this pressure.
If you heap chronic stress onto someone who already has a biological or psychological predisposition to overthinking, it’s a recipe for burnout and overwhelm.
Clutter, be it at home or work, is generally a significant cause of anxiety because it subconsciously acts as a reflection of yourself.
Whether we experience anxiety comes down to the relationship between: Our unique genetic and biological characteristics and susceptibilities, and The events, pressures, and conditions we find in the external environment.
Your perceptions, perspectives, sense of self, worldview, and cognitive models all go toward your interpretation of neutral events. We respond not to stress but to our perception of stress.
generating hope and excitement rather than fear, of taking control of stress and steering your life, rather than feeling like it’s steering you.
it’s not “all in your head”—it’s all in your body, all in your behavior, and all in your world!
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.
A person who is constantly stressed and anxious starts to lose all meaning and joy in life, stops making plans, cannot act with charity or compassion to others, and loses their passion for life.
Overthinkers have an advantage over others: they are usually intelligent, aware, and able to take beneficial action for themselves—if only they are able to acknowledge that overthinking is not working for them anymore.
For overthinkers, the ordinary de-stressing advice is usually not enough. In some cases, like for Angie, it makes things worse. Instead, we need to: 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 first is neutral, comfortable, and still. The second is tinged with emotion and tends to get carried away with itself.
When stress piles on in this way, it can feel utterly overwhelming. It’s like playing an ultra-fast game of Tetris where you can’t think straight because there’s always another challenge, another crisis demanding your attention.
Having a simple, structured approach to anxiety can be like a lifeboat in the storm of stress and overthinking. All you need to remember is four techniques: avoid, alter, accept, and adapt.
Consider someone who hates how busy the grocery stores are on Saturday morning. Knowing that this stresses them out, they can rearrange their schedule so they do their weekly shopping at the quietest time, say, on a Tuesday evening. There’s no need to manage the stress of a busy supermarket if you just avoid it entirely.
I like this analogy
When you avoid stress, you are not running away from obligations or denying genuine problems. You are simply learning to say “no” to stress that is unnecessary and harmful.
Communicate your needs and feelings directly, rather than suffering in silence. If you never clearly tell your friend that his stupid jokes really hurt you, you may sit quietly and bear the brunt of it forever, when it would have been easy to tell him how you feel and ask him to stop.
If you can’t avoid a stressor, ask what you can do to change it. If your answer is “not much,” then you might need to go one step further and accept it.
When you forgive, you are releasing yourself from the stress and energy of resenting and blaming the other person.
Acceptance doesn’t mean we agree with what happened or that we like it and shouldn’t try to change it. It only 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.
You can use prompts like: What has someone done to help you? What are you grateful for? What are your ultimate values and principles?
The only trick with this approach, however, is to make sure that you are constantly moving toward something more positive. You are not just venting and complaining, but allowing your expression over time to be transformed into something healthier and more balanced.
A stress diary can help you pinpoint your triggers, as well as your reaction to them. From there, you can start taking active steps to manage your stress levels.
Try to build a three-dimensional snapshot of what your anxiety and overthinking actually look like.
Keep a stress diary for a few days or a week, and then sit down to analyze it and find any patterns: 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?
The journal is just a tool to get closer to your emotions—if you find yourself focusing more on the journal than your emotions, you might need to try a different technique.
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.
try this: stop, take a breath, and look around you. First, find five things in your environment that you can see. You might rest your eyes on the lamp in the corner, your own hands, a painting on the wall. Take a moment to really look at all these things: their textures, colors, shapes. Take your time to run your eyes over every inch and take it all in. Next, try to find four things in your environment that you can feel or touch. Feel the weight of your body against the chair, or the texture of the jacket you’re wearing, or reach out to feel how cool and smooth the glass of the car window
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When we externalize, we put the problem out there. We are not wrong or bad to have problems, and we don’t judge or blame ourselves for having them.
Another big step is to realize that you really are in control and are the author of your own experience—other people are not to blame for our perception, and equally they cannot save or teach us; we are the experts of our own experience.
Just like a cloud is not the sky, our problems are not who we are—they will pass, and we do have control over how we respond to them.
When you overthink, the sensation is often one of overwhelm: there are a million things going on in your head, all at a thousand miles an hour, and you don’t even know where to start with any of it.
A story is a way to organize, to slow things down, and to remind you that you are in control when it comes to where and how you place your attention.
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.
For many of us, good stress management is simply good time management. If you find yourself anxious about deadlines, feel rushed, too busy or overwhelmed, then you may derive more from time management strategies than techniques aimed directly at relaxation.
Time management, in turn, often comes down to one fundamental skill: identifying your priorities and using them to guide your goal-setting. When you can do this, you increase feelings of competence and control and indirectly boost your resilience when inevitable setbacks occur.
