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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Trenton
Started reading
May 11, 2023
Overthinking is excessively harmful mental activity, whether that activity is analyzing, judging, monitoring, evaluating, controlling, or worrying—or
Thought is not an enemy.
They are desperate to solve the “problem,” not considering that their appraisal of what is a problem is in fact the problem.
about overthinking, we are talking about anxiety.
we’ll see anxiety as the root cause (the why) and overthinking as the effect (or the how).
In this way, the brain could be said
to have evolved to survive, not to be happy.
Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” And rumination is what happens when all that processing power has nothing better to do!
“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” found that the brain is ultimately spending as much time stewing over what is not happening as it is over
what is happening.
The first main reason you’re anxious could be the nature part of the “nature vs. nurture” question. In other words, though it might not feel like it in the moment, a big cause of anxiety can come down to intrinsic factors within you as an individual.
There is even now evidence to suggest that as we get older and our environments change, the effects of our genes have even less influence over us.
But the truth is that overthinking often doesn’t lead anywhere, because the overthinker gets trapped in the cycle of analyzing, rejecting, and reconsidering different possibilities.
It feeds on our worst fears.
social media often, not eating well or getting enough nutrition, not drinking enough water, having awkward sleep cycles, etc., can exacerbate our tendency to overthink things.
In other words, genetic predisposition + stressful precipitating events = overthinking.
“Eustress” or good stress is the kind of normal everyday pressure that inspires us, keeps us on our toes, and challenges us to be better.
Known as 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 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 anxie...
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The body’s fight-or-flight response evolved to keep us safe—but we were never meant to stay in a heightened state of arousal indefinitely.
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.
have found that one of the biggest predictors of mental disorders in adulthood was experiencing trauma, abuse, or neglect in childhood.
This is the immediate environments we spend substantial chunks of time in—our homes and offices/workspaces. How these spaces are composed and oriented can have a huge impact on how anxious we feel.
Clutter, be it at home or work, is generally a significant cause of anxiety because it subconsciously acts as a reflection of yourself.
You might be surprised at how much of an impact good lighting, pleasant aromas, and walls with calming colors have on your anxiety levels.
“It’s not the load, but how you carry it.”
Your perceptions, perspectives, sense of self, worldview, and cognitive models all go toward your interpretation of neutral events.
fight-or-flight response to prepare the body to survive the perceived threat.
