Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm Book 1)

by Nick Trenton

Wrong—anxiety is a physiological, mental, psychological, social, and even spiritual phenomenon. There is no aspect of life that anxious overthinking doesn’t impact. When you perceive a threat, your HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenals) is stimulated. Your brain triggers a cascade of neurotransmitters and hormones in the body, which then have physical effects—this is the classic fight-or-flight response to prepare the body to survive the perceived threat. Karin et. al. (2020) have published a paper outlining how the HPA system, when dysregulated, can form the bedrock of several related psychiatric conditions. 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.

Racing heart, headache, nausea, muscle tension, fatigue, dry mouth, dizzy feelings, increase in breathing rate, aching muscles, trembling and twitching, sweating, disturbed digestion, immune system suppression, and memory issues. Your body was designed to endure brief moments of acute stress, but chronic stress (stress that is ongoing) can start to cause chronic health conditions like cardiovascular disease, insomnia, hormonal dysregulation, and so on. If the ordinary physical experience of stress is prolonged, the physical effects can have consequences in the rest of your life. Mental and psychological effects include: Exhaustion and fatigue, feeling on edge, nervousness, irritability, inability to concentrate, lack of motivation, changes to libido and appetite, nightmares, depression, feeling out of control, apathy, and so on. Stress can reinforce negative thinking patterns and harmful self-talk, lower our confidence, and kill our motivation. 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. This means ...

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. There is very little spontaneity, humor, or irreverence when someone’s mind is too busy catastrophizing, right? As you can imagine, the physical, mental, and environmental aspects all interact to create one unified experience of overthinking and anxiety. For example, if you overthink consistently, your body will be flooded with cortisol and other stress hormones. This can leave you on edge, and in fact cause you to overthink even more, adding to the stress, changing the way you feel about yourself and your life. You might then make bad choices for yourself (staying up late, eating bad food, shutting people out), which reinforce the stress cycle you’re in. You may perform worse at work, procrastinating and inevitably giving yourself more to worry about, and so on.