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

Takeaways What exactly is overthinking? Overthinking is when you excessively analyze, evaluate, ruminate, and worry about certain things to a point where it starts affecting your mental health because you simply can’t stop. There are two main sources of anxiety that lead to overthinking. The first one is ourselves. Unfortunately, some of us are just genetically predisposed to being more anxious than others. However, genetics may not be the only factor. We might become habitual overthinkers because it makes us feel like we’re somehow tackling the problem we’re overthinking about. Because the overthinking never ends, this doesn’t happen, but we still feel like we’re making some progress. This turns into a vicious cycle that can be hard to escape. Another cause of anxiety is our environment. There are two aspects to this. First, we need to consider our immediate environments where we spend the most time, like our home and office. The way these spaces have been designed can have a huge impact on our anxiety levels. If they’re cluttered, dimly lit, and noisy, it’s going to make us more anxious. The second aspect is the broader experience we have in our socio-cultural setting through our interactions with the world. Something like experiencing racism or sexism might make us stressed and result in heightened anxiety. There are many negative consequences to overthinking. These include physical, mental, and even social harms that can become long-term issues. Some examples are racin...

In fact, 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. For overthinkers, we tend to go into anxiety when simple awareness is all that’s called for.

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.”

The 4 A’s of Stress Management This technique was first proposed by the Mayo Clinic but has since been used in various iterations by therapists, coaches, doctors, and laypeople all over the world. 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. It can be a comfort in itself to know that really, there are only these four possible ways to respond to any life stress.

The first thing you can do is avoid. Sounds suspiciously simple, but there’s a lot of aggravation in life you can simply walk away from. We can’t control everything in life, but we can arrange our circumstances so that we don’t have to be in stressful surroundings, or with stressful people. If we’re honest, we might see that a lot of the stress in our lives is voluntary—and we don’t have to agree to it!

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.

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.

When we adapt to stress, we find ways to make ourselves stronger. We build a worldview for ourselves that empowers us. For example, someone might get into the habit of making a “gratitude list” every day of all the wonderful things they are actually blessed with in life. Another person might meditate on their own personal “code” or say a mantra daily to remind them that they are strong and they can get through adversity. If we have an arsenal of powerful attitudes, ideas, philosophies, and inspiration, we can go into the world knowing that we can handle stress—and maybe even be better people for

Stress Diaries and Journals Another concrete way to bring more awareness to your daily experience of stress is to write it all down. With overthinking, it can sometimes seem like there are a million things on your plate at once, and it’s hard to decide what single cause is really behind your anxiety.

But this is not the only way to use journaling. 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.

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?

You can learn not only the level of stress that works best for you, but also the kind of stress that is beneficial.

If you’re battling low mood and find your anxiety is general and seems to affect everything, you might find a gratitude journal helpful.

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.

The next time you feel anxiety and panic spiraling out of control, 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 feels against your fingers. Next, find three things that you can hear. Your own breath. The distant sound of traffic or birds. Next, find two things you can smell. This might be tricky at first, but notice that everything has a smell if you pay attention. Can you smell the soap on your skin or the faint earthy smell of the paper on your desk? Finally, find one thing that you can taste. Maybe the lingering flavor of coffee on your tongue. Even if you can’t find anything, just dwell for a moment on what your taste buds are sensing. Are they really “off” or does your mouth almost have a taste of its own when you stop to become aware of it? Stay there for a moment and explore that sensation.

The point of this exercise is, on the surface, distraction. While your senses are active, your brain is engaged in something other than endless rumination, and your overthinking is halted.

In the moment, you might not remember which sense comes next, but this isn’t important. What matters is that you are giving your full and focused attention to something outside of yourself and letting anxious energy dissipate. It’s difficult to stop a thought by saying, “I think I should stop thinking,” because, obviously, this itself is a thought. But if you can put your brain on pause and re-engage your senses for a moment, you unhook yourself from the worry track and give yourself a moment to become present and calm.

Nevertheless, we do have the power to change how we talk about ourselves and our lives, and we can make meaningful changes. So, when it comes to overthinking, a big step is saying, “Overthinking is a problem, and I’m going to find alternatives,” versus saying, “I am an overthinker and that’s bad. I have to find a way to fix myself.” 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.

If your life was a movie, what genre would it be? What role would you always play, and how would the story play out?