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

Research into the causes of anxiety is ongoing. Competing theories suggest that it’s a matter of personality, or a question of a biological predisposition—something you inherited from your equally anxious parents. Anxiety is often found with other disorders, both mental (like depression) and physical (like irritable bowel syndrome). But it’s also been observed that certain groups—such as women—experience it more, and that elements like diet, stressful lifestyles, past trauma, and even culture have a part to play.

The idea here is that mental “downtime” is used for additional processing—whether there’s something to process or not. As physicist Michio Kaku said, “The human brain has one hundred billion neurons, each neuron connected to ten thousand other neurons. 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!

Let’s begin with a common explanation for anxiety: genetics. The truth is that no experts have been able to identify with absolute certainty a single genetic cause for anxiety. Researchers have, however, discovered a genetic component. Purves et. al. argued in a 2019 Molecular Psychiatry paper that chromosome 9 carries genes associated with the development of anxiety. But having these genes does not definitively mean you’ll develop anxiety.

The field of epigenetics now tells us that genes are only a part of the story. We are born with DNA that can be later altered through our life experiences and interactions with the environment. Certain genes can be activated or deactivated by molecular process, one of which is methylation. Epigenetic researchers are not only finding that life experiences can turn off genetic expression via methylation, but that this patten of methylation can in fact be passed down through generations.

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.

Lastly, our daily habits can feed our anxieties and result in overthinking in subtle but significant ways. Seemingly innocuous habits like checking your 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. Of all the factors we’ve mentioned so far, this one is by far the easiest to control. However, the next source of anxiety does not bend to our will as easily.

Stress is not a bad thing. “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. When stress is too great, however, it has the opposite effect and only works to deplete our psychological resources and leave us feeling unable to cope. On the other end of the spectrum, we can also be stressed by the complete lack of stimulation. 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 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.

Clutter, be it at home or work, is generally a significant cause of anxiety because it subconsciously acts as a reflection of yourself.

Do you remember James from earlier in the chapter? We took a peek into his brain for just an hour or two, but imagine being James twenty-four-seven with a brain that seemingly never switched off. Perhaps you already know what this feels like. Yet most people don’t think of worry and overthinking as innately harmful—it’s just thoughts, right?

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.

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.

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.

This means you’re less likely to recognize creative solutions to problems, see new opportunities and capitalize on them, or truly appreciate all the things that are going right for you. If you are constantly in a low-level state of fear and worry, every new encounter is going to be interpreted through that filter, and interpreted not for what it is but for what you’re worried it could be.

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.

Awareness is not rumination, though: when we are aware, we simply turn our attention to both our inner and outer experience, without judgment and without clinging or resisting. 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.”

All you need to remember is four techniques: avoid, alter, accept, and adapt.

If the situation is one in which you’ve been wronged, acceptance may take the form of trying to find a way to forgive. 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.

To do this kind of journaling, simply write about a traumatic experience for no more than fifteen to twenty minutes for around three to five days. As you write, gradually shift your focus onto positive effects, i.e., good emotions. 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 idea is simple: for each entry in your stress diary, record the time and date and how you’re feeling at that moment. A common way to do this is on a rating scale (for example, one for not stressed at all and ten for super stressed), but you can also use feeling words, or note physical symptoms (like sweaty palms). Also note how effective and productive you’re feeling using a scale as well. Then, note any stressful events that have recently happened as well as any ideas for what you feel could be the causes of your current state. Try to build a three-dimensional snapshot of what your anxiety and overthinking actually look like. Finally, note how you responded to the event and what the overall outcome was.

This last point brings to attention something we can easily forget in our blind hurry to de-stress: We all need some stress in life! A stress diary can help you identify your optimal range. So for example, you might notice that you are at a stress level of around 2 or 3 out of 10, but that this level is relatively comfortable and a zone where you are at your most productive and efficient. You can learn not only the level of stress that works best for you, but also the kind of stress that is beneficial. This is a vital insight you would not get without taking the time to keep a stress diary.

As you’re analyzing, avoid overanalyzing! Remember that the goal of the stress journal is not to catch yourself out or feel bad about what you discover. In other words, there should be no judgment. Instead take a compassionate, curious approach and stay open-minded. Overthinkers are typically intelligent, but sometimes that just means they’re really good at hiding obvious things from themselves!

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.

If all of the above sounds too complicated to remember in the moment, try this: literal grounding. Researcher Gaétan Chevalier found that “earthing” or grounding the human body on the actual earth had fascinating effects on mood. Chevalier asked participants of the study to put their feet or bodies in contact with the earth for one hour. He then tested them and found a statistically significant boost in the self-reported moods and levels of wellbeing in those who were in contact with the earth versus those who spent the hour without this contact. Though grounding in this way is unlikely to be enough to combat a more serious anxiety disorder, it’s certainly an encouraging finding. If you can, try the 5-4-3-2-1 technique outdoors, where your bare feet are in contact with the soil.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it may help to repeat the mantra to yourself: “I am not my problems.” Change your language, too. Instead of, “I’m an anxious person,” say, “I’m experiencing anxiety right now,” or even, “I’m noticing some anxiety.” We can put distance between ourselves and our problems in many ways:

Another technique is to imagine yourself putting your worries away in a locked safe before going to bed. Tell yourself, “I can always open the safe and come and get these later if I want to, but for now, I’m sleeping.”

If things are feeling disastrous, stop and force yourself to focus on the single thing that is most important right now.

Anxiety and overthinking have a way of “fracturing” our attention and creating chaos and confusion. When we deconstruct all of these thoughts, however, we see that many of them are just noise, and we don’t necessarily have to entertain them.

The procrastinator has different challenges: delaying any action at all until it’s often too late. While some pressure is good, for the procrastinator, anxiety only impairs them further. You might not think that procrastination and overthinking have much to do with each other, but consider the person who has put off work they know they should do, and the stress this creates. If you procrastinate, you may benefit from breaking things down into small tasks and rewarding yourself for each mini-milestone. The distractor has a related problem—they start but are often derailed by distractions and find their attention going all over the place. Distraction and overthinking can feed each other into epic proportions. What works for people with this tendency is to have firmer boundaries and a better consideration for the kind of environment they work in. For example, you might decide to drastically declutter your office and set a firm boundary not to be disturbed during certain work hours. This will reduce the number of things that pop up and demand your attention, triggering stress and overthinking. The underestimator mistakenly thinks tasks will take less time than they really do, and they can miss deadlines because their estimations were too optimistic. Here, time management also comes down to building in ample time for tackling projects step by step, to give time to appraise the process more realistically. This is a relatively easy issue to fix, but unresolved, it can wreak havoc.

How one person could be all three.

Allen’s Input Processing Technique This technique is great for procrastinators, firefighters, and distractors, but can be helpful for anyone who wants to navigate our information-saturated world. In this technique, data is broadly called “inputs,” i.e., any stimulus from the environment: meetings, emails, phone calls, social media, TV, other people, and so on. How do you respond to each of these little hooks that reaches out to grab your attention? Allen’s technique claims that unless you plan ahead for how you respond, you’re probably doing it sub-optimally.

A lot of overthinking comes down to juggling too many commitments with too little time or resources. This causes stress, which fuels overthinking. If we cannot avoid such time stress, we can certainly change it or adapt ourselves.

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.

For important and urgent tasks: Do immediately. These are your priority. It’s a good idea to have some time every day scheduled for unforeseen events, but re-evaluate if there are many of these, and try to see how you could have planned for them.

Try to schedule routine activities so you don’t need to really think about them; for example, a morning run, a budget session every Sunday evening, or a weekly call with your mom.

For not important but urgent tasks: Try to delegate. These are the things that are pressing you but don’t actually enrich your life or bring you closer to your goals. It’s better if you can reschedule or delegate so you can spend time on things that actually do relate to your goals. Have good boundaries and say no to unnecessary commitments.

For not important and not urgent tasks: Delete! There’s no need to waste time or effort on these things; just ignore or move on from them as quickly as possible and try to reduce their frequency in the future if you can. Things like pointless internet distractions, ...

In Jan O’Neill’s seminal work, The Power of SMART Goals: Using Goals to Improve Student Learning, she explores the evidence behind the relationship between clear, achievable goals and measurable success. O’Neill and several other education experts find again and again that the focus required to set concrete goals is the single biggest predictor for their fulfilment. Motivational speaker Tony Robbins is often credited with saying that goal-setting is “the first step in turning the invisible into the visible”—in other words, they carry us from the potential to the actual.

With time blocking, you dedicate certain blocks of time in your schedule to one task and that task alone, rather than multitasking or rapidly switching between this and that. By planning ahead, you waste no time or willpower making decisions about what to do, and you can ensure you always begin with your priorities. You want to encourage “deep work” and get engrossed in what you’re doing, rather than shallow attention on many things at once. This is not only effective (i.e., you get more done in a fixed space of time) but it’s far less stressful, and you may get more out of work with less mental or emotional effort.

Start by asking what you hope to achieve with a day or a week, and what priorities you want to focus on. This will guide your approach. Then look at the morning and evening routines you want to establish at the start and end of every single day. For example, you might start with a morning workout and meditation and end with a relaxing read or quality time with family. Of course, these are all set according to your priorities and values (not to mention your unique sleep/wake cycles and habits). Next, block in the priority tasks first, planning them for when you know you’ll be most alert and energetic. Keep these blocks as undivided as possible. Then find room for less important shallow work and schedule for times when you are not as productive. Of course, you will need a time every day for those tasks you can’t exactly predict, such as responding to emails or other things that emerge in the moment. Set aside some time to address these so they can’t build up and stress you out. Having this set time also means you can confidently forget about reactive tasks outside of their designated window. Take a look at your schedule and try it out for a few days. It’s not gospel—see what works and change what doesn’t.

Heaviness Warmth Awareness of heartbeat Awareness of breath Awareness of abdominal sensations Focus on coolness of the forehead

Don’t rush, and really tune into guiding the desired feeling of calm within you. Feel how your body actually becomes calm when you say, “I am calm.” Magic! It’s important to stress here that autogenic training does take some time to show the full extent of its benefits. It will require both dedication and commitment to the exercise. However, if you manage to do the hard work, the fruits of your labor will be endless because you’ll have mastered the art of controlling your stress levels through a simple exercise that can be done anytime, anywhere.

Take a few minutes out of each day, several times if possible, and try to practice this process regularly. You’ll eventually see just how effective this can be to help you stop overthinking.