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

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.