Stop Overthinking Quotes

“The ancient Stoics understood these principles well, with Epictetus saying, “Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.” We have power over our minds, not outside events. So, if we continue to focus on outside events that we don’t have power over, the conclusion is obvious—we repeatedly experience powerlessness and therefore anxiety.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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. So, if James is worried about his health, it’s natural that him overthinking endlessly about the various causes and solutions makes it seem like he’s trying to get to the bottom of the issue. 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’s like scratching an itch that just won’t go away. You can scratch it to feel some momentary relief, but it won’t make the itching stop despite how good scratching might feel.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“If we hope to successfully tackle overthinking, we need to take a step back rather than trying to work through the problem from inside our own rumination.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“A 2010 paper published by Killingsworth and Gilbert titled “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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“When you relax, your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure drop; your digestion and blood sugar levels improve; you moderate stress hormones in the body; you reduce fatigue and muscle pain; and you increase concentration, good sleep, and confidence. And all this spells less anxiety and rumination. Combined with other techniques in this book, relaxation is a powerful tool for mitigating the stress of living.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“We all live in a highly strung, overstimulated, highly cerebral world. Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress. Endless analysis of life and of self is usually unwanted, unstoppable, and self-defeating. Ordinarily, our brains help us solve problems and understand things more clearly—but overthinking does the opposite.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“In fact, the moment he has that thought, his head is filled with seemingly millions of examples of all the times people have criticized him.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“The first thing you need to remember is a mantra called the 4 As of stress management. These are avoid, alter, accept, and adapt. Avoiding things entails simply walking away from things you can’t control. Some things are simply not worth the effort and are best removed from our environments”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“People who are not subject to anxious overthinking have mastered a particular attitude to life that’s characterized by flexibility, focus, resilience, and beneficial action. Put your awareness”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on 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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“When you find yourself feeling anxious, pause and run through each of them in sequence. No matter how stressful the situation, there is a way for you to engage with it mindfully and proactively. You are not helpless in the face of stress—you have tools at your disposal! To use these tools, all it takes is a little awareness. For example, there may be a colleague at work who stresses you out daily. Instead of getting overwhelmed by telling yourself there’s nothing you can do about it, pause and ask if you can simply avoid this colleague. Maybe you can have lunch at a different time to avoid meeting them in the cafeteria, or maybe you can physically move to work farther away from them. But let’s say you can’t avoid encountering them in weekly meetings, and this is where they frequently interrupt you or steal your ideas. You think of ways to alter the situation. Can you get out of these meetings? Can you speak to your colleague privately and share your concerns (“I’m uncomfortable in meetings lately, and I feel dismissed when you interrupt me”)? Can you speak up in meetings and assert a stronger boundary when you talk? If none of these are really possible, you can still accept the situation to some degree. You might confide in a close friend about your frustrations, or come to realize that this colleague actually interrupts everyone, so you won’t continue to take it personally or let it stress you. Finally, you can adapt by working on becoming an overall more confident and assertive person. When you genuinely feel that you have as much right to speak as anyone else, then you may feel more confident saying, “Sorry, I was still speaking,” and carrying on calmly.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“worry postponement is an effective way to put objective distance between a person and their distressing thoughts, as well as practice a degree of metacognition, which can reduce overall anxiety and overthinking.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“They are desperate to solve the “problem,” not considering that their appraisal of what is a problem is in fact the problem.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“After deciding that price, a garden, and three bathrooms are nonnegotiable, they’re able to focus their attention and ignore options that don’t measure up.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“Be proud of yourself for having the honesty and courage to grow and change, rather than trying to “fix” yourself from a position of desperation, shame, or impatience.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“If you’ve ever heard, “Clean your room!” as advice for coping with stress, it’s because of this very reason. Clutter, be it at home or work, is generally a significant cause of anxiety because it subconsciously acts as a reflection of yourself. Things like the quality of lighting, the smells and noises you’re exposed to, the colors of the walls, and the people occupying these spaces with you can all cause or reduce anxiety and stress levels depending on how they’re managed. You might be surprised at how much of an impact good lighting, pleasant aromas, and walls with calming colors have on your anxiety levels.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“He then puts a magnifying lens on all his flaws and starts turning each of them over in his mind, wondering why he is the way he is, tortured by the fact that he can’t seem to just “let it go.” After an hour of this, he realizes with despair that he is no closer to making a decision”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“Overthinkers are typically intelligent, but sometimes that just means they’re really good at hiding obvious things from themselves!”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“Another reason it can be so hard to escape this vicious cycle is that the anxiety causing our overthinking works in clever and mischievous ways. It feeds on our worst fears. You might have noticed that your overthinking is exacerbated by some very specific triggers. This can be your insecurities about your personal capabilities, your relationships with certain people, your physical or mental health, etc. Simply trying to suppress your thoughts when they’re running wild often results in the opposite outcome. You start thinking even more about the thing you were worried about. This might sound like a helpless situation, but later in this book, we’ll discuss some techniques you can utilize to get out of this cycle.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“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?”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“So, what’s really happening is that worries are controlling you rather than you controlling them. A stressful thought comes along and cracks the whip, and you instantly obey. The mistake we make is to think that if a negative thought comes along, there is no other option but to focus on it. Remember our brain’s negativity bias and our information-processing software that literally evolved to amplify bad news? It tells us that the threatening and scary thing always takes precedence.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“So, what’s really happening is that worries are controlling you rather than you controlling them. A stressful thought comes along and cracks the whip, and you instantly obey. The mistake we make is to think that if a negative thought comes along, there is no other option but to focus on it.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“Consider this: Siamese cats possess genes that give the coat its characteristic coloring. The genes, however, are not set in stone, but rather express themselves conditionally in relation to the environment because they are temperature-sensitive. They are “switched on” in colder areas of the body (the brown tail tip, nose, ears, and feet) and turned off in warmer areas. If you raise a Siamese kitten in a very cool climate, it will be darker brown. In a warmer climate, it will look lighter. Thus, two cats with the same genetic makeup end up with a different phenotype, i.e., physiological expression of those genes.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present

“When you forgive, you are releasing yourself from the stress and energy of resenting and blaming the other person.”
― Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present