I am essentially a person who overthinks things. Always. When I was a kid, I would lie in bed and have the conversation in my head again, figuring out what I should say. As an adult, running a business with my brother, I can turn a small question into a long psychological movie before breakfast.
For years I thought of this as a personality fixed point. That’s how I’m wired. Some people are calm. I think too much. End of story.
To be precise, it wasn’t me who changed. Here are three little habits I started developing without a real plan. Each of them sounds too simple to make an impact. That’s part of why they work.
I started noticing it before adding the loop
The first thing that helped was learning to recognize what it felt like to overthink before I fell into it.
Overthinking has a special quality to it. This is not a real idea. True thought keeps moving forward. It concludes and stops. The circle of overthinking. Same problem, same imaginary conversation, same worst-case scenario branching, and fifteen minutes later you’re somewhere else and the loop is still running underneath.
I once made the mistake of thinking that looping was a productive idea. I would tell myself that I was solving some problems. Most of the time I was just rehearsing.
Now, when I feel that special pull and my mind starts replaying or planning a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, I try to grab it sooner rather than later. Sometimes I quietly say to myself, this is the cycle. Does not serve as a stop command. Just a label. A label is often enough to break the spell. Once you see it, the loop loses its pretense. I no longer think about it. This is what your brain does when it doesn’t know what else to do.
A lot of overthinking continues because we don’t notice it happening. Saying its name, even silently, leaves a small distance between you and the spinning object.
I act before I let the thought begin.
This is the most common of the three and the one I rely on the most.
I run most mornings. Not far, not fast. Being clean and tired is enough. When I started doing this consistently, I noticed something I didn’t expect. After my morning run, my overthinking became more muted for the rest of the day. On those days when I don’t do it in the morning, my brain finds something to chew on by mid-afternoon.
I’m not sure what the exact mechanism is. I just know it’s true.
Body and mind are more closely connected than most of us realize. A still body trying to outsmart a busy mind is a losing battle. The body moves first, and then the mind will follow.
When I can’t run anymore, I walk. When I can’t walk, I get up from my desk and do some physical activity for a few minutes. Organize the kitchen. Took my daughter around the apartment. Stretch on the floor.
The trick is to act before the mind has fully grasped what it wants to grasp. Once locked in, exercise can still help, but it’s much harder to get started. You can lie in bed at 6 a.m. and know that running will help, but still spend 40 minutes overthinking. I know because I’ve done it many times.
The smaller the gap between getting up and moving, the easier your whole day will be.
I write this thought down so I can never carry it around again
The third habit is the slowest to be taken seriously but changes the most over time.
If an idea keeps coming to me, I write it down. Not in a journal or as part of any practice. Just on anything nearby. The back of receipts, sticky notes, the Notes app on your phone.
This article is not suitable for any reader, including me. I rarely read these notes anymore. The point is to keep the thoughts somewhere outside of my head.
Holding an idea in your head is like holding a heavy bag while trying to do anything else. You can do it, but everything is more tiring. The thought keeps drawing you in, demanding your attention, and every time you let it go, it comes back again. Once it’s written down, your brain seems to accept that it’s been dealt with, even if nothing actually was resolved. The thought stops looping because it no longer needs to remind you of itself.
To make decisions, I sometimes write down the question and two options and underline each option. Most decisions look smaller on paper than they do in my head. The catastrophic version of the loop turned out to be one of four plausible scenarios, not the most likely one.
As for worrying, just writing it down often makes me realize that this worry is older than it is today. It’s been happening over and over again for weeks. This in itself is useful information.
What do the three have in common?
Taken together, what these habits have in common is that they are not about thinking better. None of them is about replacing bad ideas with good ones, or finding the right insights, or learning new frameworks. They are all about getting the mind to a place that is not circular.
Notice the loop and name it. Move your body so your brain has less room to rotate. Get the thought out of your head so it’s no longer in orbit.
I still think too much. This isn’t going away, and I’m not sure it ever will. But the gap between the cycle starting and the moment I noticed it has narrowed a lot. Nowadays, it’s rare that I’m so immersed in it that I don’t even know I’m there.
For anyone who has ever lived in those moments, that’s enough.
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