March is upon us and for the next installment of my Year of Letting Go challenge, I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to let go of overthinking.
For some reason, I’ve got into to habit of excessive rumination and its not healthy. Instead of taking a proactive approach and moving forward, I get stuck into a thought loop. It’s exhausting.
An example of how overthinking kills my own productivity can be taken from my early morning mind-meanderings a few days ago. When I awoke I laid in bed thinking about all of the things I needed to do that day. It went beyond taking stock and planning my day. Instead my thoughts looped continuously around how much I needed to do and how tired it would make me.
In reality, the tasks weren’t even that immense or taxing but the more I overthought them, the heavier and more exhausting they seemed to get. And before I knew it, I’d been overthinking for 40 minutes and I felt completely drained. So much for a relaxing start to the day!
Did I have a productive day? Nope. I felt drained and despondent for most of the day.
The flip-side
Compare those events to today’s and it’s a very different story. I knew that I needed to do some business work this weekend, so I consciously allowed minimal opportunity for overthinking.
I decided to get up early (yes, on a Saturday!), journal, go for a run and then be at my desk for 9am so that I could get a solid 3 hours of work in before lunchtime. Doing this meant that I could have an afternoon of freedom doing the things I enjoyed and feeling pretty proud of myself to boot.
To help me prepare, I made sure I had my morning routine planned and got an early night. As soon as my alarm went off, I got up and started my day. As a result, the whole day has felt so much more positive and even as I type this at 9pm (although I probably won’t publish it until tomorrow), I’m still feeling good – a very different vibe to the days when I allow overthinking to take over.
Getting to the root of overthinking
I write in my journal every morning and as I tried to dig deeper into the source of my overthinking, I realised that it went beyond procrastination.
It wasn’t just about avoiding tasks – many of my thoughts were about future events. Here are a few of the familiar topics:
- What my life will be like in a years time and whether I’m doing enough to achieve it
- All the things I want to do in the next week / month / 6 months / year
- Work – yes, even on my days off, I’d catch myself thinking about my 9-5
Am I overthinking my overthinking here? Hopefully not. But I am being curious and trying to unearth what is going on, because it’s only by identifying the root cause that I can start to do something about it.
At the moment, all indicators are pointing in the direction of trying to pre-plan and create certainty – something we all to some degree, don’t we? And ultimately it’s about feeling in control. Yet paradoxically, overthinking results in me feeling less in control.
My journal musings led me to the conclusion that, in reality, we only have control over a limited amount of things in our life, so trying to stay in control is an illusion and overthinking is a waste of time, energy and drains the enjoyment out of life.
Being present
The antidote to overthinking is being present. So for the month of March I’m going to focus on bringing more awareness to my habit of overthinking and gently return myself to the present moment.
Perhaps when I catch myself overthinking, I can decide upon one key action to take around the ‘thing’ I’m overthinking, meditate or focus on my breathing for one minute and see how that feels. Maybe I’ll put my favourite song on and dance around the room. The key is to shift myself from a place of thinking to a place of feeling.
Interestingly, as I write these words, I’ve noticed that I’ve subconsciously started to shift into a place of ‘feeling’. It’s as if I’m tuning into the subtle undercurrent of my needs and being drawn towards things that will help me on my path.
Stillness and cycles
A few days ago, I listened to an interview with Pico Iyer called The Urgency of Slowing Down. In it, he refers to the ‘art of stillness’ and its ever growing importance in a world that is moving at an ever increasing pace. He reflects upon his own need to unplug from the noise, both internal and external, in order to truly connect with himself. I think there’s a lesson for us all there.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the book I’ve chosen to read this month is In the Flo by Alisa Vitti. It proposes that women and men have different body clocks and that men work within a 24 hour cycle which is in contrast to women’s 28 day cycle.
Vitti suggests that so many things in the world are geared up towards a 24 hour cycle and the pressure to fit in with this can leave women feeling drained, over-whelmed and out of synch. And yet we continue to try and work within this timeframe and end up feeling like there’s not enough hours in the day and that we’re being unproductive.
I think that making space for stillness and working in tune with my cycle will complement my attempts to let go of overthinking. Afterall, overstimulation leads to overthinking, so it’s time to slow down and redress the balance between my head (thoughts) and my heart (feelings).
I have no idea how my journey towards letting go of overthinking will go, but I’ll be making an effort to break the habit and I’ll let you know how I get on.
Do you struggle with overthinking? Have you got any tips on how to avoid it? Let me know in the comments below.
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Image courtesy of Laurentiu Moraiu on Unsplash.