Latest / Internal Insights / How to Stop Overthinking Everything
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Hey, I'm Ted Thao This is Internal Insights. I'm a licensed professional counselor, which means I spend most of my weeks listening closely to people work through the hardest parts of being alive. This podcast is where I take what I'm hearing without any names or identifying details and open it up into a conversation for anyone willing to think a little harder about themselves and the world around them. I used to think peace was something you found once everything finally got sorted out. Once the inbox was empty and the worry list was handled and life slowed down enough to let you breathe. Maybe even you're thinking about like vacation. I don't believe that anymore. Here's what I've noticed, both in my own life and in the therapy room. Most of us living are about two steps ahead of ourselves at any moment. Washing our dishes while our mind is drafting an email, sitting with our kids and we're mentally still at work. We're technically present, but we're not really there. And that gap between where our body is and where our mind is is where a lot of our unrest tends to live. Not because thinking ahead is bad. Playing does matter. But when it becomes a constant, overwhelming thinking when we're never quite landing anywhere and we start to feel this low hum of anxiety we can't always name, it's rarely one big thing that causes us to be out of peace. It's usually a slow buildup that never fully arrives. Peace, at least a virgin I've come to believe in, isn't the absence of Problems. It's the ability to come back to what's actually happening right now. Even if it's only for a few seconds at a time. I think of it like a radio that's been playing static for so long you forget there was even a clear station underneath. The presence of just tuning the dial until you find it again is still there. It's just beneath the noise. For me, this shows up in small, almost embarrassingly simple ways, like noticing the water temperature when I'm washing my hands, or actually tasting my coffee instead of drinking it on autopilot, or feeling my feet on the floor before I stand out of my chair. None of these things fixes my to-do list, but it gives my nervous system a break from constantly scanning ahead. And that break is where something like peace actually gets to take root. And this is usually the point where someone starts to wonder something out loud. And I hear a version of this question all the time. Well then how do I stop overthinking everything then? And here's my honest answer. You probably won't stop overthinking everything completely. And I don't think that needs to be the goal. What tends to help more is is building a habit of noticing when you've drifted without beating yourself up about it and gently bringing your attention back to something real in front of you. Your breath, your hands, the sound in the room. It doesn't quite require 20 minutes of sitting still or perfectly having a quiet mind. It can be three seconds long. The practice isn't staying present forever. It's coming back over and over without treating the drifting as a failure. I try to remind myself that overthinking isn't the enemy. It's often just my mind trying to protect me from something uncertain by rehearsing everything possible to happen. So instead of fighting it, I've started treating it more like a signal. When I notice I'm spinning, that's my cue to pause. And ask what's actually true right now. Not five steps down the road, and almost every time, right now, turns out to be more okay than what my mind was telling me. So if you're someone who feels like your thoughts are always racing ahead of you, I don't think the goal is to silence them completely. It's to build small moments. Where you step back into your body and your surroundings, even briefly, and let that be enough for you now. Peace isn't a destination you arrive at once and keep. It's something you keep returning to, a little at a time for the rest of your life. That's where I'll leave it for today. You don't have to agree with everything I said, but I'd invite you to sit with it a little longer before you move on to whatever is next. I'm Ted Thao this has been Internal Insights. And if you want to learn more about my work, you can find me at internal insights therapy dot com. Take care, and I'll talk to you next time.