A post in a group I belong to asked for solutions to overthinking. I thought I’d share my response:
“Chronic overthinker here. Anything that gets you in your body – team sports are ideal, also contact improv dance, because they require alertness and awareness of your surroundings in the present. I can totally keep overthinking during a chiller activity like yoga but things like parkour and krav maga require the very immediate attention of my neocortex if I don’t want to get injured.
Singing can also help, especially if you choose a song that helps you release the emotion causing you to overthink. That does mean being in the emotion for 3-5 minutes but it does feel better afterwards, sometimes your body just needs to be heard.
And finally you can overthink yourself out of overthinking – sort of how you’re doing now with this post by thinking of ways to stop overthinking ?– by redirecting your thinking to hacking inner peace. I’m a die-hard figure-outer, cannot for the life of me stop overthinking everything (as you can probably tell by this point in the post), and so I finally made peace with it by putting my mind to the task of figuring out what would make me happy. I started overthinking God, and love, and what it meant to experience enlightenment, and how to create a life of bliss – rather than overthinking about other people’s opinions of me or whatever was causing me anxiety. I thought so hard that I thought myself right out of the problem, because eventually I thought my way into figuring out the problem in my own system. I will never not need a puzzle to solve, but now I solve puzzles that yield results that benefit me and my community.”
Oh and – I’m now teaching that as a skill set.
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