Abolish Overthinking With These 5 Philosophical Principles

Happy Monday lovely! It’s the final full week of Sunflower June. Today’s post offers 5 principles to stop overthinking in its tracks!

If you’re like me and struggle with constant overthinking as a conditioned habit from life, then you’ll want to keep reading.

Before getting into the principles to quit overthinking, I want to address why overthinking is a thing, and where it comes from.

Why Overthinking Happens

Sometimes life throws a curve ball, your roommate calls you names, or a global health crisis puts a halt to the job you were working, and things are just out of whack. Then your mind chimes in with 100 reasons this is happening; from blaming yourself, to blaming Donald Trump, your mind can come up with SO many reasons that the worst is happening.

This chatter of negative thinking is called overthinking. For me, I learned this kind of thinking because I’d often find myself being blamed for circumstances outside of my control within friendships. The result was to always assume 100 other things could go wrong before they did and to be hypercritical of myself before I could go and do something wrong.

I now see overthinking as a kind of defence mechanism; similar to the way Chandler uses humour as a defence in Friends.

The biggest question I’d always ask my coaches and therapists was how do I stop? It seemed never-ending and all-encompassing at times. Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a lot of self-help books by prominent philosophers and have found these 5 principles in common with what each of them says about how to get rid of this toxic habit.

5 Principles to Conquer Overthinking

The task of conquering your own mind is a large one. Are you ready to take on the philosopher’s quest? To master these principles in theory and in practice takes discipline.

1. Acknowledge the voice by hearing it with detachment

The first principle of overcoming overthinking is to acknowledge that you hearing the voice with 100 possible horrible outcomes, is just a voice.

It’s important to decipher which voice it is, and label it as that.

Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth that the voice of ego can be heard by you, and you are witnessing the voice talking, it is not your voice.

What Tolle is saying in his book when he talks about the ego is how this part of you wants to protect you from the possible discomfort of growth, change, and opportunity. Your ego is conditioned when you’re young, which is why healing often starts with your inner child or younger self.

Consider what you may have picked up as a child, what were your parents saying about the economy, were they in and out of jobs? These circumstances that are not yours are adopted by your ego and lay the foundation for how the ego is trying to keep you safe from danger.

Sometimes the ego labels good things as dangerous because of a traumatic experience when you were young.

2. Choose where to put your focus

The time I overthink the most is usually when it comes to relationships. If someone doesn’t message me back, my mind will use past experiences to tell me that this person doesn’t want me, or is talking shit about me.

It’s important when that happens, to change where I’m putting my focus. Instead of sitting and waiting for a reply, I’ll go and look at Pinterest. This takes my mind off the conversation I was having with someone and puts it into a mode of inspiration.

I’ll often search for inspirational quotes and find that reading these quotes will shift where I’m putting my focus as well as distract me from what I was overthinking about before this.

3. Put it into a new perspective

Building on the first two, shifting your perspective can stop overthinking in its tracks! Continuing with the relationships example, because I often find myself overthinking about them, a powerful exercise to stop overthinking is to write about the relationships where you feel valued right now.

Getting the positive perspective down on paper will allow you to release some of the fear based negative expectations overthinking puts on relationships.

4. Consider your daily habits

Training your mind to stop overthinking requires discipline. Just as an athlete is disciplined in a training routine, one must mimic this discipline in daily habits.

I often ask myself what I’m doing in my day that leaves room for overthinking about things that do not serve me.

Is there a gap in my schedule that is allowing this negative thinking pattern to resurface?

If there is, then fill it with something else! You’ve got more important things going on than to waste your time thinking about the f*ck boi who won’t text you back!

I know that following a schedule is difficult for me, so I will tell you this. Make a list of 5 activities you enjoy doing by yourself in your room, that doesn’t require much effort.

1. writing
2. drawing
3. making bracelets
4. searching things on Pinterest
5. searching things on IG

Having a list of 5 things that you know you can switch to when you catch yourself thinking too much is going to propel the habit of disciplining your mind to focus ON YOU and no one else!

5. Raise your vibe with music and dance

The last principle to crush overthinking is to turn on some tunes and blast out your dance moves like Ariana Grande! That’s right, you’ve gotta change your vibe up with music and movement and dance it out!

I’m borrowing this one from Meredith Grey, as her favorite thing to do when she or Christina is having a really bad burst of negative emotions is to dance it out!

Remember…

I write this post with hopes that each of these principles inspire you to get back to your higher self, and let go of the ego.

Overthinking won’t go away in a minute, it takes time to build yourself and conquer your mind, as it is the philosopher’s journey to get to a place of enlightenment.

Leave a comment and let me know which tip helped you the most! I’d also love to know which quote is your favourite and if you enjoy seeing quotes in posts like this!

With so much love, light, and support.

~~~ stay true stay weird ~~~

xo kristi