You Can't Out-Think Overthinking

and a 10 min guided meditation

free

All tangled up and nowhere to go

The other week, I noticed a knot in the thin, fragile chain of a heart necklace that I always wear. I was in a rush, so I unclasped it and started to tug at it, only for the knot to become tighter and tighter. Fuck it, I put it on my nightstand to return to it later, and headed out the door.

Later that night when I was crawling into bed, I remembered that the necklace was there, and decided to try again. This time, I had nowhere I was running off to (other than an unconscious bliss), so I revisited the knot with a bit more patience and slowness - and I untangled it within seconds.

Our overthinking mind isn’t so different from a tangled necklace. We overthink, our thoughts knotted together, and we want clarity, relief, resolution from our thoughts, so we try to fix them, figure them out, and it only pulls further into the loop, into the knot, into the tension.

A question I often hear in therapy sessions is, okay so how do I stop the overthinking? When we’re feeling dysregulated (which we are when we’re overthinking), this question also stems from a place of dysregulation, manifesting as a panicked, please-just-fix-it urgency: tell me what I should think about to help me stop thinking!

Overthinking can be a lonely experience because it’s all happening in the privacy of our minds. What if we could see people’s thoughts floating above their heads like little cartoon speech bubbles? (This is my personal nightmare, btw). I think we’d feel so much less alone in how noisy and messy our inner worlds can be.

The true and unsatisfying answer is that we can’t think our way out of overthinking. It’s an inevitable pattern of the busy mind, let alone in an age where we’re endlessly consuming more noise, more information, more opinions. We won’t quiet the overthinking loop by throwing more thoughts into the noise - but by stepping back from the noise, so we can see it with some distance.

Loosening the knots

When we’re in an overthinking loop, I find it helpful to focus less on what the content of the thoughts are, and more on the cadence of them. Focus less on the stories of the thoughts, and more on the shape of them. We don’t need to get sucked into the details of where the thoughts are taking us - we can instead zoom out and simply notice that we were overthinking.

We can notice the urge to “figure out” the scenario, the urge to replay that conversation one more time, the urge to see yourself via their perception of you once more - and instead tell the mind that, just for a moment, we’re going to put it down. We can stop where we are right now in the scenario, and without getting pulled into what the thoughts were about, just observe that we were thinking.

Once we’ve acknowledged that we were overthinking and allow the craving to “fix” it to pass, we can gently shift our focus to what’s happening right now: our breath, the soundscape of our environment, the weight of our feet on the ground.

Shifting our focus away isn’t the same as shooing the thoughts away. We can shift our focus in a way that is still allowing of our thoughts to be there. We don’t need to shoo them away because they’re already floating away on their own, inherently fleeting.

Spoiler: the mind will then get pulled back into thoughts within a few seconds — not because you’re deficient or weak, but because that’s what the mind does, and you’ll go through the same process again.

This isn’t some quick-fix that will “silence” the mind in 30 days or your money back guarantee - because there’s nothing to fix. The mind yaps all day long, and the practice is allowing that to be okay. Ironically, when we stop trying so hard to silence the mind, that’s when it starts to quiet down.

Mindfulness of our messy, chaotic thoughts is an eternal practice — one that isn’t about shaming ourselves for having thoughts, but having awareness of whatever is arising right now.

Let’s try it together

Find a comfy seat and enjoy this guided meditation! I hope it brings you even a sliver of ease.

Thank you for being here, and for reading/listening. Here’s to loosening the knot, one breath at a time, knowing that even the tightest knots loosen with time and tenderness.

♡ Meg

P.S. I have lots of tangible tools and practices like this in my upcoming book, ARE YOU MAD AT ME?