Thoughts — The driving mechanisms of our lives. Slowly shaping the way we function, they guide our lives through every decision and action eventually creating our realities. But they are mere tools. Thoughts, when used appropriately and in control, can build a good life. But when thoughts control us, they can destroy our lives. When you lose control, know that you are overthinking. And overthinking kills your happiness.
Overthinking is defined as an act of thinking about something too much. It does not include problem-solving where you are focused on the solution. Neither is it contemplating where you delve deeper into your psyche to understand your problem areas to be a better version of yourself. Overthinking’s sole purpose is to make you feel bad and anxious without any constructive outcome.
I struggled with overthinking almost all of my life. It’s messed up to be in that state. Through this article, I will explain how overthinking kills your happiness and the one personally tested way that can help you to stop it at its source.
But not everyone thinks overthinking is bad for them.
How is overthinking bad? I find it helpful.
Often some overthinkers are defensive and justify their overthinking.
- I worry too much but that’s because I care a lot.
- I think of all the possible ways things can go wrong to avoid bad decisions.
- I am a perfectionist and because of the way I think, I create masterpieces.
But underlying these justifications, hide painful truths that they put a blind eye to.
- I worry too much but that’s because I care a lot.
- [I am so anxious that I haven’t slept properly in days]
- I think of all the possible ways things can go wrong to avoid bad decisions.
- [I am indecisive and always stuck in the planning phase because I am afraid I’ll make the wrong decision]
- I am a perfectionist and because of the way I think, I create masterpieces.
- [All I do is procrastinate because I am too scared to begin. Nothing I do is perfect. Nothing is enough. There’s always more to do.]
If you want to put an end to your overthinking, the first step is to accept you have it. The only way to begin to solve a problem is to acknowledge that you have one in the first place.
Do you want to know if you are an overthinker? The symptoms of overthinking might clue you in.
How overthinking kills your happiness — The symptoms of overthinking
Overthinking kills your happiness in multiple ways in your everyday life. Know that you are an overthinker if you exhibit even a few of these symptoms.
You live in the past
You frequently relive the golden memories of the past while comparing them with the present, which is never good enough. Or you constantly fret about your past mistakes blaming yourself for how your life turned out. Everything in the present is an opportunity to beat yourself up for any mistakes you did in the past.
You play the “What if” scenarios in your mind
Always doubting your decisions you think “What if I had gone the other way?” You are filled with regrets and the roads not taken. You struggle with the thoughts — “If only there was a way to go back and change everything.” You are more focused on ‘What could be’ rather than ‘What is’. Overthinking kills your happiness.
You are anxious about the future
You predict the worst for all the possible events yet to happen. Everything is a doomsday event of the future. You think it prepares you, but it only makes you anxious that you are not doing enough right now. It is never enough. Rarely being in the present, you are constantly preparing for the future, and your whole life just passes by.
You take too long to make a decision
You are indecisive. Constantly doubting every decision you take, you think you might have made a mistake. Often disguising it as being thoroughly prepared before taking decisions, you either take too long to take any decision, or end up not taking it at all.
You worry about what people think of you
You have a hard time with conflicts and it makes you uncomfortable when someone doesn’t like you. Rarely doing something you want to do you end up doing things that conform to the idea of what people think of you. A facade, an image is needed to be maintained so that the world doesn’t disapprove of who you really are. You are constantly stressed by living a double life, and unhappy that you can’t just be what you have always wanted to be.
You are terrified of failure
Normally, people are afraid of failing. But you are outright terrified. The word ‘failure’ doesn’t exist in your world. On the surface it might seem to everyone that you have a perfect life, excelling at things you take up. A perfectionist. But deep in your heart you know it is far from the truth. The opportunities you do take up are predictable — A sure way to success. Anything shaky, and you give up. For you, the best way to never fail is to never try.
You are too imaginative
You are often phased out. It doesn’t matter if you are alone or surrounded by people. Engaged in your world of thoughts, you often forget what is happening around you. Your life is a constant battle between your imaginations and the current reality.
You are often mentally exhausted
Even after a supposedly normal day, you feel mentally exhausted. At the end of the day, all you crave is something that doesn’t engage your mind. Just sleeping or endlessly watching sitcoms or movies could be your favourite guilty pleasure.
You constantly question your self worth
Any mistake or failure makes you suddenly point a finger at yourself. Your overthinking kills your happiness by constantly doubting whether you are good enough. You rarely feel deserving of any of your achievements. People often think you are humble, but in reality, you just have low self-esteem.
You deliberately find ways to keep yourself busy
You can’t leave yourself idle. The mind starts to wander causing you to face reality in its most intense and negative form. The only way to escape the torture is to keep yourself so busy that you do not have time to think about your life.
You are not okay with uncertainty
Uncertainty makes you uncomfortable. You want your life in a certain way and order so that you can be ready for every possible aspect of it. You want to be in complete control. But life’s unpredictability makes you extremely uneasy. Be it in your career, home or relationships, you never stop thinking of all the ways trying to predict the unpredictable.
You are often anxious and feel stressed
Be it the end of a weekend or mid-week, you often feel uneasy. Anxious feelings that you don’t always know the reason for, but it’s there. These feelings only worsen when facing a stressful situation but do not leave completely when the situations change. You feel a temporary relief by engaging in your choice of distraction, but the feelings are always lingering.
Throughout my life, I have gone through a lot of the above symptoms of overthinking occasionally. It is difficult to live your life when overthinking kills your happiness in every possible way. So I tried multiple ways to try to approach this issue.
Let me first tell you the most common ways overthinkers try to overcome their overthinking and fail.
What doesn’t help in solving overthinking
The crappy advice – Just Think Positive
How lazy is this advice — just think positive? If it would have solved anything, wouldn’t we be doing it already? You cannot just switch to positive thoughts when your entire being feels like shit. Thinking positive is not the solution to overthinking. It just tries to solve the symptoms while the root cause is something else. But thinking positive becomes an outcome when you solve overthinking at its source.
Thinking positive thoughts is bad advice because it is not believable to us. When overthinking kills your happiness while you constantly beat yourself up, saying ‘I am happy’ won’t work because you feel horrible inside.
Another reason why thinking positive thoughts while you are overthinking doesn’t work is because often, your thoughts are not in your control. [More of it later in the article] It is just a matter of time when you effortlessly switch back to your original routine of overthinking.
Distracting yourself
How often do you find yourself doing these just to avoid thinking about your life? Binge-watching Netflix, frequent parties, alcohol, drowning yourself in work, outings, social media, or just surrounding yourself with people because you are too afraid to be alone. Distractions work, for a while. But they are temporary. Like putting a band-aid on a wound that needs stitches.
It won’t heal.
It becomes worse when we know overthinking will take over when the distractions end. So we make sure the distractions never end. And what this does is replace our existing problem with another — addiction. This addiction could be any poison of your choice – workaholic, alcoholic, binging social media, frequent outings, being addicted to Netflix (that’s my choice of poison) and many more.
Then how do we even solve it? We solve it at the source — Thoughts.
Using ‘Awareness Point’ to stop overthinking
What is the purpose of overthinking? Its sole purpose is to generate anxieties without any constructive outcome. There is NO OTHER PURPOSE. Overthinking kills your happiness and does nothing else.
So the best solution to solve overthinking is to stop your thoughts when you are overthinking.
[What! How am I supposed to stop my thoughts? It is not even possible]
YES, IT IS.
Let me introduce you to something I call the ‘Awareness Point’.
What is an Awareness Point?
Have you paid attention to your thoughts when you are overthinking? Let me show you the sheer madness with an example.
Jasmine is walking home from work at the end of her day. She looks at the beautiful trees and listens to the chirping of the birds. At this moment, she is unconsciously happy. But while walking, she mistakenly steps on some litter. Her thoughts now start racing…..
Damn, I ruined my shoes. Why didn’t I pay attention? Why don’t I EVER pay attention? Was my boss right that I do not pay attention to details. But it was such a small mistake in that email. Ohh, I also missed that details in the report we had sent to the leadership 3 weeks ago. I made a complete fool of myself and embarrassed my team. I am such an embarrassment. A failure……
Ohh right, I was walking towards my home. Shit, I missed my turn. I will have to go back.
See! I DO NOT PAY ATTENTION! What is wrong with me? All I do is fail. Maybe this is why it has been 3 years and I still haven’t been promoted. I do not deserve it. Nobody thinks I deserve it. Maybe, I deserve nothing.
I need to take a right here to reach home….
Maybe I should take a left and FAIL to reach my home too since I am such a failure. Why do I even deserve to reach my home, or anything? Why should I even go to work tomorrow since all I do is fail? What if I get fired for not paying attention to something critical this time.
I better avoid that pothole..…
My life is a pothole. An abyss of failure. Why do I even wake up in the morning…..
Sounds a lot? But these are the thoughts of an overthinker. That’s what overthinkers go through in their minds all the time. This self-sabotaging happens consistently and you aren’t even conscious of it. It happens in the background and this overthinking kills your happiness constantly. But did you notice in between these thoughts there were moments when Jasmine came back to reality? (Marked in bold)
I call these ‘Awareness Points’. Awareness Points are moments where you are aware of the reality, the task at hand (in this case walking back home), and are conscious of your thought process. Before the awareness point, Jasmine didn’t even realise she had a train of thought that was ruining her mental peace. But at this instant, she is aware. She is back to reality.
How do you use the ‘Awareness Point’ to stop overthinking?
An ‘Awareness Point’ is an instant where you have a way out. A choice to stop your damaging patterns of overthinking.
When you reach the awareness point, do this two-step approach.
Step 1: Ask yourself, is this thought process adding any value to my life?
In the case of overthinking, the answer is always ‘NO’. This question helps you to filter out the thoughts that are just damaging to your mental health Vs. the thoughts that might make you uncomfortable but are needed to be pondered on. This way you do not just avoid the problems of your life.
If the answer to the question is NO, go to step 2.
Step 2: Breathe – The focusing technique
Instead of focusing on your thoughts, use the Awareness point to shift your focus on your breathing. Normally, breathing is an unconscious process that happens in the background. But we can use it to stop our damaging thought streams using the following steps.
- Breathe in, naturally. Feel the air moving in your body.
- Focus on the moment between inhalation and exhalation. The moment of peace.
- Now, breathe out. Feel that your is mind emptying as you exhale.
- Focus on the moment between exhalation and inhalation. The moment of peace.
- Breathe in again and continue….
Keep doing step 2 until you regain back your mental peace. It’s a very simple yet quite effective process to stop engaging your mind in overthinking. You can read more about the breathing technique here.
But it won’t be easy when you begin. You might have to do Step 2 multiple times because your mind keeps wandering again and again. It is because the mind is habituated to overthinking. But whenever your mind wanders while doing step 2, you will always notice the Awareness point, when you are fully aware that your mind is engaged in overthinking again. That’s your clue that you need to restart Step 2.
Overthinking kills your happiness. It is very damaging to your life. But using the Awareness Point and the two-step approach we can control its effects by stopping it at the source.
What are some ways you try to control your overthinking? Let me know in the comments below.