Hacking the Over-Thinking Doom Loop
Racing thoughts. Head trash. Noise. Analysis paralysis. Information overload. All the dark side of being a thinker. Because when the ego is in control, being a thinker turns into being an over-thinker. The ego creates over-thinking which then produces more ego to sustain the over-thinking. Over-thinking is especially rampant with entrepreneurs and leaders. It leads to warped perspectives, reactive responses and poor decision-making.
How do you break this cycle? Unfortunately, many over-thinkers turn to some sort of temporary salve — often a chemical solution. While some things might provide short term distraction or numbing, they don’t really fix the problem. Some over-thinkers build elaborate coping systems to handle over-thinking. Many just over-think until their physical body shuts them down (this was my “solution” for many years).
The first thing to know about breaking the over-thinking doom loop, is that it can be done! Here are a few tips …
- Be a Witness. This is a fairly common, but very underutilized, mindfulness practice that is written about at length by Eckhart Tolle in Power of Now and Mark Divine in Unbreakable Mind. In essence, when you can create space between your mind and your thoughts, you can be a witness to them. You can then observe, question, be curious. You will realize that 90% of the thoughts don’t matter and you let them pass on by.
- Remind Who is Boss. Once you learn to be a witness to your thoughts, you can then have an intervention with your ego and take back control. I heard a great intervention line recently: “You work for me!” This simple, blunt statement snaps your ego to attention and allows you to re-gain control. In Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch, they write about the Elephant (the mind) and the Rider (the heart). It reminds me of some horsemanship I learned growing up a ranch: “remind the horse who’s boss”.
- Change Your Language. Language frames every perspective. Simply put, if you change your language, you can change your life. Positive self-talk is the most powerful language to use when challenging your ego’s tendency towards over-thinking. Observe the language you use with yourself about an unexpected event. The more you react negatively to situations and people, the more you feed over-thinking. Observe how you talk about yourself to other people. Humility is great. Self-loathing is not.
- Know Your Purpose. When you know your purpose, talents and your value, your life becomes a system for manifesting those in valuable, high impact ways. Knowing your purpose and creating a system around it is an excellent re-set button for over-thinking. When you find yourself awash in a torrent of thoughts, go back to your purpose and examine the thoughts that are necessary to fulfill that purpose.
- Examine Your Systems. A bit more on systems. Be sure to examine that the systemic behavior you are creating (usually in the form of habits on how you spend time) is not feeding a Coping or Distraction system. Coping and Distraction systems were designed to be short-term trauma survival tools. When the ego is in charge, it converts coping and distractions into a long-term system — fed by over-thinking. A huge portion of our consumption driven economy is driven by these distractions and coping systems. So be sure your system for handling over-thinking isn’t someone’s business model.
A final take-away … when you begin to confront over-thinking, you will notice a great discomfort and even agony. This is your ego fighting back. After all, you are threatening it’s nutritional life force: your thoughts. But just keep pushing through that feeling to the other side — where you will find that place where you control your thoughts. And control your path.
