INFJ NAVIGATING THE BUSY OR RUMINATING MIND

My achilles heel! Have you heard the saying, “don’t let your strength become your weakness”? But thinking is just that for me. It’s both. My high executive function, dreaming and ability to visualize the future is amazing! Not being able to quiet my busy mind and actually get out of the chair and do something is not amazing. It’s exhausting.

I have soooooo many ideas that it’s ridiculous! What can happen without a plan of action is ruminating and looping, or over-thinking (those of us with a type of ADD struggle more). So I am trying do the opposite — take action!! Obviously, more than an INFJ’s mind will struggle with ruminating, but since our go-to processing is intuitive introverted thinking, we tend to live in our heads very well. Actually, we are quite experts at this. So how to quiet the busy mind and take action? Here are my thoughts…

1. IT IS WHAT IT IS. Knowing that it is an inherent wiring with us INFJ’s helps. It’s not us, it’s our brain. We can give ourself some permission to just go with it a lot of the time.
2. WRITE. Ideas are great! Get them out on paper so that they are out of our heads. Then we can process what is possible and what is not. Acknowledging these grandiose thoughts and giving them space is healthy.
3. MOVE. Regular exercise is about the most important thing we can do for brain balance. It soothes it and also boosts brain power. It gets some of the inner energy out and aids us in thinking one thought at a time. Get up and move! Move it, move it, move it!
4. PROTEIN. A balanced diet with high protein also helps with brain balance. Since we live in our heads and are very cerebral, understanding brain balance and how the brain functions is very important.
5. DREAM BOARD. We can’t do it all, sorry. It feels like we can. It’s quite unfair to have brilliant dreams but can’t attain them all. But that is life. Pick your top 3 ideas, make a dream board, pray and take steps forward. Pursue the education of what the steps would be. That is doing something. Taking action feels good.
6. SCHEDULE. Having a calling or a job and a schedule helps. If we have things to show up to, it limits how much we can sit and dream or ruminate.
7. READ. Read a good novel. I love historical fiction! That gets some of the dreaming out. When we are a dreamer, we actually have to dream — it’s how our brain makes connections and builds a view of the world. A book also gets us into flow state, which quiets the painful monkey chatter. We need it.
8. GOOD DISTRACTIONS. When over-thinking makes us stuck or immobile we can call a friend, turn on music and sway and move, work on a craft, walk, go for a drive but go a different route, take our computer or current book to the local coffee shop, go next door and meet a neighbor — any healthy distraction to interrupt the looping.
9. PHARMA-GABA. I take PharmaGABA when the over-thinking or intense looping is hard to stop (I actually have limbic ADD — look for my article on that). Actually I take it a few times a day. GABA relaxes the brain and acts like brakes on a car. It is an inhibitory neurotransmitter found in the body’s central nervous system. It helps minimize the ‘noise’ in our brain. Do your own research!!! Also, a supplement that just says ‘GABA’ did nothing for me. But PharmaGABA crosses the blood-brain barrier, and I feel a difference. And again, make sure you do your own research — each of us are wired differently.
10. MEDITATE. Daily meditating for 10 minutes trains us to slow down. There are so many articles on this, so I don’t care to give a big explanation. But it’s simply getting comfie, maybe putting on some low frequency music, staring at a spot on the wall or a leaf on a tree and let our mind quiet and still. When intrusive thoughts come in, we refocus on the leaf. In some of those times for me, I have actually had a mental picture pop up of something I was trying to figure out. The still let my mind do the work all on its own without the thinking.
11. TALK. Talk out what seems to spin inside with a good friend or therapist.
12. BREATHE. Breathing techniques help such as taking a deep breath into the bottom of our belly on the count of 4, and then blow it out through pursed lips on a count of 8. This brings down the fight or flight. It makes us focus on something in front of us and stops the mental spinning.

Actually, intense thinking causes me a good bit of anxiety and renders me immobile at times. I am learning to meditate more, which seems to be the best way for me to bring down the internal loud. It helps me visualize what is real and what truly needs to be thought about. It helps me build a mental picture of my life that is more realistic. I think it will always be a constant challenge with me to not live in my head and in the future most of the time. But true accomplishment happens today. So I will continue to work on this. If you have any tricks for yourself, please share below. I am always trying to grow in this area — it is my biggest personal challenge…