Shut up, mind!

Do you think about something for too long? I guess everybody does, it is human nature to think things when making decisions (Isn’t it?), it becomes overthinking when you cannot get out of your own head. We all experience events that cause us to worry or stress. But is it healthy to think about something too much? No, this is a kind of thinking that wastes your time and energy and prevents us from acting.

Of course, everyone overthinks a situation, but if you are a true overthinker, it would be like tying yourself to a rope that is connected to a pole and circling around it over and over again, therefore it will get difficult for you to quiet the constant barrage of thoughts.

You might say that when you overthink, you probably are trying to solve a problem, but that’s not true you create more problems by engaging in rumination, worrying about the future, or thinking that “what if” this would have happened in the past, or making mountains out of molehills. And if you are an overthinker, you already know that you cannot sleep when your mind won’t shut off. You might experience insomnia due to overthinking, and it could also impact your memory or ability to learn. And I have already discussed how important sleep is in my last blog.

When you overthink, you create so many scenarios, choices, and options that you end up unable to make a decision. You are stuck with so many consequences that may not even happen, just worrying about certain outcomes. Your instinct or your gut feeling gets rejected because you have already created so many options in your head and you may end up not making the choices that are right for you in that moment.

It takes a lot of mental energy to overthink. Your brain generates so many different thoughts that are not really going toward anything productive. Mental energy without any physical work is absolutely fatigue. You feel exhausted because you have spent so much time inside your head.

Study shows that when we overthink, we stress ourselves and our body produce cortisol, which is a stress hormone the constant release of cortisol can be depleting and cause burnout(a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion).

Overthinking can also affect physical health as well. When you deal with negative thoughts and anxiety, you experience headaches, body aches, and stomach problems. When the excessive fuel in the blood isn’t used for physical activities, the chronic anxiety and constant release of stress hormones can have serious physical consequences such as suppression of the immune system, muscle tension, digestive disorders, etc.

Excessive overthinking can lead to depression and even suicidal thoughts. Although these effects are a stress response, which is simply the trigger. Whether or not you become ill depends on how you handle stress. Physical responses to stress involve your immune system, your heart, and how certain glands in your body that secrete hormones.

All of these systems interact and are greatly influenced by your psychological state. It isn’t the stress that makes you ill. Rather, it’s the effect responses such as excessive overthinking have on these various interacting systems that can bring on physical illness.

But how to stop overthinking!

Here are a few ways you can do to stop overthinking:

• Stop setting your day up for stress and overthinking.
• Realize that you cannot control everything.
• Become a person of action
• Try to stop in a situation where you cannot think straight.
• Get plenty of good quality sleep.
• Spend more of your time in the present.
• Meditate

While your trigger thoughts are completely automatic, you can learn to control whether or not you engage in a trigger thought. You can choose whether to ‘answer’ the thought and follow it up with more related thoughts — or just let it be.

Yup! That’s it for this blog. Do give me your feedback. Also, the next time your brain starts going into overdrive, try and put the brakes on.

Until next time, take care and happy learning. :)