Many people have a tendency to overthink. When troubled by something, they keep mulling it over with no end in sight. Research shows that overthinking can increase your chance of mental illness, interfere with your ability to solve problems, and disturb your sleep. Even your life might be shortened due to incessant overthinking. How to stop overthinking
1. Schedule overthinking
It is possible that overthinking might be in your nature. In such a situation, trying to fight it would be meaningless. The more you try to control it, the more you are likely to keep overthinking. So a good way to counter such a tendency might be to accept that it exists and schedule a strict time period where you can let your thoughts run free.
“Incorporate 20 minutes of ‘thinking time’ into your daily schedule. During that time period let yourself worry, ruminate, or mull over whatever you want. When your time is up, move on to something else. And when you start overthinking things outside of your scheduled thinking time, simply remind yourself that you’ll need to wait until your ‘thinking time’ to address those issues in your mind,” according to Inc.
2. Meditate
Overthinking can be caused by your mind’s inability to remain calm. As such, you should try meditation to resolve the issue. Meditation will allow you to reign in uncontrolled thoughts and slowly bring your mind into a state of calmness and peace. Your mind will operate with high clarity. As such, you will be able to set aside unnecessary thoughts and focus on the important ones. Meditation has been proven to increase your self-awareness and generate higher alpha brain waves that help to decrease feelings like tension, anger, and sadness.
Meditation will allow you to reign in uncontrolled thoughts and slowly bring the mind into a state of calmness and peace. (Image via Pixabay)
3. Work out
For some people, physical exercise can be therapeutic. Try working out and see if the intense physical activity helps to avoid overthinking and controls negative thoughts. When you expend the excess energy that keeps you supercharged throughout the day, you are likely to see that the mind’s tendency to overthink also dissipates.
4. Write down thoughts
One main reason why many people tend to slip into overthinking is that they are unable to correctly analyze a problem. This creates confusion in their minds and their thoughts end up going in circles. A good way to deal with this would be by writing down your thoughts. Note down everything that is troubling your mind with the pros and cons clearly stated. Once done, you can read through the list and judge for yourself how to solve the issue.
5. Talk with a mentor
Sometimes, no matter how hard you think, you end up without any satisfactory answers to your troubles. This can stress your mind and make you overthink. What you might need in such a situation is expert guidance. If you already have a mentor, you should consult them and put forward your troubles. The mentor will likely be able to find the source of the problem and help you pull out of it.
If you have a mentor, you should consult them about your troubles. (Image via Pixabay)
6. Accept your limitations
If nothing works and you seem to be unable to stop overthinking about an issue, the best thing might be to accept the situation as it is. After all, you are a mere human who has his own limitations. Some problems can simply be way beyond you or basically anyone. Ruminating incessantly over such issues is simply a waste of time.
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