5 Psychological Tricks To Reduce Your Overthinking

Whether you call it stress, worry, or just planning, nearly all of us struggle with some form of anxiety. But not Sadhguru.

Whichever way you judge me has absolutely no impact on me because I'm completely stoned.

So in this video, we're going to break down how you can overcome anxiety in the instant you feel it. We'll also cover how you can shift your mindset so that it doesn't even come up in the first place. But let's start with the fastest outer fixes and work our way to the more inner, perfect, profound shifts. So first off, you're going to notice that Sadhguru often reveals his palms when he's speaking.

In a way, enlightenment means you are an unblemished life. No branding. Those lights went off, and if this became dark, I just see a mass of people. You just be ready. When he raises his question, you know this is what he will ask 93 to 94% of the time. It's always right like that.

We've covered how open palm gesticulation can put your audience at ease in the video on Mark Zuckerberg, who actually doesn't always do this to his own detriment. But when it comes to anxiety, revealing your palms actually helps calm you down in the moment. And that's because anxiety forms a vicious cycle. With the uptight body language that it creates. You feel anxious, which makes you clam up, which makes you feel even more anxious. So opening up sends signals to your nervous system that you're actually safe, and it doesn't need to go into panic mode. For maximum effect in the moment, turn open your hands so that you expose the insides of your elbows and tilt your head slightly to reveal more of your throat and uncross your legs. This is a fast and covert way to combat anxiousness in the moment that it arrives. Now, this next piece can be added on if you're expected to speak or respond when you're feeling anxious. For instance, if you're called on in class or at work, or if you're in a conversation with someone that makes you nervous. And it's to replace any filler words that you might have with pure silence. Watch here.

Changes and improvements. Vision can transform the whole situation.

Now, this isn't just because filler words like and don't sound nice in conversation. It's because when you're speaking with lots of filler words, you're not actually breathing in, and that contributes to that rushed feeling where you have so many words but not enough breath to get it out. Now, this can sound simple but 99% of people rush when they don't know what to say and are feeling anxious, which of course makes the anxiety even worse. They sputter ums, uhs, and other meaningless phrases because they fear that too much silence can make them feel inept. Now, this is exactly the opposite of the truth. You have much more time than you think you do to respond to anything. And to demonstrate this, look how long Sadhguru waits before answering a question tells.

Him.

Please.

We must understand this.

But as a general rule of thumb, you usually have at least twice as long as you feel like you do to respond and still have it. Be a pause that people don't even notice. Now, of course, in normal life you might not wait quite this long, but give yourself extra time when you feel anxiety kick in. And to concretely put this into practice, you can make it your goal for the rest of the day to not use filler words like or so in normal conversation as a natural response to this. You're going to create more silence and more time to breathe in, which is exactly what you need to calm your nerves. Moving along to the internal, you can see that Sadhguru often uses reframe phrases. Now, these are phrases that shift your perspective and immediately make anxiety feel smaller and more manageable. Here's an example.

You are only working what will I get? What will I get? What will I get? What the hell will you get? You'll die one day, that's all.

There are different kinds of reframe phrases, and all of them can be incredibly powerful. Jeff Bezos, for instance, would ask himself what decision would minimize his regrets when he was 80 years old, looking back at his life, and that's how he decided to quit his job and start Amazon in the first place without worrying about failing. Once I thought about it that way, it was immediately obvious to me. I knew that when I'm 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing. Sadhguru often reminds himself and his disciples that in the end they'll all be topsoil, as he puts it, and that immediately makes the fear of a big mistake pale in comparison. So find a question or phrase that works for you. It can be like Sadhguru and the Stoics, reminding yourself that someday you will die. Or it can be like Jeff Bezos asking how to minimize your regrets. Or another one that I've always liked is, will I care about this at all in 10 years? The answer is almost always no. And it makes anxious feelings over a job interview a date or a seeming catastrophe. Much easier to just drop. Now, normally I wouldn't do this, but I want to pause here to speak to current events for a moment. I understand that this mindset and the next ones might feel small in comparison to getting fired or not being able to pay your bills or getting sick in this crisis. And while I believe that these mindsets can still help anxiety in the most terrible of situations in which you might find yourself right now, I just want to add that I'm rooting for you throughout all of this. I hope that you make it through this crisis stronger. And even if things are tough for you right now, I genuinely hope that you Bright moments for yourself and the people that you love. Anyways, back to the video. This next piece takes us deeper into the long lasting anxiety killing mindsets and it's the idea of first accepting, then changing. Now. Concretely, this means that accepting that people around you will be the way that they are and not trying to change them automatically, that means that you'll often be accepting occasionally selfish, rude, unkind, or even cruel behavior. Now for instance, you can see when Gordon Ramsay visited Sadhguru, at one point he was invited to a communal pool with meditators.

They take a dip here. Wow. Because if you go and you will see, you'll feel like you're floating. So the energy in it. Wow.

Bathers meditate around a mystical metal ball. When he arrived, he immediately started to break the rules, quote unquote, messing things up. He splashes around, freestyle swims and sits on the ball that was meant to be an object of meditation. But listen to Sadhguru's immediate response.

Just meditate for some time. Close your eyes.

Meditate. Sadhguru laughed and then he calmly corrects Gordon. He even compliments him already.

Look cleaner and brighter and shining. You're glowing.

Now you might see this idea of accepting first as being a social doormat. After all, if no one gets upset and yells at the Gordons of the world, how will we get them to stop doing what they're doing? But accepting what is happening with a smile doesn't prevent change from occurring. In fact, it puts you in the best position to make more profound changes going forward. For proof, take a look at what notoriously stubborn long term veggie hater Gordon Ramsay had to say after just a few days of eating and spend time with Sadhguru. But you heard it here first. I'm calling a ceasefire with vegetarians.

If you're ever thinking of going vegetarian.

Then get to an ashram quickly because that's the confirmation.

One day in a week, if you eat this kind of food, you would know the difference.

One day a week and you think I'd notice a significant impact?

You will definitely notice that on the back of the experience here. Yes, I'm going to consider it.

To put this into practice in your own life, when things start to go wrong, you might want to pause and say to yourself, yes, this is happening now. It might sound counterintuitive, but you'll find that your anxiety dissipates because you're not fighting what has already occurred and is real. And you're going to be more calm and collected for making changes going forward. So accept first, then change now. This next mindset is the granddaddy of them all. And while you may not entirely adopt this mindset today, moving towards it can dramatically improve the quality of your life. And it's to stop depending on the external to make you happy.

We are busy fixing the world. Yes, world needs to be fixed to some extent. But we think by fixing the world, everything will be all right. No, we also need to fix this human being.

Nearly all anxieties boil down to the fear that something won't go your way and therefore you will be unhappy. It's the belief that a dream job will make you happy that makes you so anxious for the interview. And the belief that a relationship can make you happy that makes you so anxious on that first date. And of course, this anxiety only makes it harder to nail the dream job or to impress your date. But if you realize that no job or date or external event can make you lastingly happy, the pressure to perform just evaporates. With nothing critical on the line, there's nothing to be anxious about, no matter what they do.

I'm like this because I have not given that freedom to anybody. That somebody can freak me, somebody can make me angry, somebody can make me happy, somebody can make me unhappy. These privileges I kept to myself.

Now, it might sound insane to say that the external world won't make you happy. To many type A personalities, this sounds like loser talk for people who can't make their dreams come true. But Sadhguru offers us a thought experiment to prove his point. In this case, he gives the example of a luxury car.

Just watch those people who are driving BMWs, Mercedes and whatever else. Okay? Successful people, just carefully watch them. How many of them are joyfully driving their BMW? Hello? How many of them are joyfully driving their dream car that they worked for? You will see hardly anybody.

But the failure of the external world to offer us what we truly desire goes far beyond cars. Maybe you want to be world famous, to have a great body to date talented, beautiful people or to be wealthy. And you work towards those things imagining that you will feel great when you've achieved your dreams. Well, Brad Pitt is one of the most handsome, powerful, successful, famous, talented people on the planet. He's positively impacted millions of people and he recently revealed that he has been struggling with alcohol as an escape from the pain that he experiences. I mean, certainly for me, you know.

What I, what I realized was I was, I was running to things to avoid, to avoid tough feelings, painful feelings. I just didn't know how to deal with them.

And looking for similarly, Jim Carrey had this to say about all his fame and fortune. I've often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame and so that they could see that it's not where you're going to find your sense of completion. And both of these men deserve to be recognized for sharing their struggles. Not least of all because it lets the rest of us know that happiness is not waiting at the top of whatever mountain we're climbing. It's either there for the climb or not at all.

We will go as far as we go. But if you're always concerned about the finish line, if you get to the goal, you will be disappointed. If you don't get there, you will be broken. Most successful people on the planet.

But let's bring this back to anxiety. Imagine a situation where you get anxious. Identify what it was that you were hoping would happen, the thing that you thought would make you happy. Then consider that while you might spike in happiness for a moment if things went your way in the long term, you actually have nothing to gain from those situations and therefore nothing is on the line and you have nothing to be anxious about. Russell Brand describes the internal dialogue he experiences when he feels socially anxious. Like, what's it going to be like? Is everyone going to like me? What's going to happen to me? Who are these men? What's happening here? Like all of this stuff starts happening and then another part of me goes, you've got nothing to get, no one can give you anything.

You're all right.

You don't have to be afraid. If any of the later mindsets in this video have resonated with you, I would definitely recommend checking out our course, Emotional Mastery. It's a five week video program that's designed to help you master your emotions so that you consistently feel better than you might think. Is currently possible and the goal of the course is to raise the baseline level of joy that you feel on a day to day basis to be less easily triggered into anger, anger, stress or anxiety so that you can enjoy your life and be the best self for everyone around you. It also helps you identify and move towards what you really want for your life instead of blindly following the goals that are laid out by your family or society at large, which is where 99% of people probably find themselves. Now, the way this works is by focusing first and foremost on your relationship with yourself. This means exercises that get you in touch with feelings that you might have been repressing for a long time. If you're a type a person who thinks that self love is airy fairy stuff and feelings are something to be conquered with logic, then this is exactly the course for you. Members often realize that they want to share what they've learned and help other people on their own personal development journey. So we've added a bonus section that is a crash course in starting a YouTube channel. Now this is one that I made at the beginning of the channel where we had about 20,000 subscribers and it's a very, very tactical explanation of how to build a following from zero. Now, I've not spoken about this Emotional mastery course on the channel before because we normally only offer to people who have joined our email list or the Charisma University program. And that means that there's no sales page or anything like that explaining the course, it's just the checkout page. So if intrigued and you want to learn more, the best way is probably just to check out the course directly with the link below. And you can do that knowing that it comes with a 60 day money back guarantee. That is for absolutely any reason at all. There's nothing that you need to do, just go to the billing section and refund to get every penny back. But I do hope that you try it. So if you'd like to join, go ahead, click the link below. I hope to see you on the inside. Either way, I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one.

Sam.