A short YouTube monologue by Dr. Aziz teaching practical techniques to stop overthinking and shift attention from internal thoughts to sensory experience. The speaker demonstrates brief guided experiments (silent 15-second observation, focused listening) and introduces a "channels" metaphor (thoughts, emotions, senses) with actionable exercises to tune into sound, vision, and feeling to reduce rumination and social anxiety.
Are you stuck in your head? Are you lost in thought? This is one of the most common things that I definitely have experienced and I see a lot, especially when it comes to social anxiety and other ways that we can be in a state of nervousness or fear or concern or worry about other people's judgments is we are so much living in our heads overanalyzing, overthinking and being removed from our own lives. So if you relate to this, watch this video because you're going to learn some very practical tools to get out of your head and into your life. And if you're benefiting from this, please click down below. Give it a like. Subscribe to the channel. Click the little bell notification so you can watch these videos as they come out and continue to grow in your confidence. So living in our head versus living in our life. Well, just pay attention right now. Now, sometimes when we're watching something, we're absorbed in something, we're listening to something. It kind of silences that little voice in our head. But if we were just to do like 15 seconds, in just a moment, we're going to do 15 seconds in silence. And I want you to see what you notice. Are you ready? Little experiment. Here we go. Just 15 seconds. Silence. Pay close attention to what you notice with your awareness. You ready? Three, two, one. Here we go. So what did you notice? For most people, that silence is not very silent. It's a lot of thinking, it's a lot of talking. And what is it talking about? Well, you tell me, right? Is it like, what's going on here? Why is he just standing there looking at the camera? Maybe it's commenting on the video. Maybe it's thinking about, you know, as soon as there's a moment of silence, it's like, off to like tomorrow. I gotta do this and what's happened on the weekend and oh, I gotta set up that thing and I gotta get back to so and so. You know, your to do list. I don't know why you're scratching your ear. Maybe that's what I do. Scratch my ear and think about my to do list. Maybe it's thinking about something that's bothering you. Oh, why did he say that to me? What a jerk. Like I said, you're gonna tell him over here. Maybe it gets absorbed in some feeling. Why am I feeling this way? I don't like feeling this way. I gotta get rid of this feeling. Ah, right? Is it in the past, Is it in the future? Notice like we're going somewhere else. Okay, so that Might not be brand new information to you. I just wanted to demonstrate to you that we often are elsewhere. Our attention is somewhere other than right here. So what do we do with that? Well, I like to think of it as channels. So I got this little remote. Where's my little remote? Stick with me. I got a little remote. It's in my pocket. It's a little remote thing, right? Think of it as like, there's channels that our awareness can go to. So one channel is thought, like mental noise. And it could be about anything in your life as you just saw. Another channel is your emotions. And what you feel in your body can be a whole different channel. And then another channel are your senses. So just as an experiment, right now, what if we were to consciously, like, just imagine there's a remote and you go from. Let's say channel one is thought, and you're like, you know, channel two is feeling. Channel three is my senses. And let's make it even more specific. Let's say three is like sound, right? Hearing one of your senses. So just imagine you're going to press 3 on that remote right now. We're going to do another moment in silence here. And I want you to listen to all the sounds that you hear. Small sounds, big sounds, distant sounds, close sounds, reoccurring sounds. And just let yourself go real deep into the sound. Just really immerse. Get more and more and more curious. See if you can notice more and more subtle distinctions in the sounds. Okay, here we go. Just listen. Great. So were you able to hear some different sounds there? Sometimes people try this and they're like, I didn't hear any sounds. I just heard that voice in my head talking again. Okay, all right. That means that you are probably addicted to channel one. I just gotta go back. What's on channel one? I don't even. This is boring. Sounds go back to channel one. Yeah, that's where it's at. Okay, maybe that's a sign to practice something. But you know, you have other channels too, right? You have your senses, you got your touch, smell, sight. Like, could you look around? You could look at this video. You could look around the room, depending on where you are outside, and just notice color and light and shadows. Like, where is the light? Where is your eyes drawn? Interesting, huh? So what would happen if for just little bits of time, maybe five minutes, three minutes, you just intentionally experimented this week with not trying to stop something, like stop your thinking or don't feel something, just changing the channel? Or to use a slightly different metaphor, what if instead of their buttons on a channel, they're knobs and you just turn up the hearing knob or turn up the light and vision knob, so you're just bringing more awareness to that. The sounds can still be there, the thoughts can still be there, everything. But I'm just focusing in on that and letting that expand in your awareness. Just experiment. Just play with that for three minutes at a time. You don't need to be stressed about it. You don't need to not think during that time. You don't need to clench up. Just like, I'm just going to tune into vision for a minute. I'm going to tune into where the light is and just notice what it's like. You might find that all of a sudden colors seem a little brighter or sounds are more textured or interest. And you can do the same thing with feeling. You can just tune into feeling and you can even do the same thing with thought. But just pay attention to the thought channel and just like, observe it as if it was someone talking. Like, let's say it was someone outside of you. Personify it. Like, you know, give him her a face and just imagine and just notice and just sort of watch that person be like, wow, person talks a lot. Says a lot about what they like and don't like and how things should be and what's right and what's wrong and judging and blaming. It's like, okay, all right, buddy, I hear you. So you can observe any of these channels and just play with that for a few minutes a day. And if you have a more consistent meditation practice or something, you can play with this while you meditate as well. I like to do this stuff while I'm walking, while I'm moving outside. It's one of my favorite places to practice this stuff. So just see if you can do it when you're alone at first. Eventually you can start to practice more around other people. But just this little tool will help you start to get out of your mind and into your life. And you'll start to feel more resourceful, more energized, because that's where the source of energy is. It's not in your thoughts. It's in life around you. So share down below in the comments what you're finding most valuable. And until we speak again, we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.
