A short excerpt of a YouTube video by Brian Johnson about managing overthinking by taking immediate action. Johnson uses a beach-ball-underwater metaphor to show how overthinking keeps popping up, and recommends choosing the most important task and staying so busy (including using Mel Robbins' 5-4-3-2-1 countdown) that there's no mental space to ruminate.
So imagine a beach ball that floats on the water, but you want this beach ball to be under the water. So you try to push the beach ball down, but what does it want to do? It wants to pop back up and go out of the water. So you want to keep it under the water. Overthinking is up out of the water and you push it back under the water by taking more action, taking more action, taking more action. So in any given moment, as Mel Robbins says, give me a minute, I want to overthink this. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It just decide what the most important thing is for you to do at any given moment and be so busy you don't have time to think about it. That's literally how I deal with my own stuff. I just decide this is what I'm going to do and what surreal is. Wow, that's amazing. I don't even remember what was stressing me because I'm so busy. I don't literally have the mental cognitive space to overthink those things because I'm too engaged in what I decided was most important.
