Overthinking is an addiction that traps you in worry and fear about the future. The fix: anchor yourself to right now by noticing what you actually feel, smell, and sense when you wash your hands or climb stairs. Your mind stops spinning when it's busy with the present.
Chapters
Are you addicted to overthinking? Now, you might listen to that question and say, I'm not addicted to it. I just happen to overthink. Sometimes I can't really control it. But what is an addiction? An addiction is something that you no longer have control over. It has control over you. Do you want your mind to have control over you? Probably not. Because if you're overthinking, you're probably not overthinking about the positives in life. You're probably thinking about the negative things that could be happening in the future. And that leads to worry, that leads to limiting beliefs, that leads to fears, that leads to you not creating the life that you want in holding yourself back. Negative thoughts, fears, worry, limiting beliefs all come from one thing and one thing only. Overthinking and overthinking can be an addiction. It can have control over you. So where exactly does that come from? It comes from thinking too much in the future. In other words, not being in the moment. So then you might be asking, okay, how do I get control of my mind then?
The way you get control of your mind is to bring it to the present moment, to stop thinking in the future. So how do you bring your mind into the present moment? You do whatever you're doing and bring your conscious thought to it and notice as much about it as you possibly can. For instance, if you happen to be washing your hands, think about the feeling of the soap, think about the warmth of the water, think about the smell of the soap. Don't think about the future or anything else but washing your hands. If you're walking up your stairs, for instance, you bring yourself to the present moment and you notice the way the carpet feels on your feet, the way it might be warm or it might be cool inside of the house. You bring your mind to the present moment. Ultimately, what you're doing is you're allowing yourself to enjoy and to notice the senses that are being used in the present moment in your taking control of your mind and not letting it do whatever it wants to do.
And here's what you'll notice.
It's essentially like living like a 3 year old again. Why do 3 year olds have so much fun? Because they're so in the moment that nothing else bothers them. They have no worries, they have no fears, they have no limiting beliefs or judgments. They're in the present moment and they're experiencing everything for the very first time. So what you'll notice when you do this is that you will bring more joy out of yourself because you're in the present moment enjoying little, teeny, tiny, mundane things that you normally wouldn't enjoy, but you're bringing your conscious thought to them and not allowing your mind to go all over the place. Because overthinking is an addiction, but it's an addiction that you can break.
