Natalie Moore, LMFT teaches mindfulness techniques to break the overthinking cycle. She contrasts autopilot thinking with awareness and offers grounding practices: focus on your breath, body sensations, and sounds around you. It's a practice, not a quick fix.
Do you overthink or overanalyze everything in your life? Natalie Moore, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist here, and today I'm going to talk about what to do if you overthink and overanalyze all the time. First of all, I want to normalize this. Everybody, I'm sure, at some point deals with overthinking. Your brain's job is to keep you safe and alive. Being happy actually is a spiritual endeavor and requires sometimes overriding the brain and its tendency to overthink and overanalyze. You're either in a state of thinking or in a state of awareness. When we're in a state of thinking, we're usually on autopilot mode, and we're usually thinking about 80% of the same thoughts that we thought the day before and the day before and the day before. But if we're in a state of awareness, we're actually bringing in new information to the mind. So you can imagine that if you're in the thinking mind and it's autopilot, you're actually going to keep perpetuating those same patterns that keep you anxious, depressed, dissatisfied, stuck. But if you're in a state of awareness, you're actually opening yourself up to this broader experience of life, and you're able to bring in new experiences, which can actually create new thoughts and probably more positive, more beneficial thoughts for you. When we're in a state of awareness, we're actually noticing things. Physical sensations in the present moment. As soon as we start labeling, judging, criticizing, we've drifted off into the thinking world and thinking mind, and we need to bring ourselves back. So if you find yourself overthinking or overanalyzing, what you can do is identify that, yes, that's part of what's in your awareness in that moment. Typically, if we're overthinking, overanalyzing, it feels so big and overwhelming that we're not really noticing anything else. But if we start to expand our scope of awareness and just tune into what's happening with my breathing right now, how do my feet feel in my socks and in my shoes and on the floor, how does my butt feel in the seat right now, are there any sounds around me that I can attend to? Suddenly, as you're broadening your scope of awareness, the overthinking and the overanalyzing will actually start to get smaller. Smaller, and your awareness of your environment and what's happening within you and around you will actually become a little bit bigger. So this is a practice. It's not one of those, those things where you do it once and you're done and you never overthink or ever overanalyze again. It's something that you practice every time you notice yourself overthinking or overanalyzing, and over time the thinking will shrink and the awareness will grow. So good luck to you. Please comment, subscribe, like. If you have any questions for me, I'd love to either answer them in the comments or even do a video response for you. Love doing that. And I hope this helps you, and take care. See you in the next video. Bye, guys.
5 Things You Need to Cultivate Total Wellness with Natalie Moore | Authority Magazine
