If You Overthink Everything…

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1:58Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week so that you can learn who you are, become better, improve yourself so that you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button, join us along this way. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to stop overthinking. Because if you overthink everything, it's not because you love stress. It's because your brain is running old programs of the past and it doesn't trust that you can handle what happens if something goes wrong.

2:38And so today I want to break down why all of this happens and then how to actually retrain your brain so that you can stop overthinking. Because if you don't understand this, you'll spend your entire life living in your head instead of living in your life. And so if you overthink everything, this episode can change your life. Okay, so if you're the type of person who overthinks, if you replay everything in your head, your conversations in your head that you had in the past, you're constantly looking for what could go wrong. If you think about every possible outcome before you make a move, I want you to understand you weren't born that way.

3:15That's not who you are naturally. Let that land for a second. Like that's not who you are naturally. You became that way because of the environment that you grew up in. There's really only two reasons why somebody overthinks so much. And I'm going to dive into those two reasons today as we go through it. Okay. The first thing that you really need to understand when we talk about overthinking is overthinking is a protection mechanism. Your brain is not just trying to protect you from danger, but it's trying to protect you from every possible outcome so that you can stay safe. It's trying to protect you from unpredictability.

3:52There's research that's been done on hypervigilance that shows when someone grows up in an unpredictable environment, which means like emotionally inconsistent parents or extreme financial instability or parents who have anger problems or emotional problems or chaos inside of the house or parents who just weren't emotionally mature enough, that the nervous system, your nervous system as a child learns one thing. If I scan enough all of the time, I can try to figure out how to fix the environment so that I can stay safe. And so what do you do? As a child, you learn to be hypervigilant. You You can read tone shifts.

4:35You can analyze facial expressions. You replay what was said over and over again whenever something happens so that you can do something different the next time. You learn to anticipate worst case scenarios and you learn to overthink every single minute detail. And so that's what you've accidentally trained yourself to do. Like you accidentally trained your brain to be that way. And your nervous system basically learned uncertainty is a threat. And so now it's really hard as an adult to stop doing what kept you safe when you were younger. And here's where it gets really fascinating, okay? The whole idea of uncertainty and unpredictability is really interesting in the way that it works in the brain.

5:21There was a study that was done in Nature Communications where participants were given electric shocks. And when they knew they were going to get shocked, their stress levels were actually lower than when they were told they might get shocked. So think about that for a second. The possibility of pain created more stress than guaranteed pain. And so your brain as an overthinker would rather know the bad thing is coming than to sit in uncertainty. So if you grew up in a household where your parent might yell, or they might judge you, or they might get mad without warning, or they might just blow up on your brother or sister or mother, then your nervous system in your household that you grew up in learned to stay alert, to think of every possible outcome.

6:13So like I said, your brain started scanning for tone changes, for facial shifts, for tiny cues, anything that could help you avoid the explosion. And over time, you basically learn to mentally rehearse every single possible scenario. If I say this, will they get upset? If I do that, will they get mad? If I say this, will they judge me? And so that constant overthinking is what you developed to protect yourself in childhood. You trained yourself to think of every single circumstance that could keep you in a safe environment where, you know, you might've been in an environment where your parents might've been unpredictable.

6:53So what does your brain do when it doesn't know what's going to happen? Here's the key to all of this. Okay. It simulates what could possibly happen. Overthinking is mental simulation. Let that land for a second. When you're overthinking, your brain is just mentally simulating every possible thing that could happen in the future. Overthinking is never about what's happening right now. It's always about what could be happening later. And so it's your brain trying to convert uncertainty into predictability. You know, if I think through every single scenario, then I'll be prepared. But the trap is you can't simulate infinity because there are infinite scenarios of things that could possibly happen.

7:38And so overthinking is basically this attempt to control the uncontrollable. You know, your brain thinks that if I can think enough, if I can plan enough, if I can rehearse enough, then I can eliminate the risk. In psychology, this is called intolerance of uncertainty. And studies in research anxiety show that people who score high in intolerance of uncertainty engage in more mental rumination. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out, like what could possibly happen? And it turns into more compulsive thinking patterns, not because they were born that way, but because their nervous system equates uncertainty with danger.

8:17And so the non-obvious part of all this is that overthinking is not about outcomes. Overthinking is more than anything else about emotional avoidance. Like you're not trying to control the situation. And I really want you to understand this part. You're not trying to control the situation or what could possibly happen. You're trying to control how you feel if something goes wrong. And you're trying to control how you feel by not allowing something to go wrong. So it's never the actual situation that's the problem. It's always how you feel and how you react. And we will be right back. Square keeps your business running smoothly.

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12:16Like really let that sink in for a minute. So if that's the case, why don't we just pay attention more than anything else to what we feel versus the external circumstances? And so here's the paradox that nobody talks about. Overthinking feels like preparation, but neurologically it actually reinforces fear. So every time you mentally rehearse a disaster, you actually activate your amygdala when nothing is going wrong right now, which is your brain's alarm system. And the amygdala doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. So when you repeatedly imagine something going wrong, even though in this current moment, nothing's going wrong, your brain encodes it as an experience and you're training yourself to expect threat all of the time, which is why it gets worse over time.

13:04Like if you don't stop your overthinking and your fear, it will get worse five years, 10 years down the road. So you're literally strengthening the neural pathways of anxiety and fear through repetition. You know, in Hebb's law, which is in neuroscience, which is neurons that fire together, wire together. Every time that you overthink and you ruminate, it's a training session for your brain to get stronger and to do it more often. And that's why overthinking becomes automatic is because you've actually practiced it without realizing it. So what do we do? I can't just tell you, Hey, stop overthinking.

13:39I can't tell you, stop thinking. Neither one of them work. Instead, we really need a strategy to get yourself to stop. Okay. The first thing you want to do is you want to train tolerance, not control. This is a big piece. You want to trade tolerance, not control. And so instead of like asking yourself, how can I make this situation certain, you ask yourself, how can I become the type of person that can handle uncertainty? Instead of trying to control the situation, I want to become stronger mentally. And this really shifts your identity because then you stop being the type of person who's trying to control the world and you start strengthening your nervous system because you will never control the world.

14:23And so one powerful strategy is to try to have little bits of micro exposure to uncertainty, like little pieces, like just kind of test your boundaries of what you're comfortable with. Like send the text message without reading it five times. Like make a small decision without trying to ask everybody else, you know, what they want to do. Like leave a little thing undone for on purpose just to show yourself that you're not going to die if you don't completely finish something. Like just try to push your edge for what feels comfortable to you. And what you're doing when you're doing this is you're teaching your nervous system, I can survive by not being perfect.

15:04I can survive by not knowing. I can survive if something goes wrong. And over time, the threat response that you have built so strong inside of your body starts to shrink. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing you want to do is you want to separate problem solving from rumination. Here's the thing that most people don't realize. Rumination and thinking about everything, it feels productive, but cognitively, it's basically just circular. There was a study that was done in Clinical Psychology Review that found that rumination increases depression and anxiety because it doesn't generate solutions.

15:44It just amplifies your emotional distress. It makes it worse. you just amplify your own emotional distress when you constantly ruminate on things. So instead, what you want to do is this. When you catch yourself overthinking, ask yourself, am I solving something specific or am I just emotionally looping? If you can't write down a concrete next step, it's rumination. And rumination, more than anything else, if you want to change your rumination, the first thing you want to do is change your state, not just continue to keep thinking. So if you notice, okay, I'm ruminating and I'm just kind of stuck in my overthinking.

16:23You need to move your body. You need to change your state. You need to change your environment. You need to change what you're doing, where you're doing it, everything. So when you ruminate, you need, before you shift your thinking, is you need to change your state. You need to get your body moving. You need to change your environment. You need to change your physiology. Like interrupt this loop physically because trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to dig your way out of a hole by digging deeper. It's just, it's your, you're just going to get worse off. And so every rumination you have to understand is not a logic problem.

17:00It's a nervous system problem. It's a nervous system loop that you're stuck in. So the first thing you need to do is change your body and your nervous system before you try to change your thinking. So that's number two. And the third thing that you want to do is build evidence that you're emotionally resilient, okay? Your brain overthinks because it doesn't trust that you can handle the situation, that you can handle the pain. So you need to start giving it evidence that you can handle it, that you can trust yourself, that you have confidence within yourself. And so you start tracking these times, times when you survived being embarrassed in the past, Times when you got rejected and it didn't destroy you.

17:41Times when things went wrong and you ended up, guess what? Living. Times when things went wrong and you ended up adapting and surviving and getting better. Times that you've survived in your life that were really hard. You're wanting to basically track and prove to yourself and find and like build a pool of evidence for you to see, hey, I've survived things before in the past. I'm currently surviving things. I'm getting better all of the time. You want to find these. And the reason why you want to find these is because your brain will naturally go towards a negative. So it will just not pay attention to all of that evidence.

18:16It won't look at that and it'll go, remember that one time when you collapsed and this thing didn't work and that thing didn't work and that thing didn't work. And so your brain learns through evidence. You want to give it new evidence. You want to start showing the times when you did survive. If you want to reduce overthinking, prove to yourself, I can handle this. I can handle discomfort. Confidence is not certainty. Confidence is knowing that you'll survive and make it out stronger on the other side. Okay? So that's number three. Number four, stop trying to eliminate and completely avoid fear.

18:46Like you're not going to ever. Fear is just the edge of your comfort zone, right? It's not a red light. And so at the edge of your comfort zone, you know that if you want to grow, you must leave your comfort zone just a little bit. So if you feel that tightness in your chest before sending something, before making a decision or before speaking up. It's not danger. You're not going to die. It's not a red light. It's just a little bit of pressure on you. Pressure on your comfort zone. Oh, it feels a little bit uncomfortable. Well, that's an opportunity for growth. So you need to start thinking about it differently.

19:20Oh, okay. This isn't like a, hey, I need to back off. Like this is a, hey, this is an opportunity to grow. Maybe I should go ahead and do this. You know, stop trying to be so comfortable. Press the comfort zone just a little bit. Your mistakes are not that big of a deal. You know, if what you're, what you're thinking is, is unsafe is actually something that's unfamiliar. You're going to screw up. It's okay. You know, the only way to get better is to recalibrate and to just keep pushing yourself to be better. So I really want you to understand this if you're an overthinker, right? If you overthink, the reason why you overthink is because at some point in time in your life, it worked.

19:57It kept you safe. It kept you connected. It helped you survive an unpredictable environment. But what helped you survive back then is probably limiting how you live right now. So you don't need to shame yourself for it. You need to retrain your brain and nervous system and have new patterns that you develop. The goal is not to try to eliminate uncertainty or to have no fear. That's completely impossible. The goal is to become so internally strong and stable that uncertainty doesn't control you. You're not trying to get rid of uncertainty or get rid of fear. You're trying to become stronger so that you can control those things.

20:36It doesn't matter. Oh, no big deal. Okay. I don't know what's going to happen. Okay. I trust myself because here's the truth. The most powerful people in the world are not the ones who know what's going to happen to be able to predict every single outcome. They're the ones who trust themselves no matter what happens. And if you can build that within yourself, the overthinking will start to fade, right? And so I want you to understand not because you're like forcing overthinking out, but because you're realizing I'm so strong, I no longer need to overthink because I trust myself more than I need to predict every single outcome.

21:11I'll be good, everything will work out, I'm strong, I trust myself. And that is how you stop overthinking. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories, tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day. Hey, Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month? With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

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