Ep. 109 How I Stopped Overthinking: The Theory That Changed My Life

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1:40What is up and welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working and a very special welcome to my fellow overthinkers as this week we are discussing the curse of overthinking and most importantly how to overcome it but not just overcome it how to use it to your advantage so you will know if you've been here for five minutes I speak a lot about productivity and contrary to popular belief I genuinely believe that overthinking not laziness is the main cause of procrastination and so overcoming overthinking not only alleviates so much mental noise but also makes you more productive in the long run overthinking i will be the first to say can be so incredibly fucking annoying but on top of that it can also like i really really believe that overthinking stops us fulfilling our full potential and i don't just mean because i do think there are benefits to overthinking or no actually I take that back there are benefits to thinking but overthinking is by definition bad like it is surplus it is more than you actually need to be thinking over a situation and from personal experience it can drive you fucking insane so before I go any further I think it's really worth saying that overthinking and anxiety can go hand in hand but they are not synonymous.

3:09So when I am doing this episode and I'm being like, oh, how to overthink less and how to start using thinking to your advantage rather than overthinking and how to quell it and all of this, I am not specifically talking about anxiety. And whilst they can be very interconnected, I would say that I am not a professional in any sense. I'm unprofessional in all walks. So if you want to speak to someone about anxiety and mental health in general, I would just, I have to say, legally morally responsibly and friendlily i would highly highly highly recommend speaking to a professional about that we are going to be speaking specifically about overthinking harnessing that and being able to reach our full potential today but i just wanted to disclaimer that because i know that they're often talked about as the same thing and i don't want this at all to sound like me being like just stop overthinking when actually there are obviously much deeper things at play there for some people.

4:01Now if you haven't listened to any of these solo episodes before, we have done a grand total of one before today. We've done other solo episodes but this is a new format of solo episode. Essentially the whole idea behind this episode is that I am very nerdy. I'm very curious about different topics and whenever I'm having like an issue in my day-to-day life, like something like overthinking or like building a habit or like getting to where I want to get to in my career. If there is a pattern recurring, I want to know why. And the idea behind this solo episodes is giving me a platform to rant at you about the issues I've had, and then the science behind why that's actually an issue a lot of us have, and then the science behind how to fix it.

4:48So full disclaimer, I'm not a scientist. I've got a music degree. Imagine. I know. But actually, what we're trying to do here is really like rationalise these different things at these different stages of our lives, do deep dives into topics and to come out of like this quick explainer deep dive episode feeling like we know a lot more on a topic and being able to therefore get to where we want to get to in our day, in our work, in our friendships, relationships, career. So as always we're gonna start by getting into the data because in this house we believe that data makes things less scary because it shows us why we're feeling a certain way and it shows us how many other people are thinking a certain way.

5:31So you may not know because I personally didn't know until I started researching this more but research recently published in Forbes suggests that 73 % of 25 to 35 year olds chronically overthink. So not just overthink, chronically overthink. So they are persistently, constantly overthinking in a recurring way which I'd assume would come in the way of living your daily life to your full potential. That period captured there of 25 to 35 is a time in most people's lives obviously where they're making really big decisions and also often big decisions for the first time ever. So whether to take a job, whether to move to somewhere new, whether to move in with their partner and despite 73 being a huge figure it really doesn't actually surprise me.

6:17Our 20s are obviously a time of huge uncertainty for so many people and I think in a way overthinking is our brain's way of trying to find some certainty in that uncertainty or trying to work it out. Like I sometimes find my brain going round and round in circles because it's trying to solve often an unsolvable problem. Trying to work out the multiple different outcomes that it can emotionally and physically prepare for as I come up to something happening. However what this also means because in today's society we have so many options available to us we are constantly told that the world is our oyster and we can do anything or go anywhere and don't get me wrong this is obviously brilliant and is a huge privilege if you come from any type of situation where you are told and kind of somewhat believe those things but there also absolutely is this paradox of choice like if i think back to my parents generation it's probably fair to say that most people were given a few career options and that was kind of that.

7:15And also you probably couldn't see that much beyond your immediate circle in terms of what different career options look like. So if you didn't take a certain career you probably weren't going to see how that entire thing would play out and therefore be able to compare yourself to that person. What I do think this all means then is that overthinking is something that has really become woven into how this kind of 25 to 35 age bracket thinks. And I would be very, very unsurprised to learn that that is also the generation following that. If you've listened to the episode with Gemma Spegg, we go specifically over why your 20s are so confusing and what to do about it.

7:53But as part of that, we were also talking about this paradox of choice and being this illusion of the fact that you think you could have 20 different lives at once. And by choosing one life, the opportunity cost is constantly every other life. And not only are you thinking I could have done that, but you're seeing hundreds of people on your feed who might also have done that. and therefore always by definition you are missing out on an entire life path whilst not also thinking about the fact that okay but you would have to have every single other thing that came with that life as well and maybe that life wasn't available to you or maybe if you'd made that decision you wouldn't have gone down that path.

8:25I do think that overseeing can lead to overthinking and I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing that we get to see everyone else's careers. I would say that it is absolutely and categorically a good thing that we're given more than a few career options and we have the privilege to be able to choose some different paths but what I would say is that there is no doubt that when overthinking is often a result of our brain trying to like work something out and work out what the right path should be when there are infinite different paths at any one time whether that is about a small decision whether that is about a big life decision it is going to lead to more overthinking and I do think that's kind of become ingrained in what growing up is now and I don't just mean like teenage years I mean beyond that choosing your career deciding whether you want to have a family deciding whether you want to compromise one of those things for another even just saying like deciding that many times it's like wow there's so many decisions like there's more decisions than ever absolutely a good thing in so many ways but you can see why it would lead to overthinking and beyond the societal factors from a psychology standpoint there are actually three main causes of overthinking so the number one is fear number two is uncertainty and number three is self-doubt.

9:38Now you obviously don't need me to tell you that these three things are very common feelings for people in their 20s and I would go as far as to say even more common in women. I don't think it's a reach to say that women naturally carry more self-doubt but also when you add more decisions and more illusion of choice you also add an element of uncertainty of choosing the right path or uncertainty of how those 100 different paths might turn out when you've never seen anyone around you do that thing and all of those things can be enveloped in fear. So I think when you start to look at what those three main causes are it becomes pretty clear why each of the times you might be specifically overthinking.

10:20So now obviously probably quite helpful given the title of this video we're going to talk about how to stop overthinking. So as part of this, when you sense yourself starting to overthink, and I think sometimes that's part of the issue in itself, I'll often only realise about like five minutes into a full overthinking spiral. But I do think one of the most useful things to do is to simply ask yourself, why am I overthinking this? I want you to literally answer this out loud to yourself. Like, why am I overthinking this? And then I want you to fit it into one of these three categories. So the first one is obviously fear.

10:59So if it's fear I want you to work out what you're scared of. Like I want you to write a list, a physical list down of what you're scared of and it might be a totally reasonable fear. It might be a new job or moving to a new country but even knowing the source of this overthinking being fear, by then noticing it's scaring you, you will be able to sit with it without your brain going at 100 miles per hour. And the reason for this is because if you just sat there and said, do you know what, I'm scared, you'd be able to much rationally and more clearly think through it. So you could say, I'm scared because I'm moving to a new country and I don't know anyone there and what if it's a terrible decision and what if I hate it and for each one of those questions you can either talk it through with a friend or you don't even need a friend here for this who needs friends you can literally just in response to each of those questions answer it so what if you hate it yeah it's gonna be kind of shit like you're gonna move there for a bit and then you're gonna have to find out you hate it but you only could ever know that you hated it because you went to that country you moved there you took a big leap you might have no friends but you also might meet the most amazing people ever and again that's not a one-way door decision that's a two-way door decision you can move back and you will come back having known more about yourself and more about this country and more about this trajectory of your life that you had to explore to know whether it was right or wrong do you see how just understanding the root cause of fear allows you to be able to write down the different parts of that fear what are the different fears and then also to rationally answer them or at least be able to sit with it.

12:41Okay so you're listening to this and you're like well it's definitely not fear. The second one we're going to check for is uncertainty. Now if it's uncertainty the small nuances between fear and uncertainty are that uncertainty is probably a specific type of fear where you just don't know what the outcome is going to be. So uncertainty is the reason why you're thinking through all of these fears because you can't predict the future. Like you literally cannot become certain about this situation. So your brain is working overtime to become certain about a situation that you are able to have no certainty on unless you have a physical time machine, which I am, for the sake of this video, going to assume you do not.

13:22You have to remember with uncertainty, if you get to this and you think, do you know what, the root cause of this specific overthinking is uncertainty, you have to remember that uncertainty is without a doubt where the magic of your life happens. It is so reasonable to want to analyse situations where you're not 100 % sure but often as I've said this kind of overthinking involves searching for answers when there literally isn't one and I truly believe some of the best things come out of uncertainty. Uncertainty is just another word for saying you are living outside of your comfort zone and so instead of spinning out over things that are uncertain you've got to get good at living with that feeling and I think different people of us struggle with uncertainty to a different extent because ultimately it is a form of control like certainty for the outcome is a form of control over your future control over your emotions because you know what's going to happen and therefore you can anticipate it and therefore you can make sure that it doesn't come up and hurt you because you always knew that was going to happen or whatever it might be.

14:29That being said, the only way you can have full control and full certainty over an outcome is if you do fucking nothing and the only certainty there is going to be around the fact that you are going to do nothing and go nowhere. So you have to normalise living in that uncertainty and the sooner you do that, the sooner you'll be able to gain some clarity but I would say as well that like as I've said each of us will have different issues with coming to terms with uncertainty like I for one have a fundamental need for control over my life my future my day like in the past I would rather self-sabotage a situation obviously unconsciously because I'm not a masochist but I would self-sabotage a situation unconsciously because it was more certain.

15:19Like you get to decide the outcome when you are self-sabotaging because you have control over the outcome because you're the one self-sabotaging so you're the one doing the outcome. And that's nobody's best way of getting anywhere. And if I was able to really train my brain to normalise living in some uncertainty and also seeing joy in that and seeing excitement and seeing the fact that beautiful things come out of uncertainty and sometimes you just need to take a risk and you can't have control over everything. Like if I was able to do that earlier there would have been a lot of situations that I wouldn't have basically made worse purely to have some certainty which is just the silliest side of overthinking because you're overthinking that it might end badly and then you're making it end badly just so you don't have uncertainty.

16:05Like why are you doing that for? Come on put yourself together. Then for the third reason if it is self-doubt, you're gonna need to know that this one requires the most work and I would say the most continuous work as well but like the most work to even get to a point where you can fight this. Whereas situations of uncertainty and fear are brought about by specific life events, self-doubt is very hard to fight in all life events. What I mean by that is that you can be the most sure person in the world of who you are and your confidence and where you want to get to and if something happens that makes you fearful and feel uncertain about your future you're probably still going to overthink like you might be able to quell that quicker but you're probably still going to overthink however conversely if you have significant self-doubt I can promise you that the likelihood is that no matter what happens whether it involves a huge amount of uncertainty whether it makes you fearful, whether it's terrifying, whether it's exciting, like literally no matter what it is, you are probably going to overthink it.

17:12So if this is the root cause of a lot of your overthinking, I would spend a lot of time working on it because I don't know about you, but I mean, I used to have such big self-doubt and used to lack confidence. You never, ever, ever would have known that I would have lacked confidence. Like I, you know, I'm extroverted and I yap, yap, yap. And so, you know, there's a chance that you would never have known that. But I definitely overthought every single thing. I definitely self-sabotaged lots of things. And I spent so much time looking at people who I could tell were confident and people who I could tell did have like high self-worth, who walked away from situations that weren't great and all of this.

17:51And I always just thought, I was like, oh god, that looks so great. And actually, I think that kind of as I said there are always going to be life events that are thrown in that get you overthinking. That's not so much of an issue as if every single life event results in overthinking because your base level is of self-doubt over who you are, over how confident you should be, over what your morals are, over what you want from your future, all of these different things. You don't need to have them all figured out but you do need to know yourself and without knowing yourself I can promise you you're probably going to end up in every single situation overthinking.

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19:47For millions of brands, that engine is Shopify, making selling seamless for them and shopping effortless for us. upgrade your business and get the same checkout aloe yoga uses sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com retail all lowercase go to shopify.com retail to upgrade your selling today shopify.com retail so in this scenario instead of rationalizing your feelings like you've got to give yourself an ego boost and i don't just mean like looking in the mirror and being like you're fit although you can do like that might work for you you can you can absolutely do that but what I mean on top of that is you need to show yourself how hot shit you are you know you need to go back through your goals you need to go back through your diaries from whatever year I don't care if you were five and you're 25 now you need to go through old things of yours and old vision boards and you need to check in and you need to remind yourself how far you've come.

20:53I don't care if you've reached one out of a hundred of those goals. No one else is going to think of your worth above theirs, right? So if you don't think of your worth as so strong and like knowing that you as a person have this worth, then no one's got your back. Like no one's got your back. You can be loved from all different angles but if you don't have that you're not only going to be doing things like self-sabotage but you are also like that's one less person who could like really really believe in you. Well sometimes we definitely watch these videos when we're going through like a point in our lives where we're like god I actually need to change that or I need to overhaul or I need to get to where I want to get to.

21:32So even if you're actually at this point because you're thinking I've reached none of the goals I've set for myself this year that is fine like it takes these moments to actually get to where you want to get to but what you do need to do is you need to prove to yourself how great you are and that can be through the smallest things like you can do something nice for someone else you can help someone you can donate something you can like whatever it might be like something that makes you feel good about yourself something that shows you that you're a good person you think of other people and of course that is an inherently selfish act if you're doing that to boost your self-worth but sometimes we need to prove to ourselves over and over that we can stick to our entire to-do list, that we can stick to that schedule we put in for ourself that day, that we can say I need to do these returns today and actually go and fucking do the returns and give ourselves the self-respect we deserve to actually like and have that discipline to get where we need to get to.

22:26But I need you to prove to yourself any which way that you are a person that you yourself respect and that sometimes just involves building evidence. I remember Ben Gallagher's episode of this podcast and he was saying that before his business started doing well he was just saying I like didn't like who I was. I like wasn't a good person. I didn't enjoy who I was. I didn't think I was very nice. I was kind of mean. I was kind of you know and he maintains that he very much like overturned his life and just like started being a good person and then everything else around him started going well and it doesn't matter like how much you believe that.

23:05I do believe that a big part of that is proving to yourself that you are a good person who deserves respect not only for other people from other people but from yourself enough to like have some discipline and so just proving to yourself who you are can be so incredibly valuable for building that self-worth. What you're going to do when you've checked in and reminded yourself how far you've come is you're going to use it to channel your confidence and you will find your thoughts quiet and down quicker than you might expect. I would also say that one thing that works for me is that sometimes when I'm overthinking loads and I just I'm overthinking and I can tell it comes from a place of self-doubt and I'm just feeling unconfident and I'm just feeling like I'm lacking some self-worth and all of this I will act as if I was like a hater to myself and be like yeah you know what you don't deserve this or you know what this is gonna go wrong and all of this and as soon as I start getting my own back up I'm like no I do and this is why for these 10 reasons and this is why even if it goes wrong it's still going to be a good thing for me to do and I'm going to be proud of myself for doing it and when there's someone else against you even if they're a fake hater in your head you go into the defensive mode backing up your self-worth which is ultimately where you want your mind to be most of the time but all of these fixes require work and practice.

24:21I will always remember someone telling me that my brain is a muscle that I need to exercise like any other. So the more you fight your overthinking instincts, the easier it will be to stop it the next time. But that being said, if you do need a quick short-term fix to get you out of a spin, distraction is very much your best friend. You can do lots of different things to distract yourself. So you can do something like plan out your day, you can pick up a book, although I will say that doesn't usually quieten down my mind unless I'm like very into ACOTAR or something. You can watch the TV, you can move on to a different task you can call a friend one thing that roxy nafusi said on an episode the other day was she said when she overthinks she literally thinks what is your next thought like when your brain is spiraling if you think what is my next thought your brain will stop like the most unhelpful thing in the world because that's what it does sometimes you know sometimes you ask your brain to do something and it can't do it and this is a great one because when you think what is your next thought you like you're like oh I don't know like I have no fucking clue what my next thought is so I do find that one really helpful too but you're gonna know what distracts you most like I know that if I'll read a book I'll read like one sentence in and then suddenly I'll start like thinking about it again and I'll just be like staring at my kindle for like three pages and being like okay I haven't actually read any of that but you'll know things that can get you out of your head it might be going on a walk it might be phoning a friend like sometimes I'll literally tell someone I'll be like I'm overthinking this can you just distract me I'll talk through it but sometimes I think distraction is really the best but like overthinking is so rarely helpful now one weird thing I do sometimes use to distract myself actually is that if I'm overthinking in the work day that is not only annoying and detrimental to my mental health but it's also unproductive which in this house we don't like lack of productivity because if we're at work We would rather work then and be able to play later.

26:18I don't work because I want to work all the time. I work because I want to do a better job of when I'm actually in the office and then be able to do the things that I like later. But sometimes I'll distract myself with things that like fully need to take my concentration. So I will, for example, if I'm overthinking an issue that we're having at work, I'll time block out my entire day and I'll just be like, look, I can think about this again once I've got these three things done and I literally just parent myself. I'm like you are not allowed to think about that again because you cannot behave so you're going to do these things first and then you're allowed to think about it again and often those things distract you so much that you don't come back to thinking about it in that kind of spiraling way.

26:59So let's talk about when to use overthinking to your advantage. It's the fun parts, your superpower. So there's another psychological term for overthinking that I haven't yet mentioned but it is analysis paralysis. Isn't that fun? It essentially hits on something that I want to make clear but often the people who overthink are actually the deepest and most creative thinkers. Now I've kept this to this time in the video to tell you that if you're this far in you clearly are really overthinking a lot and you need some help so I just thought I'd land a little compliment there because if you're overthinking it's probably because you care the most.

27:37Someone who overthinks is someone who overloves. It's someone who overcares. It's someone who over invests. It is not inherently a bad thing. And I always think like, if you took away how much I care about this, I don't think I would still be me. And that's, it's fucking annoying when I'm going around in circles in my head. But actually, I like that I spend that much time thinking about the details of things. Like I think that's to thank for high quality of work. I think that's to thank for how much I love the people around me. Like it's not about this being a negative thing. It's about when to use it and how to stop it when it is detrimental.

28:11But being analytical is all about examining every option and drawing inferences and having a brain that will dive down every alley is very useful in this case. So if you're an overthinker and as I said if you've got this far I'm guessing you are it's all about training your brain to only unleash its full powers at the right time. So I'm just going to use an example that would be me here. So I spend a lot of my time overthinking, right? And I really, really, really, really hate it sometimes. Like it drives me fucking insane. But if I'm conceptualising a new campaign, for example, it is beneficial for me to overthink.

28:54So to spell this out, when you're conceptualising a new campaign, overthink. Go at it. Overthink every single part of it. That's fantastic. That's what makes you so good at your job. But spiralling about one sentence your boss said in your meeting, don't overthink. We're not overthinking there. And the same comes to when you're thinking about your relationships. Like overthink about how much you love that person and overthink the fact that you are also someone who is so capable of that type of love. And that is a wonderful thing. And therefore in that scenario, don't overthink about the multitude of ways that this relationship could blow up in flames, but do overthink about how much you love that person and how it's a great thing that you're someone who gives so much love and is therefore able to receive so much love like that is a fantastic thing we just need to learn when to like fully unleash the overthinking powers coming back to work obviously often overthinkers can find work a bit of a struggle for this reason particularly i would say remote work which gives you more time and space for your brain to spiral and also less direct communication which is not helpful to the overthinker I will say.

29:59So caveat there learn what communication is good for you and if you spend a lot of time overthinking how harshly someone said something on Slack maybe a less remote job might be good for you. Like I obviously don't mean that sincerely. Get your remote job, do what you need to do but I do also think as part of that understand the type of communication and the type of back and forth and the type of workspace that particularly works for you or makes you feel overly anxious or communicate that and say hey if there's some big news or a big thing that's just changed in our whole thing I would actually rather you give me a call or let's hop on a zoom or whatever it might be but I read a really interesting article in Harvard Business Review about this recently which compared overthinking to a concept called Parkinson's law and I will link it in the show notes but this is Parkinson's law is essentially a law that states that the work expands to the amount of time that you allow it to so if you and I fully agree with this it's like a liquid you know work is very much like a liquid this is why I have such a strict schedule every single day because you'll know if you're certain types of people with certain types of tendencies as well this will be the case even more than anyone else so if you give yourself one month to do a piece of work it will take you a month to get done but if you only have a week you'd finish the work in a shorter period of time I promise you and obviously there are exceptions to this.

31:20There are pieces of work that would absolutely take that time but I promise you if you give yourself longer to do that it will also take longer. If you give yourself shorter you can probably squeeze some time off it. So I've spoken about this before and actually if you've been here since my uni days you will know that I gave myself fake deadlines all the time because I would leave things far longer than they needed to be and I would spend far longer on things. So it basically just meant that unless I gave myself a fake deadline, everything would start to come to a head on the same day, which is never the case.

31:54I've written about this too. Someone else's deadline does not mean it's your deadline and that doesn't mean that you can make your deadline a week later. I would always make your deadline earlier than the official deadline for anything in any walk of life ever. It's a good employee thing, it's a good student thing and it also just leaves a buffer and allows you to stop overthinking it that entire time. But anyway, back to the article, it argues that overthinking also expands to the time we allow it. So if you give yourself one week to worry about something, you will waste an inordinate amount of time and energy worrying.

32:26But if you give yourself an hour to worry, which is still quite a long time, but you will only worry for that hour. So if you are struggling with working on your own from home and you're spending a lot of time overthinking, think back to this law and try to minimise the time and space you allow yourself to overthink in. What I will say as the biggest fattest addition to this is if you have ADHD there is also a chance that this will be the case more and more for you. Set timers to do tasks, to overthink. I have literally been known to be like I am allowed to think about this for two minutes more and then I must change and I will give myself accountability.

33:08I will literally tell people at work. Like I will say I'm not allowed to spend any more time on this than this and I'm going to set an alarm and when you hear that alarm go off, if you see me go back to that thing, you know, fight. But I do think that that's worth bearing in mind as well. Timers are your best friend, not just in overthinking. Very much in work and getting anything done as well. Right, as I've already mentioned, I spoke to Gemma Spegg, the queen of 20s psychology, about why we overthink and her top tips to stop it. You know we always need a little special guest for these solo episodes but here is what she had to say on the topic.

33:40Overthinking is basically our brain tricking us into believing that the more we think about a problem the closer we are going to get to an answer but actually that's a fallacy because the more we think about a problem the more we present ourselves with even more ridiculous and unlikely hypotheticals. What that actually means is that we get into a state of analysis paralysis where there is no possible way that we can make a decision or take any action because we're so caught up in considering what could go wrong. My biggest tips for overthinking is to firstly do a big brain dump, get a piece of paper, get your journal and write down every single possible outcome that you are considering.

34:18Then I want you to rank them. I want you to rank them as to how likely you think they're going to happen. What you're actually going to see is that normally the scariest options, the scariest hypotheticals are the ones that you realize are the least likely to occur and so you release some of that anxiety. Secondly, I want you to trust your past knowledge and your past experiences. I want you to think back to previous situations that you have overthought, that you have gotten into a spiral about. Think about the worst case scenario that you imagined at that time. Did it actually come true? Did it actually happen?

34:55No, normally it doesn't. I want you to teach your brain and reinforce to your brain that actually the worst case scenario is rarely if not ever the one that actually occurs and you know this from past experiences. Finally get out of your mind and into your body. Either you can do this through movement and processing your anxiety by exercising, moving your body, being out in nature or you can do it by taking small actions. If you're overthinking some huge situation or a problem I want you to just choose a direction and start moving towards it. The opposite of overthinking is action and you'll often find that it becomes a lot easier when you're actually doing something about the problem rather than just thinking about it constantly god Gemma is so good and if you haven't listened to her podcast on the psychology of your 20s we did one a few weeks ago but her whole podcast is fucking brilliant and I feel like that was the perfect place to end I on brand could over talk about overthinking all day but what I would really like you to do is to that writing down stuff I need you to do that.

36:01Like, next time you're overthinking, I need you to establish whether the root cause is fear, uncertainty or self-doubt. And I need you to write down the subsequent parts of that. Like, why am I fearful of this? Why am I uncertain of this? Why do I have self-doubt around this? Because that will allow you to get out some of the waffle that your brain is telling yourself that you know is too silly to even write down. I also think that as part of that for myself my brain can think a lot faster than my hands can write so sometimes to slow down my overthinking I simply have to answer those questions and write them down like it's okay to be fearful about something it's okay to be uncertain about something it's okay to have some self-doubt write it down it slows it down it allows you to like you know like a helicopter coming into land it's like you know slowing down and then allows you to be able to rationalize it a little bit more so to understand so that you're not racing at 100 miles per hour to try and reach a conclusion which often doesn't even exist but thank you so much for listening to this episode i really hope you got something from this episode it was very much for me but i hope you can feel that the noise of overthinking can begin to quieten down at least at some points in some walks of life it's not going to be like a one-off solution that you know this and then you never overthink again you do need to train yourself over and over and over and just train yourself to be like stop what's my next thought i'm not like you're not allowed to think about this if you're not going to behave if you're going to spiral out of control and just like understanding that hygiene around how you stop it for yourself or how you harness it in the best way possible to be able to get to where you want to get to without driving your brain into the ground because that is tough.

37:50But if you did enjoy this episode, I would really, really appreciate if you could like, rate, subscribe, review, whatever. Leave me a hate comment. All engagement is engagement. Wherever you're listening to it, have a wonderful week and stop overthinking. It's wasting your time. Think what you could put that effort into.

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