Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm)

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Or you can easily put off emergencies that you believe are not important, and those emergencies might actually turn into severe situations.”

So, if you’re struggling to manage your thoughts, if you feel lost in a haze, devoid of concentration, this book will help you Reclaim Your Brain and it might just change your life. Overthinking isn’t about overthinking: Over thinking is when you excessively analyze, evaluate, ruminate, and worry about certain things to a point where it starts affecting your mental health because you simply can’t stop. Sources of anxiety that lead to overthinking: ourselves (26% genetics) and environment (cluttered/dimly lit/noisy). Negative consequences of overthinking: physical (racing heart, fatigue, headaches, muscle tension) and mental (irritability, nervousness). Eustress (everyday stress) that keeps us on our toes and challenges us to be better. To flourish, we don’t need a stress free environment, we need one that’s optimally suited to our needs. It’s not the load, but how you carry it. Whether you feel an event as stressful and overwhelming comes down to how you interpret and understand that event. A person who is constantly stressed and anxious starts to lose all meaning and joy in life, stops making plans, cannot act with charity or compassion to others, and loses their passion for life.Author Gwendoline Smith is a clinical psychologist, speaker, and the author of The Book of Knowing, Depression Explained and Sharing the Load. She dispenses mental health advice online as Dr. Know. She lives in New Zealand. In the section on procrastination, reason starts to break down entirely. When describing tasks that aren’t urgent or important the author uses these: If you’re used to boarding most trains rather uncritically – that is, continuously engaging in trigger thoughts and starting to worry and ruminate for long periods of time – then, unfortunately, you’re well on your way to developing an unhealthy pattern. If you repeat this pattern over and over again, it might begin to feel as if it happens automatically. You might, understandably, come to believe that it’s outside your control.

Smith explains how overthinking can become a habit that our brains default to in response to stress and uncertainty. She describes how the constant stream of thoughts and worries can consume our attention, leading to rumination, self-doubt, and negative emotions.This technique has really helped see my worrying for what it is - not reality or fact, but something that just makes me anxious. This is a self-help book written by Gwendoline Smith, a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety and depression. The book offers practical advice and strategies to help readers break free from the cycle of overthinking and worry that can lead to anxiety, stress, and depression. Inspired by the above, and if you feel ready, I recommend that you give yourself daily challenges that involve trigger thoughts, and that you practise instructing yourself to leave them alone until a designated worry-time. This will help you become more adept at leaving your trigger thoughts alone and to realise that you’re in control of your worries and ruminations. You won’t succeed every time but, just like learning to ride a bike, you need to get up again every time you fall and keep biking until you get the hang of it. When overthinking and the associated symptoms spiral and become unbearable, it’s usual for us to look for ways to calm down. Many common strategies sound reasonable or useful, but research shows that they can inadvertently cause more harm than good and typically lead to even more overthinking. You might recognise some of them in your own behaviour: