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Build with Leila Hormozi
This Will Stop the Cycle of Your Constant Overthinking | Spotify Video Exclusive
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If you ever find yourself overthinking, anxious, stressed, then in this video today, what I want to do is share with you how to overcome that and the frameworks that help you break that cycle for good. Overthinking is really unproductive thinking. Sometimes overthinking can be good. It can help us in situations, it can help us think through really long term decisions that have a long tail. For example, if you want to start a business picking what industry are you going to serve, what product are you going to sell? That warrants a lot of thinking. And I think that that would be an appropriate time to overthink. Whereas on the other side, a situation that wouldn't warrant overthinking would be something like the dress you're going to wear to a date, what diet you're going to go on to lose weight. An unmanaged mind will constantly overthink. To learn what to do instead of overthinking is a skill now we just have to learn in what situations does it work and in what ones does it not work, and then in the ones it doesn't work in, we what can we do instead? I have a framework that I like to use for overwhelm. Overwhelm tends to be high demand with lack of clarity. They're self imposed demands. It's all these have to, must, shoulds that we put on ourselves. And those are creating the high demand. And then we have a lack of clarity, meaning we are not sure what action to take. And typically the reason that we have a lack of clarity is we've never done something before. It is an unknown, we aren't able to predict it. So if you want to decrease overwhelm around the overthinking, the first one is identifying what are the musts, shoulds have to's that you're imposing upon yourself that are creating such a high demand. It's creating such a sense of urgency and importance for you to do something. There's a term used by Albert Ellis which is called like masturbation, which is like thinking of like the must, shoulds have tos. Humans like to create rules, but over time those rules and rituals can start not to serve us. When they have us rather than we have them, they dictate our lives. The best thing for you to do is to identify what are those thoughts that you're telling yourself. One thing that I don't find helpful is that if you have a thought that says I should be making more money by now, you could say, you know what? I would like to have more money by now. But I know that it takes time and with enough hard work and effort, I will eventually get there. That's a much more realistic thought. It's identifying the must, shoulds and have to's and then exchanging them for realistic thoughts. Another way that we do this is the language that we use. So, for example, I had a woman reach out to me and tell me that she was devastated because she was heartbroken that her and her boyfriend broke up. And I said, you are devastating yourself by the language you are using about this. You were dating somebody. The two of you broke up. The breakup wasn't fun itself, but you can see it as a great challenge and you can get through it and become a better person for it. That's probably a realistic perspective of the situation. But to identify as devastated and heartbroken, that increases the overwhelm and the demand we put on ourselves because it's escalating our already emotional situation that we're having. If you can get rid of all the mustards and have tos and you can get rid of all the absolutes, you will find out that you can de escalate your emotions just by how you talk about them. Now, the second route is understanding that it's typically lack of clarity. You have a lot of demand on yourself and a low ability to figure out what the direction is. Typically, it's because you're in a situation where you haven't made a decision like this before, or you. You are not able to predict what needs to happen next. And so what I would suggest doing is in those situations, seeking out somebody as a idol, as a mentor, as a coach, whatever level of access you can get to somebody who has been in your situation before. If they are an idol. Reverse engineer what they would be doing in your situation or if they are a coach or mentor, ask them, what steps would you take in my situation? Sometimes the wrong steps are better than those steps because in this situation, we just need you to take action. The great thing about taking action is if you take the wrong action, you can correct it later. I had this mantra I say to myself whenever I'm feeling incredibly overwhelmed and I'm feeling like there's so much going on. Typically, what I. What I realize when I pull myself out of the situation is like, wow, I'm expecting myself to do so much that it almost guarantees a bad outcome because it's just an overwhelming amount of work or things to think about. What I repeat to myself in those situations is do it wrong, do it imperfectly, because what I've realized is that when the goal is to be perfect, it increases our anxiety about the situation, and then actually the outcomes tend to be worse. The brain is paradoxical. It typically wants to do, you know, if you tell it, don't look at the elephant, it looks at the elephant. If you find yourself, like, caught up in trying to be perfect, trying to do everything right all the time, just remind yourself it's okay to do it wrong. It's okay to be imperfect. And I think that commanding yourself, do it wrong, do it imperfectly, is a powerful statement to break us out of that anxious cycle where we're constantly overthinking and overwhelming ourselves. So the next tool, and probably my favorite tool when it comes to overthinking, is the act of doing something else. I call this productive distraction. What most people do is they're like, I'm locking myself in my room. I'm not doing anything. I've got to think through my overthinking. I'm like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. Let's think through the overthinking, which is just amplifying the cycle of overthinking. What you want to do is put yourself in an environment that makes it harder to overthink than easier. The best thing you can often do is find something else to do for a couple hours and then come back to it and see how different you feel. And, you know, sometimes it's not perfect. There's some days where I just celebrate that I was able to do the productively distracting activity. If you are thinking about something specifically that's in front of you right now, it is very hard to overthink about something else. So if I'm riding a motorcycle in four lanes of traffic, it's pretty hard to think about this other thing going off my girlfriend. People who have the tendency to overthink also tend to have more time than others. The people who are taking action constantly have less time to overthink things. If you have too much time, you almost create problems that aren't there due to your overthinking. There was a study done, and it was basically on identifying prisoners in groups of faces that people saw. And they said, identify. How many people in here are prisoners? You know, I think people identified, like, X percentage of the group. It might have been like 60% of the group were felons, right? And then they reduced the amount of felons in the next group when they showed them. And what they found is that the human brain still found the same amount of felons. Even though there were less. And so what you find is that your brain finds the same amount of problems, no matter what the situation is, and no matter how many actual problems exist, it will create them out of nothing if there's nothing good. Have you ever had a neighbor, they keep calling the hoa, complaining to the hoa, it's like every day. And they're talking about how you're a huge problem, you left your trash out, the bush is not trimmed, know your car's on the driveway, and they call them day after day after day. Those people often are retired, they don't have a job, they've got nothing to do. And so in their life, you are the biggest problem that exists. So I think a lot of people look at overthinking as a problem. In reality, what I think it is is that a lot of people actually just don't have the skill of managing how they think. And so rather than identifying yourself as somebody who is an overthinker or who has a problem that they need to solve, why don't you just identify with being inexperienced in the skill of managing your thoughts? Because it is a skill that takes practice and takes time. I lack the skill of managing my thoughts from time to time, and so I will overthink. And I'm working on acquiring the skill of managing my thoughts so that I can reduce how much I overthink. There's a lot of ways our brain can get in our own way. In fact, it feels like it's constantly trying to do the opposite of what you want it to. There's also a ton of ways that you can learn how to manage your brain and help it gear you towards success. It.