← Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Get Out Of Overwhelm In 2 Minutes Flat! Stop Overthinking Spirals Using Neuroscience
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Most people are not lazy or broken, they're overwhelmed and avoiding starting. I built the Everyday Calm app to make starting feel possible. Short lessons, simple practices, real relief. No big commitment, just tiny actions that actually move the needle. Get it@studio.com Rebecca in this episode you'll discover a simple two minute practice that helps slow your thoughts when your nervous system starts taking in way too much at one time. Welcome to Takeout Therapy Mini Session, A short episode to help with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and therapist here to help you calm your mind, reset your focus and actually feel better. If you're ready to bring more presence and self compassion into your week, you're in the right place. Find more tools anytime@takeouttherapy.com well hello there friend. I'm so glad you showed up for the mini session today because today I'm going to teach you why racing thoughts are often an overload issue, not a thinking problem. A two minute grounding practice that reduces mental pressure and how to use it right in the middle of a spiral. Here we are, still an overthinking month and isn't it so convenient because it's January? It's one of those months where we totally overthink everything because there's all this pressure to make it fantastic. But the thing is, when the mind is overloaded, big complicated strategies aren't really that helpful. What I like are short body based interventions because they work faster and they're way simpler. You know me, I'm an easy peasy skills type of gal. I like things that are short and sweet and very effective. So today in this mini episode I'm going to give you a simple two minute practice that you can use any time your thoughts start speeding up. It might seem too simple to you, but just hang tight because this evidence based practice might actually help. If you practice it a few times, the first thing you want to do is spend a moment getting grounded. When we take on way too much, our body just goes into high alert and so we have to tell the body that we're safe and we can't use words to talk to the body, we have to use our body to talk to the body. So grounding is really really helpful. It means that you place your attention on your feet, stand up, place your attention on your feet. Notice where they make contact with the floor. Spend some time playing around with shifting your weight, feeling the pressure, feeling temperature or tension. And while you're doing this, just standing, placing your attention on your feet Let your breath move naturally. Don't try to breathe deep. Don't try to fix anything that you find. Like if you find tension, don't try to fix it. Just be with your body for one minute. This is grounding. Just making contact with yourself is very, very important because most of us are just running around like heads on a stick. We don't make contact with our bodies that often during the day. So this one minute of doing this really tells your brain and your body, oh, we're shifting into something a little bit more relaxed. So that's how you spend the first minute of the two minute exercise and then the second minute you want to do what we call narrowing the. And I'm directly using neuroscience here because we want to mess with your mind a little bit and get it off the track. So a simple thing that you can do is let your eyes rest on one object in front of you. Any old object will do. And spend some time really looking at the object while you keep your breath nice and soft and maybe even slow it down a little bit. You want to name three specific details you notice. Maybe it's the shape of the thing, the texture, the color, who knows? You will find features to point out. It's funny, I'm sitting here in my office and I'm actually just looking at a box of Kleenex, which seems like a very boring and simple item. But the more I sort of let my eyes rest on this box of Kleenex. It's square, but it's got like this cutout in the top where they've put this plastic film. And the plastic film holds the Kleenex into place. And I see the design on the box. It's like a flamingo and it's got all these different color leaves. Notice I'm not giving my opinion on this design because your opinion on things doesn't matter here. What we're playing with is shifting your brain from rumination and potential spiral to narrowing the field using your eyes, which PS are part of your brain. They're just part that's outside your head. We're using your eyes to give your brain something to pay attention to rather than all those racing thoughts. Right. And while you're doing this, allow your breath to soften slightly. This seems like a really silly activity, doesn't it? But this is how neuroscience works. We give the brain a focus and it will leave behind what it was on. So stay in this second minute, narrowing the field. Stay with the object, really be with the object and really see it for what it looks like this works because when thoughts get kind of racy, the brain is just holding way too much information at one time. And this practice basically reduces the input. It narrows your attention. It shifts your nervous system out of all that scanning that's always doing. And frankly, it gives your body a hot second to just calm down a little bit. It gives the body a really clear signal that it's safe. You're not stopping thoughts. You're actually just reducing the stressful load that the thoughts are carrying. I hope that makes sense, and I hope it's helpful for you today, because racing thoughts always mean that your system is overloaded. Your body can slow the mind faster than your thinking can. I promise you that two minutes of grounding and and narrowing your focus can change the whole direction of a spiral and frankly, the whole direction of your day. Hey, if you want more short, effective tools like this to calm mental overload and interrupt spirals all the time, that's why I built you an app. It offers simple, daily practices you can actually use in your real life. You're already holding the phone. You may as well make it useful. You can find the app@takeouttherapy.com or you can get it directly@studio.com Rebecca in any case, I really appreciate you showing up for today's episode because when you do your personal growth work, you affect everybody else around you. So keep it up. As always, while takeout therapy is a great educational resource, get the level of support that you need for your situation. I'm here for you. Until next time, take really good care of yourself, friend. If you're waiting to feel motivated before you take care of your mental health, you're gonna be waiting a long time. Feeling better comes from action, not vibes. The Everyday Calm app gives you short, doable tools that actually calm your nervous system. No journaling marathons, no toxic positivity. Just real support. One small step at a time. Get it at studio. Com Rebecca.