When Your Mind Won’t Switch Off: Understanding Overthinking

Simon Mundie (0:00)

Before we get to today's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am running a free webinar next Tuesday, the 19th of May, at 7 p.m. UK time. You can register via the links below. The focus of the session will be the power of intention. We'll start with a meditation, as usual, and I will open to questions too. And I hope to see you there.

When I was eight years old, I vividly recall being sat on the stairs, listening to an argument, thinking to myself, why don't I feel more sad or scared? And the reason I didn't was because I was thinking rather than feeling. And this is something I see with people again and again. So I want to talk about two reasons why this happens and provide solutions, including one that I used at three o'clock this morning. I often talk about when I took my then two-year-old daughter to the dentist and she was panicking, looking at the nurses with the masks on and I held her like this. Well, that started to frustrate my wife. So now that she's three, she wants me to start saying I did the same thing on the plane when she started panicking during takeoff. I held her right here. And if I didn't hold her in that way with that energy, being centred myself with the intention and the privilege of I've got you, then the fear of that moment would have been too overwhelming for my daughter. And at some point she would have had to dissociate. And the easiest and first place we learn to try and escape our feelings internally is by going up into the head. So big feelings when we're young, if we haven't got a loving, centred adult to be with us, that is the first way we go up. But also if we, for example, express frustration or irritation or excitement or joy, and don't have that reflected back to us, and it feels unacceptable outwardly, we typically then reject those feelings in ourself. And again, the movement is up into the head. So the analogy I like to use is one of smoke and fire when it comes to overthinking. So imagine looking out over a gorgeous vista, rolling hills and way off in the distance, there's this big black plume of smoke. You wouldn't have to see a fire there to know that there was a fire. You could infer it from the smoke. Well, in this analogy, the smoke is the overthinking. And the fire is a contraction or some tension or heaviness that we are avoiding in the body. And there's no point in trying to deal with the smoke and fire at the level of smoke. In other words, there's no point trying to get rid of overthinking by thinking. You have to come down and find the feeling, the knot, the heaviness, the tension, that you don't want to be there and get really curious about it and shift that into a yes and also start to explore what is it that this feeling needs. It might just be a simple embrace, but it could be more. It could be a whole number of things. So it's really important not to make the movement up into the head a problem or to reject that because at some point that movement was necessary to keep you safe, perhaps from a big feeling or from feeling disconnected from the people around us. So when you notice that movement is to actually meet that with compassion and gratitude and then come down into the body. And I recognize that for so much of my life, I was at war with elements of my inner experience. I get really frustrated with the movement up into the head. And what I see, in fact, I've just seen with someone in the last hour, someone I was working with, it's so important to identify when we have, where we have that inner no going on, get really clear on the inner no or the this is bad, this is wrong, and start to play around to shift that to a yes. And that is when things change, because when we meet all of our experience with a loving yes, we are in alignment with our true nature, which is a loving yes always. It can't not be a loving yes.

So finding the contraction in the body is absolutely one way to deal with overthinking. You can use the overthinking as a sign, as an alarm, like a baby monitor, to come down and see what you are resisting, what you are abandoning. The second thing that I'd like to talk about would be around balance. And this has come up because for me, yesterday I had a really busy day. The kids are on half term, I was coaching all day. I didn't get hardly any time to myself. And then I went to bed, and at three in the morning, I woke up and my brain was going.