Mind is not YOU — How to Stop Overthinking and Anxiety

Your mind is not ‘YOU’. Your mind is a tool that YOU use to think. And YOU can always tweak your tools according to your will.

Nutria, a large rodent native to South America, have to continuously chew something and wear their teeth down otherwise their teeth will overgrow and can penetrate their skull, hence killing them. Sounds familiar? Same as our mind, it can’t tolerate a thought-vacuum, it always needs a thought to churn. And when it can’t find a thought, it either tries to dwell in the past or scraps of some future events, which we commonly call ‘Overthinking’. This overthinking causes anxiety and mental wear.

Intro

Before reading, I suggest you take a deep breath first, calm yourself down, and… hold that… Go:

Welcome to the Overthinker’s Club!

Yes, I, too, am an overthinking expert and not a lifestyle guru. I used to think overthinking is a good thing, it shows my creativity and how I use my brain all the time. But…actually, it’s a brain-killer. It’s because the human brain can’t multitask. We can focus on only one thing at a time and multitasking is just switching your focus very quickly, eventually making every task unproductive. Recently, I tried to find the root of its cause and how it can be controlled, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about.

Cause and Effect of Overthinking

Let us come directly to the point without tons of self-help gibberish. To understand a problem better, the best strategy is to deconstruct it. So, let’s deconstruct our brain-killer. Overthinking is thinking about something which can’t be converted into an action, like:

• Thinking about the past
• Anxiousness about the future.
• Tensing about the outcome of an event.
• Worrying about what people think about you.

And these are the things that one cannot change and still wastes their brain-power thinking about it. It’s like racing your car to full throttle while it’s in neutral gear — you’re wasting your fuel and not going anywhere. Therefore, overthinking shifts your focus from something which you can change to something you can’t.

But as I said earlier, your mind is just a tool and you can always customize it(not so easy though). So, when my thoughts go out of my control, I use some ways to view things differently. (some may find it a little weird)

So what to do?

Changing the wiring of our brain and a little tweaking with thoughts might help. If we follow some simple mental models, we can easily change the way we perceive our life and its problems. Let’s see:

• Gaps Between Breaths: The most simple meditation to keep your mind calm and clear. There is a moment between inhaling and exhaling, just be aware of that gap all the time. It enables you to be aware of your present, thus preventing past or future related thoughts to form.
• Nothing Matters: Our observable universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter and 26.7 billion years old, with 200 billion galaxies. Our galaxy i.e. Milky Way Galaxy contains at least 100 billion stars and 200 billion planets. Can you imagine how small our planet is with respect to our universe? Unimaginably small. And how small are you and your problems are, with respect to both space and time?
• Watch your thoughts: This one is the opposite of meditation, don’t stop your thoughts, let them flow freely. And then, watch them from a distance as a third person, watch the mess of your mind from afar. And Go Further.
• No-Free-Will technique: Are you sure, the next thing you’re gonna do is your free will? Or was it always meant to happen? Is free will an illusion? I know, for many it’s a ground-breaking statement. But this mental model can help you ease. When you’re not the one who’s responsible for anything, and everything is already decided, then nothing can be done. So why bother thinking about it? If it is then it is.
• 1–year rule: If it won’t matter after one year, then it shouldn’t matter now because it doesn’t matter, so no good in thinking about it either. Simple one-liner.
• Leg breaker: Imagine you’ve got a slight pain in your right hand and it’s bothering you. But the next day one of your leg bone fractures due to some accident, and now BOOM, you don’t care about that pain in the hand. I know, this analogy is a bit brutal. But a problem seems big until a bigger problem arrives, and now you don’t care about the former one, so it is possible to not care i.e. think about it.

These are not some proven ways to cure overthinking. They are just mental models to think about your problems in a different way and to reduce anxiety.

Conclusion

The human mind is a mystery. We know how information is transported throughout the brain but don’t know why thoughts are created, or what is consciousness and why it exists. But, we know one thing for sure, we are the masters of our minds and not the other way round. After all, the mind is not YOU, it’s just a tool you use to think.