Do you know excessive thanking can drain your energy? What is most important for you is to learn to cut-off the negative thought patterns that triggers anxiety and stress as early as possible.
The power of focused mind is immense, and it can help you convert your mental energy into reality. In this article, we discussed 7 simple ways to stop overthinking.
Overthinking is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head. These automatic thought habits can be positive or negative. Negative thought patterns drains your energy and efficiency. Overthinking often starts with excessive self-talk.
Overthinking and negative thought patterns drains away the positive energy from life. If the thoughts that run through your head are mostly negative, your outlook on life is more likely pessimistic. If your thoughts are mostly positive, you’re likely an optimist. Researchers, observed that overthinking reduces creativity.
Common Symptoms of Overthinking:
Overthinking eats away from the inside. It clouds the minds, judgment and destroys any semblance of happiness. It rots away at the brain and keeps it in a perpetual state of paralysis. The six key symptoms of overthinking are: fear of rejection, excessive doubt, unfocused mind, cannot let go the past, excessive self-criticism, and insomnia.
All of our actions in the world begins with our thoughts and, when you deliberately change the way you are thinking, you can create the life of your dreams. But because our thinking habits are so deeply ingrained in our sub-consciousness mind, sometimes it is not so easy to change and then we need some assistance.
7 Tips to Stop Overthinking
1 Positive self-talk
Positive self talk, is more about re framing your mindset and views about the world, removing negative bias, and approaching life with the idea that you can tackle things and solve problems. Moreover, if things don’t go perfectly, you’ll learn from it for the next time.
In the morning you can say, ‘Today is going to be a great day.” Visualize your day going perfect in detail. Focus your energy on what you want to do. Write down the goals that you want to accomplish. Be diligent, consistent and positive.
2. Growth Mindset
The growth mindset promotes resilience while the fixed mindset one does not. Growth mindset embraces challenges easily with positive views. Growth mindset can serve as a protective factor against psychological problems, such as depression, behaviors problems, school disengagement, and burnout. It gives confidence that abilities can improve through hard work and persistent learning.
3. Learn to be present in everything you do
True happiness can only be found in the present moment. You need to learn how to live in the moment and stop worrying about the past or future. Because most humans spend more time focusing on the adverse consequences (because of the pain pathway in the brain), we develop dominant negative thought patterns that keep us stagnant and are the basis of our self-fulfilling prophecies coming true.
4. Balance your thought patterns
Learn to take a closer look at your thoughts, and coming up with more balanced and realistic thoughts, is the key tool for for managing your thought patterns. The aim is to make positive thought patterns as habit and part of your subconscious mind.
Negative thought patterns impact your work, finances, and relationships in a bad way. Many people also trick themselves with negative feelings – firstly they do not aware about the negative thought patterns and secondly they do not know the ways to come out of those negative thought patterns.
A negative mental state is when you feel stressed out, worried, frustrated, angry, depressed, irritable, overwhelmed, resentful or fearful.
A positive mental state is when you feel love, joy, gratitude, awe, playfulness, ease, creativity, drive, caring, growth, full with curiosity and appreciation.
Just witness your thought patterns. According to National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts. Thoughts are like a river goes on moving, zigzag.
5. Know the events, thoughts, and the people that irritates you
Whether it is gossip, criticism or unkind remarks, your mouths can be instruments of righteousness or unrighteousness. Know the events, thoughts, and the people that irritates you. Close that door. Guard your everyday thinking, words and actions consciously. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.
6. Be playful and learn to lough
Learn to smile and laugh whenever possible because that improves immunity. Playfulness can free your mind and help you to find ideas or solutions seemingly impossible using pure logic. This can help you to overcome creative blocks and manage criticisms. Playfulness not only stimulate unique ideas but also cultivate a sense of community and love. It cultivates a psychologically safe environment where mistakes are valued, risk-taking is encouraged, and everyone can be playful without concern for propriety or contrived politeness.
7. Change your breathing pattern
During overthinking and stress, our breathing rate and pattern change. The idea is to learn what an ideal pattern for you and then become mindful of how you breathe in different situations. If required tweak your pattern when needed. Stand in front of a mirror. Breathe in and see what happens. Your torso should expand slightly, but your chest and neck should stay fairly relaxed.
We discussed seven techniques to overcome overthinking. Excessive overthinking drains away the positive energy from life. Normally, our subconscious mind develop these overthinking habit patterns. Unhealthy thought patterns create stress and stress creates unhealthy biological reactions, and prolonged stress can lead to both physical and mental health problems. Fortunately there are many ways to come out of the unhealthy thought patterns and overthinking.