The End of Overthinking

Things to Think About, Future Becomes Past, Life & Thoughts, Intention, Ponder

I.

Things to Think About

The past couple months have been full of things to think about: the presidential election, two major hurricanes, and my wedding, to name a few.

When I emailed the wedding venue a list of questions and didn’t hear back for days, I numbed my anxiety with politics. When politics became too unbearable, I directed my attention to the hurricanes. When I realized there was only so much I could do to help my family recover from severe flooding, I shifted my focus yet again to the wedding. Many nights went by when I prayed for no election, no storms, no wedding. These things took up so much headspace; my mind accelerated into emotional overdrive. And the worst part of all? The things I chose to fret over were almost entirely outside of my control. I felt out of control. I was out of control. I struggled to write about the things I set out to write about when I first started this newsletter a year ago, and I didn’t publish any big ideas for several weeks. I don’t even know if I had any big ideas.

But now, these events have passed. Trump was elected President. FEMA wrote my parents a disaster assistance check. And I finally married my favorite person in the whole wide world.

Hunter and I on the eve before our wedding. One day I’ll write 5 Big Ideas on marriage/weddings, but, for now, this is one of my favorite posts on the topic.

II.

Future Becomes Past

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

Attributed to Lao Tzu

The mind operates in one of three states: past, present, or future. It does not hover in a liminal realm between divergent space-time continua. Put simply, at any given point in time, your mind is either with you in the present moment or it’s not.

Over recent months, my mind spent countless hours immersed in a fabricated future where every combination of political scenarios was plausible, natural disasters were both omnipresent and nonexistent, and my wedding fell apart in every conceivable way. This is a uniquely human dilemma. While prospection allows us to consider future scenarios and formulate plans, if we become too future-minded, we might emotionally anchor ourselves in a hypothetical projection that has no basis in reality. Or worse, through our thinking, we may inadvertently manifest the very conditions we fear.

As the anticipated future became the past and I find myself reflecting on the unfounded fears that once took up significant mental bandwidth, I realize two important lessons. The first is that my mind is unreceptive to big ideas when dwelling in the past or the future. Big ideas appear to exist only in the here and now. To continue doing the work I love and translating big ideas into actionable insights, I must return to the present.

The second lesson is that living in the future (or the past) is a bad habit. When all the election/hurricane/wedding drama was said and done, I found my mind craving the same anxious stimulation I had when these things were all eagerly awaited events. Why do I feel the desire to conjure up different outcomes than the ones that have already transpired? Why do I keep reliving the undesirable things that did or didn’t happen on my wedding night?

And why—God, oh why—do I feel the need to find something else to be anxious about?

III.  

Life & Thoughts

Life is objectively neutral. There’s birth, death, and all the stuff in between. And life is basically all the stuff in between. (Caution: stuff varies.)

But if life is neutral, why does living feel like suffering?

Living is subjective. We don’t view life from an objective lens when we are actively living it. Rather, we take things personally. Since we have only one life, we set expectations for that life. And when things don’t go as planned, we get upset. We lament, bemoan, suffer. And when things do go as planned, we yearn for those fleeting moments of happiness we once had. We cling, ruminate, suffer.

Living requires the mind to oscillate between thinking about the past, present, and future. Life, on the other hand, just happens.

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Like life, thoughts are objectively neutral. As life goes on, thoughts come and go. I need to get tortillas for tacos tonight. According to some sources, people experience between 6,000 and 60,000 thoughts each day. Why did my mother-in-law tell her friend to give a speech at our wedding without asking me first? And regardless of the thought, a thought is just a thought. Wait, am I saying that all thoughts are neutral—even the bad ones?!

Thoughts are like clouds—they can be cirrus, stratus, cumulus, or even cumulonimbus. What determines whether a thought is “positive” or “negative” is our thinking about it. Most thoughts drift through our awareness like a faint cirrus cloud on a fair-weather day. But, sometimes, a stormy cumulonimbus catches our attention and we feel unsettled. Emotions arise when we subjectify a thought—in other words, we take the thought personally, and subsequently, we begin thinking about it.

Sources: cirrus, cumulonimbus

Unlike thoughts, thinking is subjective. It’s a choice. Thoughts come and go without an effort, but thinking requires ample effort. Thinking is toilsome, demanding, suffering. For reasons beyond my pay grade, humans tend to think about the thoughts that evoke a negative emotion. They give significant chunks of their time and attention to the unstable cumulonimbus clouds, while overlooking the delicate cirrus clouds. Instead of letting an undesirable thought go, they think about it and think about it and think about it—fueling that thought with more and more emotional energy. The more we dwell on a specific thought, the less likely we are to notice new, creative thoughts. And the less receptive we are to big ideas.

Many different clouds form in the sky, but we don’t take the weather personally. When different thoughts form in our minds, we shouldn’t take those personally either.

IV.  

Intention

Intention = intent + attention

The easiest way to engage with thoughts is to allow your attention to wander aimlessly toward whichever thought feels the most emotionally charged. When life is riddled with anxiety-inducing future events (elections, disasters, weddings, you name it), you can just give your attention to the thoughts associated with those hot topics and neglect all the other important thoughts in life.

Or… you can engage with thoughts more intentionally.

To do so, you must first set an intention. If you’re living life without a purpose or direction, you’re at a much greater risk of giving your attention to the most emotionally unstable thoughts. Alternatively, if you have a clear goal or vision for your life, it becomes much easier to recognize which thoughts support your growth and which are distractions. When you sense an emotional reaction to an unproductive thought, you’ll see that thought for what it is—a temporary disturbance. Turbulence.

It’s impossible for us to stop having perturbing thoughts altogether, much like it’s impossible for the Earth’s atmosphere to stop producing tornadoes, hurricanes, and hail. But when we foresee storms ahead, we don’t run towards them. We prepare, seek shelter, and protect ourselves. The same principle can be applied to thought storms. Instead of being swept away by reactive thoughts, we can ground ourselves, stay calm, and weather them with resilience.

V.  

Ponder

5 final thoughts:

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Don’t think too much. You’ll create a problem that wasn’t even there in the first place.

Unknown

I think and think and think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped.

Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Analysis paralysis”

Conventional wisdom