02. How to stop overthinking

The Overthinker's Escape: Unlocking Inner Peace Through Mindful Pauses

Have you ever felt paralyzed from acting on something you want to do? This client had it all—a successful career and a good life. But he had been stuck overthinking about starting his own business for five long years. What was holding him back?

Our minds can betray us, working hard to anticipate potential pitfalls to protect us from harm. For this client, an underlying anxiety about being judged or failing kept his mind spinning in unproductive loops. Both internal pressures to achieve perfection and external information overload fed the overthinking. The result? Withdrawn, distracted, and missing out on meaningful connections.

The excellent news is that overthinking can be paused through simple techniques for tuning into the physical sensations and emotions accompanying thought patterns. By cultivating self-awareness, you can discover how your mind tries to protect you while working against you. From this place of peace, not anxiety, courage arises to move forward mindfully.

Here's what you'll gain from listening further:

- Awareness of the root causes, both internal and external, that drive overthinking
- Actionable techniques to pause overthinking when it strikes
- An understanding of how the mind attempts to protect you but ends up paralyzing you
- Advice for moving forward with courage after pausing the overthinking
- Strategies to apply the advice to your tendencies to overthink

As Igor reminds us, "You are not at the effect of overthinking. You've paused it. And from the pause comes inner peace and clarity."

Tune in to hear the whole conversation and learn how to stop self-sabotaging so you can take courageous steps toward your goals.

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Transcript

Hey, overthinker, I want to tell you about a client of mine that used to overthink. On paper. He looked successful, and he was successful.

He had a job that he liked. His life was good. But there was that one thing that he wanted to do. He wanted to start his own business. And he kept thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking for five years.

And the thinking, he wanted to do it by himself. And he was stuck, stuck in a way of where to go, how to go, and what would that mean about him? To give you more of a context, here he was working as a marketing director, and he wanted to pursue his own business, but because he was known, he was overthinking. He was thinking about what would other people think if I start my own business and I fail. So he was trying to think for strategies in his head without doing anything for years.

And that haunted him. During meetings, during private events, during his day to day life, he would do the things. He would come to work, he would work. And while he was talking to other people internally, he was questioning himself, what would other people think of me if I start my own business? What will people think of me if I don't succeed?

How can I be already successful before I start? That was one of his major things that kept him overthinking, like how to be successful before being successful. And the big question behind that, and what does this actually mean? That overthinking kept him distant in conversations because he was so consumed in his own head, with his own mind, that he wasn't available for conversations. He was physically present.

He was there. He shared a couple of interactions, and then his overthinking kicked in and his relationships suffered, suffered in a way where he couldn't be present. It was a family dinner. Everything was fine. Everybody was there.

Nothing major has happened. But he would go inside and start thinking about, what would my family think if I become the brand of my business? And he would make conclusions left and right. My father does like publicity, so I shouldn't start a brand, a personal, new brand, where I'm the face of the brand. So then he was solving for that strategy in order how to create a brand without his face, but without actually doing it.

And that lasted for years because he was smart. He didn't want to ask anyone for advice, and that kept him overthinking for years. And why am I so passionate about overthinking? Is because it rubs you from your dreams. It rubs you from the life that you can live.

And on the episode today, we will go into different segments of overthinking. What is causing overthinking. So we have the internal world and the external world. The internal world is what goes on inside of you, what happens within you, how you react to something. The external is the environmental.

So what is happening outside of you? And in this time of age, where we are basically bombarded with information, in this digital world, with choices, our brain is not designed for that. And our brain needs to process more information than it used to. It has more stimulus than it ever had, and that creates overthinking. And your internal world can be the pursuit of doing it right, like doing it perfect.

The question is, to whose standards is it yours? Is it your parents? Is it your teachers? Is it your friends? Is it the society, the pursuit of doing it right, fueled by the pressure, societal pressure, that we see is there, or that we experience is there, and our personal expectation, but of who we need to be and how we need to be.

Because in this digital age of today, everybody can see a lot of things. We are on social. We share information. We see how people are being criticized, bullied, cancelled, humiliated on a big scale. And our mind is very smart sometimes, right?

But the main thing that our mind wants to do, it wants to protect us. It will do all that it can. It will override everything logic, to protect us. So our mind senses something that will cause us to feel a certain way. It will shut down.

It will start to think. It will start to overanalyze into endless cycles of doing it right and basically to avoid it. So it will look for ways of how it can protect you. And the best way that it has to offer is to. Okay, so think about it how you can do this without making a mistake.

Think about it how you can do this without being criticized. Think about it how you can do it so that you can please everyone. Think about it how you can, you know, feel immediately so great about yourself. So your mind is playing a trick on you here. That's very important to understand.

When we think, when you ask yourself, why do we overthink? Why do you overthink? Many of us thinks that it's a habit. It's just the way. How I am.

It's just the way I've always used to overthink things. But it's actually a symptom of underlying issues such as anxiety. Anxiety of you not being good enough. Anxiety of what will people think? What will people say, people will judge me and we don't want to be judged.

Fear of failure, the fear of doing something wrong, the fear of doing it not right or not to a certain extent. So we have a vision most often and a standard that we arbitrarily just put on and say, this is my standard. And there is no room for learning, there is no room for exploration. There is no room for growth. There is no room for evolution or the need for control.

You need to control everything. You want to control how you feel, what you do, how other people perceive you, how they will like you, support you, and a variety of other things. But the main thing it's is causing overthinking is your mind. It's a misguided attempt to protect you from potential harm. Harm in the way of you criticizing yourself, you judging yourself, you doubting yourself or embarrassment by being embarrassed because other people seeing you, not how you want them to see you, where you know everything, where you immediately are successful, where everything that you do is perfect and it's trying to protect you.

So you ask yourself, how do you get out of this? Now I want you to think about a situation that you overthink. You got it? No, I told you, don't overthink it. Think about a situation that you overthink.

I'm going to ask you a couple of questions here. So the first phase of overthinking, what we want to do, we want to pause it. And by pausing it, I mean noticing it. So you have that situation. And if your mind was a room and these thoughts that you have, what would it look like?

What would that room look like? Would that be clean, neat, organized? Is there room in this space? Just be aware of what you notice. Or is it cluttered?

Is it full? Is it messy? Is it dirty? What does this room look like? When you think about that situation, imagine that situation as a room.

What would that room look like? And I always tend to laugh when I think about this because when I had imagined a situation and my room looked like a mess, it looked full. And it is full. I don't know where to look. I don't know how to get into this room.

There are so many things inside of it. It's dusty, papers, you know, piles of papers on my desk. Things are on the floor, you know, really, really a picture in my mind where, where it is messy. So how is it for you? And notice now, what's the feeling that's coming up for you when you look at this?

So just take a moment for yourself. Take a nice breath in and an even nicer breath out.

And just notice how your body is feeling when you look at that image.

Just notice how you are, shoulders are, what is your posture? What's the feeling? What's the sensation that it creates within you? Because your mind can teach you a lot. Our mind gives information.

So what's the information that it's giving you? What's the sense for me right now is like an uncomfortable stiffness. So you could suggest and ask yourself, what's the feeling? What's the sensation? You know, is it warm?

Is it cold? Is it moving? Or is it still, is it tense? Or is it light? Just to give you some language here.

And why the body and mind work is important is because it allows you to pause the overthinking. It allows you for a brief moment of time, to shift your focus on your bodily experience. And it just gives you the information of how you are perceiving it. What is the effect that it has on you. So it provides insight into your emotional and physical sensation that are associated with overthinking, and it's offering you a way of understanding it.

Oh, so when I think, you know, or when I over think it about that, this of is what goes on for me. And that creates or starts to create peace. And that's the second piece of overthinking. The first is to pause it. So I gave you an exact example there.

You could, if you would like a different example, you could also think about thinking about that situation that you overthink, that you stress about. Imagine, imagine the music. What's the soundtrack of your thoughts? Imagine the music that would accompany your thoughts, that situation. What's the genre?

Jazz, r and b, blues, pop, hip hop, techno, electro? What is it and is the sound of that music? Is it quiet, relaxing? Is it hard and loud? Just notice it and notice what is the sensation in your body.

And as you scan your body, I want you to tune in to your body and notice any area of tension that you might feel. You might feel the tension in your hands, so just open up your palms and let them relax. You might feel a tension in your jaw to just open up your mouth a little bit and just relax your jaw and breathe.

Very often for overthinkers, the neck muscles are the first to tighten and the last to relax. So just get your attention to your neck and allow your shoulders to relax.

That's right where your spine, just focus on your spine is, and just allow it to relax a little bit. Lean on something, breathe in to your spine and breathe out. And I want you to just observe the thoughts that you have right now. You don't need to do anything with them. You don't need to classify them, you don't need to judge them.

You just notice them. You just noticing, just like you're noticing clouds in the sky, like a car passing by. So how do you feel now?

That was a little exercise that I wanted to do with you and to experience so that you can equip yourself with tools and ways and how to start helping yourself, how to notice the overthinking and to pause it, and to go in into the body and look into the experience that we have, or that you have while thinking about it. That creates power, that creates knowledge, and that creates an agency for you to decide, what am I going to do with this? You are not at the effect of overthinking. You've paused it. And from the pause comes peace.

Peace in that sense, openness, room for exploration, room to have a clear mind. A clear mind is not a mind without any thoughts. It's your experience while you're having a different thought. But only then we go into cultivating IV Coaching and taking action. And why that is important is because I want you to take and cultivate the IV Coaching from a point of peace, not anxiety, not agitation.

And now think about the situation that you had that you overthink and ask yourself, if I was IV Coachingous right here, right now, how would I look at this situation? How would I approach this situation? If I can hear IV Coaching calling me loud and clear? What is it telling me to do? How is it telling me to behave and just see how that feels for you while you're answering those questions?

What is the bodily reaction that you have? What is the impact that it has on you? What's the information that your body is telling you, giving you, allowing you to experience yourself and cultivating the IV Coaching to create the things that you want for yourself. A more brave, a more honest, a more straightforward person and life experience.

And I want to hear about your experience. You can find me on Instagram under my name, Igor Belushic. Send me a DM and let me know where you are on the journey of overthinking. And if you want to take this work further, I'm just a call away. I want you to subscribe, share the podcast and engage on social media.

One last thing. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share the podcast with someone you like, leave a review and tag me on social media with your journey. Have a beautiful day. Bye.