Every time I notice I’m getting into a rabbit hole of thinking, I tell myself, “Here is my worry-maker announcing its arrival..” and then move on with my day, just like nothing has bothered my mind ..” .. just kidding!!!!

When catching a thought that could lead me to an overthinking hole….

• What If I cannot handle what happens?
• If that were to happen, I would never be able to be okay with myself
• I don’t recall exactly what I said, and now I cannot let it go. I need to know what I said.
• I won’t make it.
• Can’t stop thinking of the time in which I made a mistake.
• What – if
• It’s my responsibility to make sure things go well.
• If I’m thinking a lot about it, it means it’s important.
• If I don’t know all options, I cannot move forward with my decision

I noticed a recurring theme: a push to overthink, to dwell, to spend hours and hours solving this thinking problem, and with it, to play-it-safe. Who doesn’t play-it-safe? And yet, all those overthinking strategies – playing-it-safe moves as I call them – can lead us to live in our head while life passes by in front of us.

Not our fault. We’re prone to overthinking by design, because of evolution. But, when going along with those urges, then . . . we are at the mercy of our overthinking patterns.

You can get unstuck from overthinking patterns

So far, you have learned what makes overthinking worse, to recognize the types of overthinking you’re prone to, to watch your mind and its minding, to bring yourself back to the life you’re missing when engaging in overthinking patterns, and to observe those thinking patterns without getting swept away by them.

Those micro-skills help. And, you and I know that making a shift comes with urges to go back to the old behaviors, to the old ways of responding to thinking with more thinking; to the behaviors that have been reinforced hundreds of times.

Treat those urges to overthink with kindness

Acknowledge your urge for overthinking, respond to it with kindness and caring. There are hundreds of definitions of self-compassion; sometimes people think about it like flowers and butterflies. But, putting it simple self-compassion is:

• Treating yourself with kindness, gentleness, and caring.
• A real-time decision you make without attachment to any outcome
• A choice you make to make room for uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, urges, and sensations.

Sometimes people decide to fight those urges to overthink.. and while those thinking responses work for a little bit, it’s a matter of time the mind comes up with another thought that pulls into a rabbit hole of thinking. We’re never going to win our minds by responding to thinking with more thinking.

But recognizing that we’re struggling, that we’re getting stuck with a pull to dwell on our thoughts and live in our head, and respond to those moments of stuckness with caring is much more courageous.

One compassionate action

When noticing the urge to overthink – whether you’re driving, eating a piece of dark chocolate, drinking a glass of scotch, or enjoying a meal with your partner – take a deep breath, adjust your posture, maybe lift up your shoulders, and then tell yourself something along the lines of “I’m struggling right now, this is hard.”

The key to practicing self-compassion is to acknowledge that you are struggling in those moments with a push to jump into overthinking land . . .  and that you make a decision to respond yourself with kindness and with gentleness.  If your mind were to be an overprotective friend of yours – so you don’t make a fool of yourself – how would you respond? Perhaps you will say things like, “easy my friend, let’s go easy with those urges .. I get it, this is hard . . . and let’s just be gentle . . . we don’t need to jump into thinking land right now . . . ”

When you learn to face those urges for overthinking with gentleness, you also learn to move from living in your head to living in the present, because you are not busy any longer, trying to control your mind or responding to thinking with more thinking.