It seems that many of us have a tendency to overthink things and dwell on thoughts like 'what if?' and all of the would have, could have, and should haves. It's an interesting problem and one that I cannot downplay the significance of, but is also one that we can learn to manage through mindfulness. It's interesting that we can hear things over and over again and not really accept the wisdom in them until they finally click into place in our minds. I find this problem also aligns pretty heavily with addiction and compulsive behavioral issues, and today I'll discuss my perspective of what causes this and what I do to keep my own overthinking in check.
The first and most fundamental thing that I must stress is that you cannot force thoughts from your mind as that in turn just creates more thoughts. Metaphorically, the only way to get out of a forest is to go through the trees. We have to first accept the thoughts that we are overthinking about for what they are and then determine if they are rational or irrational thought patterns. It's actually part of our survival mechanisms that we as a species have developed over time and accepting them as that and just a natural response is as good a place to start as any. Once we have accepted that we have thoughts and are okay with that fact it's time to accept the things we cannot change and change the things we can.
It's interesting that I heard that exact statement and the Serenity Prayer many times in my journey to sobriety. I've tried to explain to people that addiction to a substance is merely a symptom of actually being an addict and the substance dependency or compulsive behavior is used more or less as an excuse for the addict. Believe it or not, I've seen people get addicted to recovery and fail to ever address their own personal issues, and yes, for a period of time I was one of them. I've written posts in the past that at the core of all of my compulsive issues was a desire for control and the only thing I could really control was how I escaped from my own obsessive negative thought patterns. The problem I ran into is that at some point there is a limit to what other people will allow, our bodies can handle, or what we can get away with, and in the end, we are forced to face the thing we have been running from, which is ourselves. The only alternative that I've found is to die before making the connection.
From this mindset, it seems that we often isolate and dwell in our own negative thought patterns. We can blame other people, society, or whatever we want for the isolation, but ultimately it's about our own inability to cope with our own thoughts. This feeling of being stuck with no way out and being unlovable is a sort of analysis paralysis from my perspective. We've basically worked ourselves into a corner with the world pinning us down and no means to fight back. Every outreached hand feels like a slap in the face or just our next fix and even the guilt of that starts weighing into our negative thought patterns. So how do we break the cycle of our own negative thought patterns and compulsive behaviors to stop the cycle of self harm and isolation? I purpose we stop identifying ourselves as the negative thought patterns or behaviors and start looking at ourselves as the one allowing them. We are not the thought any more than we are the behavior.
I can't say there is any one size fits all solution to overthinking, but what I can do is tell you how I've managed to get and keep my own emotions and thoughts in check. I started with meditation and just taking dedicated time to think about my issues one at a time. Acknowledging that each of these thoughts is just our own way of telling ourselves we need to change something is the first step. The second step that I did was to start adjusting the irrational thoughts and shifting them into more rational lines of thought. "I'm a worthless piece of shit because I want to get high," changes to something positive like, "I'm not a worthless piece of shit because I didn't get high today." Over time addressing each thought one by one and tracing them back to the source of my own negative thoughts allowed me to work through them and become mindful of my own habit to assume things and develop unrealistic expectations of reality and my own inability to actually listen to anyone else.
Over time and with practice, I found myself at a state of addressing the negative thoughts as I came to have them. All of the years of built up negative thoughts that I had allowed to persist and all of the assumptions that I allowed to flood my mind and block out anything that anyone else had to say were gone because I had already worked through them. The compulsive need to escape no longer exists when there is nothing inside of our own heads to run away from and the world in general starts feeling like a much better place. I was then able to actively listen and engage in conversations without just focusing on my own assumptions of another person's intentions and beliefs. I don't think this problem is rooted in addiction or compulsive behaviors and to treat those things is much like giving someone with bronchitis a cough drop. While relieving the symptoms is important for our own comfort, the core "illness" or problem isn't going to be fixed without addressing it directly. I can't promise this method works for anyone else, but my hope is that someone finds this post useful in starting the process for themselves. Namaste.