Caught up in overthinking and over-feeling?

How do we get into that mode for overthinking and over-feeling? When we have a thought that leads to an emotion, like anxiety or sadness, frustration or disappointment, it’s easy to struggle in finding a way out. Our minds become ever-more busy, ever more in overthinking and over-feeling mode, in an attempt to lift our mood.

Yet, it’s not the mood as such that’s the problem, it’s the effort of trying to get out of our negative thinking that can make us feel worse. All that busyness going on in our heads, that’s what’s doing the damage. And that’s very inefficient, the more you struggle, the harder it gets.

It’s like adding custard powder to water, the more vigorously you stir, the stiffer the mixture gets. If you stir slowly, it’s easy, the mixture feels runny.

And when we’re in that difficult state, we start to ask, why? And the feelings get more and more vague, because we’ve mixed in so many different emotions, limiting beliefs, old emotions and old memories. It only takes the slightest thing, like a little puff of wind, and the whole storm comes in.

So, you question yourself more and more. In maintaining the overthinking and over-feeling, you’re exhausted.

Let’s just think for one moment what we’re doing. We’re actually trying to do, is problem solve our emotions. Our minds are really good at problem solving, but you can’t ‘solve’ an emotion (they aren’t necessarily that logical!), you have to use a different type of mentality. We’re in the wrong kind of thought mode. We’re in a ‘doing’ mode inside our heads. We need to be in a ‘being’ mode. Just be!

Some examples of this would be

• Going for a walk. 10-20 minutes of different air, where you are not allowed to think about your thinking(!), but can only observe and run a little commentary in your head about what you can see/feel/hear
• Sitting or walking in nature. We were designed for nature and going into the park or countryside can help immensely
• Read – research has shown that light reading for 6 minutes can clear the head wonderfully
• Visualisation or mindfulness – find recordings you like on You Tube or click here

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