TRANSCRIPT
Some months back, someone reached out to me via YouTube and asked that I make a video on overthinking—how to solve this problem of overthinking. I thought about it and liked the idea. I thought about it more, and I couldn’t come up with something that I felt would really be helpful. So, I thought about it some more, and I would mix some of my ideas because I didn’t feel it was quite good enough. I thought about it more, and it’s been nagging at me for quite a while—several months.
Then, at a certain point, I realized I’m overthinking this video, and it’s not helping. That’s why it’s not working. Then I thought, “Daniel, you know what? The real answer that I thought of, the real solution for overthinking…” I think of this when I was a therapist. I had many clients who had this problem of overthinking, and it was very hard to help them by just talking and thinking through the problem. It was like meeting overthinking with more thinking, and that’s what a lot of people actually wanted. I think they wanted to even use the therapy to overthink the problem of overthinking.
It was like the real answer that I felt inside myself then, and I thought immediately—actually, to be honest, deep down in my gut—when this person suggested I make a video on overthinking, was that the solution for overthinking is action or intuition. Something just in a way different from thinking, deeper than thinking.
So, when I thought about making this video, I thought, “You know, I’m going to try to put that into action, manifest it here.” I’m just going to press start and talk about my overthinking problem in relation to making this video and how I solved it. Part of how I solved it was to say, “Daniel, you know, have a bit more faith in yourself. Have a little bit more trust in yourself and be willing to press the start button on the camera and just talk.” This being an action, and don’t think so much—almost like bypass the thinking process.
Another thing that came to my mind right before I made this video was that there are different ways to know truth. One of the ways is thinking. You can find truth through thinking, through the intellect, through using the logic of the intellect to know truth. But that’s not the only way, and the other thing is sometimes it’s not the best way. It’s one way, but I think when people overthink things—when I overthink things, when I have gotten stuck in overthinking in my life—it’s like actually part of the overthinking problem is that the truth is not being honed in on. Or if it is, for some reason, at some deeper level, the person doesn’t want to see what the answer is. The answer is too scary or too painful.
Sometimes there’s a lot of debate between, “Well, is this right or is this right?” What I’ve seen sometimes is when people have presented, “Is this right or is this right?” sometimes both answers they’re debating are kind of both wrong or, strangely enough, they’re both right, and they’re both scary. It’s like, “Well, which is more right?” That can get into the whole thing about the three P’s: perfectionism and procrastination, which both lead to paralysis. People can be so stuck in this perfectionism thing—”I have to choose the perfect answer,” where actually both might be good enough.
So then I think, “Well, what’s a different answer? What kind of action needs to be taken?” For me, the other way is to know truth through intuition. What I’ve seen sometimes is, especially as I’m more healed in myself, more centered in the core of me, less caught up in my traumas or less caught up in dissociation, when I’ve resolved more of the blocks inside of myself that my traumas put in place, my intuition became stronger. It was just a stronger, quick electrical connection between my consciousness and the gut level of truth inside of me. That was something that I could access that some people actually have a very hard time accessing. I think a lot of times because they are so blocked, so dissociated, so split off from who they really are.
But I know for me that has really helped me. That’s what helped me. Now, the little voice of intuition said, “Daniel, make the video. Just do it. Talk. Don’t think so much. Go for it now.” In a way, I went from beneath the area of my head into my gut and spoken, and I felt that that has been a very helpful thing for me when I get stuck in overthinking.
I remember having talked about this with many people who were stuck in overthinking. The problem is most of them were rather cut off from their intuition, and that gets into a different area—a different way in which a human being can know truth, and that is through the emotions, through our feelings. We can actually know truth through our feelings, but much more easily if we have access to our feelings. That’s another problem I’ve seen. People who are very traumatized often are quite split off from their feelings, or those feelings that they are still connected to can be fairly distorted sometimes because they can be mixed up by trauma.
For instance, some people can still have some deep connection with their anger, but a lot of times their anger is still connected with a lot of unresolved trauma. So their anger can, in a way, be split off, can shoot out, can vomit out in different ways, can actually be blaming people who may not actually be responsible for having caused their anger in the first place. So it can be confusing.
What I’ve seen sometimes is that people who can get very stuck in overthinking can, first of all, be disconnected with a lot of their feelings. Those remaining feelings that they have, they might have learned along the way that those feelings don’t necessarily lead them toward making the best choices by and large because the feelings can still be rather distorted or, you know, be projected out in uncomfortable ways that don’t make life better.
So what do I say to someone in that situation that says, “But my feelings only make my life worse, and that’s why I rely on my thinking so much more?” Because a lot of times what I’ve seen is when people get very traumatized, sometimes their last refuge—their last safe refuge—is their thoughts. Yet their thoughts can still be distorted sometimes.
I guess what this brings me to is maybe it’s not the time to make a decision about whatever the problem is that the person is trying to overthink. Maybe it’s time to take a different tack completely. That’s when I think it’s a time for engaging more in the internal healing process, working out one’s own traumas to begin to unravel one’s feelings, to open the door to one’s deeper sense of intuition. Maybe to put one’s thoughts on hold or to put one’s thoughts in a different direction—toward healing, toward looking at one’s history, to begin to explore one’s traumas.
I think a lot of times when people are trying to solve their external problems before they have solved a lot of their internal problems, they get confused. They get stuck. Their external problems become insurmountable because the internal problems really are the priority. It’s terrifying to face those internal problems. I think sometimes getting stuck in overthinking can be a nice big—in a way comfortable—even as uncomfortable as overthinking can be, it’s more comfortable than facing the horror within.
So that’s what I think I would say. That would be my big answer for overthinking: change course, take a pause, press stop for a while, restart, look within, begin self-therapy. Or if one is already engaged in self-therapy, put more energy into it. Begin to journal, take distance from one’s family of origin, stop using external substances, try being celibate for a while, try to take a pause, look at better self-care, look at one’s friendships.
I really think, though, the journaling—for me, that was such a key in developing a new relationship with myself, a new level of honesty. I wasn’t allowed to be honest in my outside life, in my external relationships. My family system, my world I lived in, wasn’t a world that allowed honesty, that encouraged honesty, that respected honesty. So I needed to go…
Into myself in a much more private world, and that was really the key for the beginning of my self-therapeutic process, my self-exploratory process, to really begin to exhume and bring up all this awful stuff from my past to take distance from.
I needed to get away from my family, get away from my town. These things gave me much more liberty to have perspective on my life. I think that’s part of the big problem with overthinking; it’s a loss of perspective. It’s like a very limited palette for being able to solve one’s own problems intellectually and with distance.
A simple, even sometimes for me nowadays, if I overthink, one way to get perspective, one way I can do the simplest form of self-therapy, is go take a walk for an hour or two. Literally just go and walk, sometimes walk even fast so my blood goes, so I sweat a little bit. What I find is after just a couple of hours of walking, it’s like I get perspective on my life. I get perspective on my stuck little existence. My thoughts literally are different.
So that’s where I think to change gears when overthinking has happened, to pull away. Okay, exercising is just a very short-term quick solution, but I think the self-therapeutic process is the bigger solution. That’s the exercise of the deeper parts of the soul, the deeper muscles of one’s emotions.
For me, getting away for years from my family of origin, especially from my parents, to really distance myself from their thoughts, from their intrusions, from their conceptions of me, from the town where I grew up, from the world in which I was raised and screwed up, to really develop new friendships, to find people who were healthier to be around, healthier conversations, not those same old screwed up patterns that I was raised with. All these things allowed me to get away from a lot of the stuck, paralyzed, unhealthy thought patterns that I was raised to live in.
The more that I did that, the more that I found actually that my thoughts became healthier, that my thoughts became more connected with healthy solutions that led to healthy actions, healthy simple actions that I didn’t need to think and think and think so much. I could actually just think a little bit, come up with a solution, and then do it.
And then also, the healthier I became, the more in a way I could check my own work through alternative means. It’s like I remember when we did math problems when I was a kid, and we had to show our work. What I learned is that I could sometimes solve a math problem very quickly without even hardly thinking at all, through intuition. Then I had to show my work, like by showing the thought behind it, and I could do it, but it was almost like a separate process.
Well, I think in a way using our different human capacities for knowing truth are different ways to figure out if the answers we come up with are healthy. So, for instance, I can think my way through a problem and come up with a solution to that problem, and then I can check my feelings. I can go through all the logic of my feelings and see how my feelings line up with solving this problem and see if the solution to my problem on an emotional level lines up and is parallel to or overlaps or syncs with the intellectual solution to the problem.
Then I can go with the third way, just simply intuitively say, “What’s the answer to this?” Boom! And just sometimes an answer comes to my mind and see, does this line up? If these three different ways to know truth do not line up, I can study that, say, “Why not? What’s wrong? Is something wrong? Is my intuition off? Are my feelings off? Are my thoughts off?” This can also help me with the problem of overthinking.
So to get back to this video, I think I did it. I think I actually said what I really wanted to say here. All those months of trying to overthink how will I intellectually solve this problem, the real solution for me was to go within, to trust myself a little more, to trust the consequences of my healing process, and just to press the start button and go.