Hey man,
Coincidentally enough, I'm doing the exact same thing right now -- I'm removing limiting mentalities, including the most evil of them all, overthinking. I overthink things so much that it becomes painful; it paralyzes me, preventing me from doing anything. I've been like this my whole life, but I'm currently fighting it to the best of my abilities, which has taught me quite a lot. So, as someone with an insider's perspective on its crippling effects, here are my thoughts:
1. Accept it as a part of you, while knowing you can change it.
pks391 said:
If i can learn to control my overthinking, i could use that large amount of brainpower to something far more useful. Some times i feel that i should overthink. My main goal is to learn to consciously control when to overthink. (i.e. Overthinking only when its needed)
As evidenced by what you said, you're having no trouble doing this. After all, it is a fundamental aspect of your brain, since every single thought you have runs through the "overthinking" filter. The goal is keeping the positive effects of overthinking (being insightful and noticing things most don't) and limiting the negative ones (annoying yourself with your constant thoughts and paralyzing yourself in thought).
2. Keep yourself busy with things you enjoy.
My overthinking gets much worse whenever I have a lot of free time. But when I'm busy, I keep my mind on my work or activities. I'm not saying to completely ignore your thoughts by burying yourself in work; instead, find a happy medium. This way, if you start overthinking things, you can do these activities to take your mind off it, and if you are active for long periods of time, you can look forward to having down time where you can think again.
3. If you're ever in a social situation and you start overthinking something, relax.
Yes, this is way easier said than done. But I've noticed that, the more I overthink things during a social situation, the worse I behave. When this happens, my body tenses up because I want everything to go perfectly, and my speech and actions become more forced. Everything goes up in smoke.
So if this starts happening, I force myself to relax and loosen up my body. I pretend like I'm talking to close friends.
4. Only focus on a few things at a time.
When starting off with my self-improvement, I first focused on having a sexy walk, having confident body language, and staying very motionless when sitting. That was it. When I got these down, I focused on having powerful eye contact, making my voice deep, and speaking slowly. Then I got these down, and worked on a few more things. And so on.
You may be more advanced than me, and have long ago established your fundamentals, but the basic concepts still apply. As mentioned above, the more things I'm thinking about during an interaction, the worse the conversation becomes. My most awkward interactions have come when I'm juggling advanced conversational skills, unpracticed techniques, and the like.
In other words, we overthink things when we are inexperienced.
I no longer have to think about my basic fundamentals, since I've already got them down, but I still have to think about things like socializing, since I'm not yet comfortable with them.
So the fact that you're studying peoples' reactions means it's something that still puzzles you. But once you have more and more experience with their reactions, you'll no longer have to think about them, since reading them will be second nature by then.
In the meantime, I'd recommend focusing solely on basic conversational skills and the reactions these give you. With a very specific focus like this, you can study reactions until you no longer overthink them.
Of course, you have to avoid perfectionism; this is a trap I keep reminding myself to avoid. In other words, don't focus only on reading people's reactions for one year straight until you know literally everything there is to know about reactions, and only then move on to other aspects of socializing. Mastering stuff like that will take years. The goal is to get proficient enough at something where you've stopped overthinking it, even though you may not have mastered it yet. From all I've learned from reading GC, moderately experienced social artists are at this stage -- they generally understand everything about socializing, and they don't stress about it. But they are not masters because they haven't fully mastered anything yet.
5. Start speaking and writing as concisely as possible.
This is minor, but it helps. Our thoughts manifest themselves in how we write and speak, so cutting down on these will help focus our thoughts.
Whenever texting or writing something, cut it down to the bare concepts and wording. For example, if your sentence is:
"Hey Joe, I got a fever while on my skiing trip last week, so I'm feeling a bit under the weather at the moment. Can you do me a solid and pick up my groceries for me this time?"
Make it more concise. Cut all the fluff and useless information.
"Joe, I'm a bit sick, would you mind grabbing my groceries?"
While speaking, do the same -- cut out the filler and leave the bare concepts. But speaking this way takes much more effort, so I'd recommend doing it while writing first.
6. Practice making quick decisions, and stick with these decisions.
Let's say your roommate asks you to drive him to the grocery store to get milk. The store closes in 15 minutes. You need milk for the morning, but you're also very tired.
To people who overthink, situations like these can be difficult. "Should I get milk? If I don't, I won't have any in the morning. So then I'd have to run to the store right after waking up, which would be painful. But I'm tired enough as it is right now. Or maybe I could skip breakfast tomorrow?"
And by the time you decide, the store is closed.
So, anytime small decisions are required of you, quickly weigh the possibilities in your head, and make a snap decision. Of course, this won't work for more complicated matters, but you can use it more and more over time. After training your brain to make small decisions quickly, you'll start doing it for slightly bigger decisions too, like choosing to talk to a girl even if you're not feeling totally up to it.
And when you make the decision, stick with it, and don't second guess yourself. Don't drive to the store then say, "On second thought, I'll do it tomorrow." And don't say, "I made the wrong choice, what was I thinking?" You didn't make the right or wrong choice, you simply made a choice. Afterwards, if you stillregret it ("I should have stayed home; I was ready to fall asleep"), don't blame yourself for making the decision. Just file the result away for future reference when making other decisions.
7. Teach yourself to act, rather than wait.
This ties in with #6. Although there are no "right" or "wrong" decisions, as I mentioned above, you should prioritize action over inaction. If we overthink whether or not we should do something, we get so caught up in our thoughts that we take the safe route and do nothing. But actually doing things is often the better option. To paraphrase the famous saying: on our death beds, we don't regret the things we
did do, we regret the things we
didn't do.
Going to the grocery at night might be a pain... but if you don't go, you'll regret it in the morning, when you do have to go.
You might be sick, and not want to go to a concert... but what will you remember a month later? Spending the night sick at home, or being at a concert?
You may not want to talk to a girl... but what do you have to lose? Sure, she could reject you, but she could also be the most wonderful girl you've ever met.
Inaction feels good at first, but the feeling only lasts for a short while. Action may be tougher, but it is infinitely more worth it in the end.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule -- if you've just pulled two all-nighters in a row, you're going to go to the store in the morning, and if you've been bed-ridden for a week with an illness, you're going to skip the concert. And obviously, no big decisions should be made on whims.
But in general, this is a huge way to stop overthinking. Instead of worrying about all the possible outcomes of a situation or wondering how to deal with them, you plunge yourself in head-first, giving you experiences you otherwise would not have had. This helps you learn things faster, which makes you more comfortable in different situations, which stops you from overthinking these situations. And there will always be time after the fact to reflect.
8. Learn to accept disorganization, imperfection, and being uncomfortable.
Personally, I overthink things because I want to organize the world, so to speak -- I want to make sense of everything and mentally organize it in a straight-forward, logically way.
However, after all my years of trying to organize everything, there is still far, far more disorder and imperfection than order and perfection, both in my life, and in the world. It's tough to think about, but it's a fact of life that must be accepted. Finding perfection is impossible.
Furthermore, I have to accept my discomfort in certain situations. I'm most at peace when everything feels organized... the only problem is, this has never happened. So in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking of more ways to make things organized, making me very preoccupied with the future, hindering my ability to think clearly in the present.
I'm guessing you're probably the same in many ways -- you want to make sense of people, relationships, everything. Some of us are just built like that. We have to accept the imperfection in ourselves and the world and learn to enjoy the present for what it is, even if it isn't completely organized. And this is hard to do, but our lives will never be completely organized, so it's pointless to try to make them so.
9. If you have any ocd-like tendencies, gradually force yourself to cope with them.
You may not be like this, but ocd-like behaviors can also be a result of overthinking.
Here's a personal example: I've always been obsessed with saving power. This means that, whenever I leave a room, my preference is to turn off my lights, computer screen and speakers, keyboard, and mouse, even if I'm leaving the room for 30 seconds. And I'm not even an eco-freak. My logic used to be, "Every little bit counts, and I don't want to waste any electricity. Also, I don't want to waste my family's money, since turning off devices will cut down costs on the electric bill..." and so on. But this got super annoying. So I began leaving everything on, then left the room for 30 seconds. I got comfortable with this, then did it for a minute. And so on.
If anything like this troubles you, I'd recommend doing the same.
10. Research thinking errors.
There are a ton of places online (like Wikipedia) where you can read about basic errors we often make while thinking.
In fact, here's a link to 10 right here:
http://powerstates.com/10-cognitive-thinking-errors/ (And there are more errors than this if you search the web.)
I make many of these errors myself, and a lot of them are roots behind overthinking. Learning what they are is a huge help in fighting them.
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That's everything I can think of for now; I'll add more tips if they occur to me. In the meantime, can you specify a little more about your overthinking? Do you want to organize everything or have any ocd tendencies? Do you make tons of spreadsheets and use lots of post-it notes? Do you have any creative outlets to let out your thoughts? Let me know; stuff like this is very interesting to me.
Know that you're not the only one struggling with this -- I have to constantly remind myself to do all of the things I listed above. And don't expect perfection; this won't be solved overnight.
