You Don’t Need to Calm Down. Your Brain Needs a Different Job.

If you’re an overthinker, you’ve probably been told to calm down, think more positively, or learn to meditate. I don’t think that’s what’s missing. Your brain is a workhorse. It wants to work, and if you don’t give it something to do, it’s going to go find problems. And it will always find them.

In this episode I talk about why your survival brain goes looking for danger when there isn’t any real danger in your day-to-day life, and how it ends up locking onto the dirty look, the text your kids didn’t answer, the thing you said 20 years ago, and every what-if about the future. I talk about why taking everything off your plate isn’t the answer, and the counterintuitive approach I use with my clients instead: giving your brain a hard job to do that has nothing to do with anything.

I also share a conversation I had with my husband about the fact that some people don’t have a voice in their head. He doesn’t. He was shocked to find out that some of us have a narrator running all day long. And I talk about why I lift heavy, why I figure skate as an adult, and why I’m learning to play the guitar this fall.

Key Takeaways:

Your brain is built to look for danger, and when it can’t find real danger, it creates problems to solve.

There is no version of taking everything off your plate. The complexity in your life is also the richness of your life.

Seeing more bad news doesn’t mean the world is more dangerous. It means your input has gone up.

You don’t need to think the right thing. You need to give your brain a better job to do.

A hard job that has nothing to do with your kids, your husband, or your work lets your brain put everything else down for a while.

When your brain gets that rest, you’re more regulated and you have more logic available to deal with the real problem.

I’m teaching a live class every week called Stop Overthinking, where I walk you through this along with every other piece of the process for stopping that anxious looping. Go to amandahess.ca/overthink to register. Come live if you can, you’ll get the most out of it. If you can’t, you’ll get the recording. And this week, pick one hard thing that has nothing to do with anything, and go do it.

Links referenced in this episode:

https://amandahess.ca/overthink