If overthinking is making your life hell, and you are one of the rare people who are actually willing to take action and do something about it, then you’ve come to the right place.

If you see yourself as:

• An anxious person

• An over-analyser

• A catastrophiser

• A ruminator

• A worrier

You don’t have to live this way all your life.

Yes, I know first-hand how debilitating it can be when you can’t stop having these obsessive negative thoughts filling your mind.

BUT:

By the end of this week’s newsletter, you will have the tools you need to quiet your mind and end the cycle of overthinking that has been ruining your life, and wasting your precious and limited time on this planet.

Before you doubt whether this is even possible:

Just know, I came from rock bottom, before I learned to properly manage my mental health and my terrible habit of overthinking.

I suffered through anxiety and depression from a young age, and for many years, so I know what it’s like to have seemingly thousands of negative thoughts rushing around your brain that you want to switch off, but can’t because no one teaches us how to.

And no, you can’t ‘think your way out’ of overthinking, like most people try to do.

Don’t worry, I will show you exactly how to fix this.

But first, we need to unpack what’s really going on.

Why does overthinking happen in the first place?

Let’s dive in.

The habit of overthinking is a defence mechanism.

When you have a history of emotional trauma, which most people do, you develop this bad habit to try and protect yourself from future scenarios where you could get hurt again.

Put simply, overthinking is dwelling on things that are out of your control. Usually past or future scenarios which exist only in your imagination.

This is where things get crazy…

Dwelling on these negative scenarios, or ‘mini-movies’ in our minds, encourages our subconscious mind to produce even more of them.

This is because our subconscious mind is built to give us more ideas related to whatever we were already focused on.

In other words, it multiplies and remixes your most common thoughts and mental images.

This will be important later.

Because of this subconscious mechanism, overthinking compounds each time we overthink and with each additional problem we focus on.

Each different problem in our lives we remind ourselves of worsens our emotional state and makes the other problems seem even worse and then it gets completely overwhelming:

Some thoughts that have personally caused me pain are ones like:

• ‘My life is going to be a failure’

• ‘How am I going to pay the bills?’

• ‘Is my partner falling out of love with me?’

• ‘I can’t find time to go to the gym anymore so now I look like sh*t’.

• ‘I’m putting all of this time into my career but it’s never going to work out!’

Thoughts like these take on a whole new life once we start focusing on them and giving them energy.

We believe every single one and take them so seriously, which is a fatal mistake.

But before we know it, we’re making up worst-case scenarios of how our life will turn out and losing all hope for the future.

However, there are psychological hacks to help you overcome this problem, which we will get to in just a second.

But first I want you to consider the impact this is having on your life.

Because in order to take action from what you learn today, you need to realise the path your life is going down if you don’t change.

Overthinking leads to:

• Relationships falling apart and dissolving

• Your health going to sh*t because you eat junk food and scroll all day to cope

• Being unable to focus and make progress towards anything that matters to you

• A general feeling of miserable anxiousness

But what about the benefits of a life without overthinking?

• Increased happiness and energy

• More peaceful and fulfilling relationships

• Relief from the intense stress and overwhelm

• More able to focus on what is important to you

In just a minute, I’ll show you how to tie it all together into a simple, actionable plan.

But most people who overthink will say something along the lines of ‘it’s just who I am’, ‘my brain works differently to other peoples’, ‘nothing will work for me’.

These are nothing more than limiting beliefs!

And beliefs are nothing more than thoughts you choose to keep thinking and these can be changed.

Seriously. Take any of your limiting beliefs and ask yourself:

• Can I absolutely know for a fact that this is 100% true? Or is it just a belief?

• What would life be like if I had a different, more beneficial belief?

• How different would life be if believed it would be possible to change my beliefs?

You can change.

This is a fact.

Stop getting in your own way.

Let’s break down how to do this.

The Mental Garden Technique:

Step 1: Imagine your mind is like a garden.

• A fertile garden left untended without proper maintenance becomes overgrown with weeds.

• The weeds fill every inch of space and cover up the beauty of the garden.

• The pretty flowers disappear.

  • An active mind not properly maintained can overflow with thoughts you don’t want.

  • The negative thoughts multiply and fill your mind.

  • Positive thoughts become hard to find.

With this metaphor in mind, we are going to clear out the weeds in the garden of our mind and help the flowers grow.

Step 2: Clear out the weeds.

Right now if you are overthinking a lot or you often go through phases where you overthink a lot and can’t seem to control it, you need understand that these thoughts are there to tell you something.

This is your subconscious trying to tell you that you need to address a problem.

You have a few options here:

• The obvious one: (but not always possible) is to address the problem e.g. stop thinking about asking the girl on a date and go and do it; stop stressing about being broke and go and make more money.

• The previous is not always a quick fix: another option, which is non-essential, but I would still recommend to everyone at some point in their life, is therapy. To help you clear emotional blockages so that problems in your life no longer affect you on such a deep emotional level.

• HOWEVER, the purpose of this particular newsletter is not to convince you to get therapy, but to give you practical tools you can use yourself: we can process the blocked emotions and clear out our mind using a journalling technique.

  • At the moment your head is full of thoughts (the weeds). To clear them out and make your mind free again, we need to get the words out of your head and onto the page.

  • To do this get a piece of paper and a pen or your notes app on your phone and at the top, write down the topic or topics of what you are overthinking about.

  • Now begin writing down all of your thoughts and concerns until it literally feels like your hand is going to fall off.

  • Write until every last negative thought, worry or concern is out on the page and your mind is completely empty (this could take you a while but it is so worth it).

  • Now that you have processed and talked through your worries, your mind (the garden will be much clearer). You have had too many tabs open in your mind but now you have closed them all.

Step 3: Help the flowers grow.

If we take flowers to be positive thoughts, feeling and mental images, now we want to multiply them and help them grow.

Remember when I said earlier that our subconscious mind tends to multiply and create thoughts that are related to the thoughts we have been focusing on most often - we are going to use that to our advantage.

To do this:

• Meditate - not just in the normal sense of focusing on your breath. I mean focus and meditate on positive and uplifting thoughts and mental images.

• If we focus on what we want. Things like: happiness, health, wealth and love, our thoughts will reflect that. You will find that positive ones multiply and become more common (we are watering the flowers and planting more).

  • As your thoughts and emotions are inseparably linked, if your thoughts are more positive, your emotions will become more positive, and these positive emotions will create more positive thoughts, and before you know it you have created a positive cycle.

  • You are now in a state of excitement, not fear.

• In a practical sense to do this you need to spend about 5 minutes, 2 or 3 times a day doing positive visualisations in your mind.

  • Imagine mini-movies of yourself laughing and enjoying life, feeling whole and perfect, exactly as you are.

  • Repeat this process as often as you can and you will see results.

  • Whether you realised it or not, you used the same process to start your negative overthinking in the first place.

If you actually implement what we have covered today, you have everything you need to solve your problem of overthinking.

If you found this valuable but feel as though you would benefit from more 1-on-1 guidance, click here to book a session with me: https://stan.store/masonsmeditations

Thank you for reading, I appreciate your time.