Insights Into Teens

Insights Into Teens: Episode 175 “Overcoming Overthinking”

Madison and Joseph Whalen Season 5 Episode 175

Have you ever found yourself falling down a negative spiral where it feels as if your brain won't shut off? 

This is what overthinking can feel like. 

Many of us get in our own way by overthinking. 

This can look like: 

  • worrying about things you can't control
  • delaying decisions to keep researching options
  • dwelling on your shortcomings
  • or maybe trying to predict other people's feelings or actions.

Sound familiar? Don't worry, in this episode of Insights Into teens we’ll discuss the tools, strategies, and activities to help you let go of overthinking so you can become calmer, happier, and overall more productive.


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Insightful podcasts by informative host for insights into things to a podcast network. And welcome to Insights into Teens, a podcast series exploring the issues and challenges of today's youth. Your hosts are Joseph and Madison Whalen, a father and daughter team making their way through the challenges of the teenage years. Welcome to Insights into Teens. This is episode 175 Overcoming Overthinking. I'm your host, Joseph Whalen, and my contemplated and considerate co-host, Madison. Hi, everyone. How you doing today, Matty? I'm doing all right. How about you? I'm doing okay. Doing okay. We're back in for a podcast this week. We were all we were going to do one last week, but we had a string of thunderstorms come through the two days that we would normally shoot. And just as an overabundance of caution, I decided not to do a podcast with that looming over us. Yeah. So we were back in the studio today and today we are talking about overcoming overthinking. Have you ever found yourself falling down a negative spiral where it feels as if your brain won't shut off? This is what overthinking can feel like. Many of us get in our own way by overthink overthinking. This can look like worrying about things you can't control. Delaying decisions to keep researching options. Dwelling on your shortcomings or maybe trying to predict other people's feelings or actions. That sounds familiar. Don't worry. In this episode of Insights into Teens, we'll discuss the tools, strategies and activities to help you let go of overthinking so you can become a calmer, happier, and overall more productive person. But before we do that, I would like to take a moment to invite our listening and viewing audience to subscribe to the podcast. You can find audio versions of this podcast listeners Insights into teens. You can find all our video versions and audio versions of all of our network's podcasts listed as Insights into Things. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher. For a little while. I found out during our insights into more podcasts, Stitcher is actually going away. Wow. We're also on iHeartRadio and tune in as well, pretty much anywhere you can get a podcast. I would also invite you to give us your feedback. Tell us how we're doing. Give us your suggestions on topics we can discuss. You can email us your comments and insights into things. You can hit us up on Twitter at Insights, underscore things, or check out our Web site at WW that insights into things for all of our social media connections. Ready to get going? Yep. Here we go. So the first step to overcoming overthinking is to identify the different types of overthinking there are. Overthinking can feel like an overwhelming challenge that's difficult to solve or pin down. And it comes in a few specific forms. Identifying which type of overthinking you're experiencing is crucial because it gives you self awareness to change your behavior for the better. So the first is something I'm probably going to bunch of the name of does it looks weird. Rumination. Rumination. All right. Nice. Rumination is a type of overthinking that involves rehashing the same thoughts over and over. You may replay missteps or mistakes in your head, like beating yourself up for a typo you made on an assignment or worrying about your friend's reaction to a comment you made. A good example of rumination is getting stuck in, quote unquote what if scenarios. A couple we have listed are What if I had gone to the dance? Or what if I had reached out to my teacher earlier? Do you ever find yourself ruminating over something, something maybe something's bothering you or you have a test coming up or, you know, you made a mistake on a test or something like that, and then just sort of turns and turns and turns. Yeah, a lot. Especially when I was in school. And I know I'm probably going to be experiencing it when I go back to school. I tend to focus on my very small mistakes or worrying about a test, like when I hear about it and like it's kind of like the constant anxiety kind of just builds because I continue to be repeating in my head. There are times when I see a mistake and I keep telling myself that I am. I was terrible for making that mistake and like it kind of continues to resonate in my head until I realize that like, okay, I probably shouldn't be worrying about this. Then I find myself doing it from time to time too, especially usually if it's stuff at work where maybe I made a mistake or I realize after a decision made that it probably wasn't the best decision. And I keep going back over it in my head trying to figure out how I could've did it better. What could I have done? More research. What was it that I, I did wrong? Where I can try to correct that in the future? And there's a certain amount of constructive effort that goes into that. One of the things that we talk about all the time is that you learn more from your mistakes than you ever do from your successes. And and in making those mistakes, it's important for us to go back and analyze them to the point that we can understand where the mistake is and how to make it. Rumination is when we take that a little bit too far, I think, and we sort of obsess over that type of thing. Yeah. So another type that we have is future tripping. When you're worrying about the future at the expense of enjoying the present, for example, you may think I'm going to completely embarrass myself tomorrow, or when I give that presentation and forget everything I'm supposed to say or you may find yourself preoccupied and distracted by upcoming deadlines when at the dinner table with your family future tripping causes you to overthink about situations and problems before they even happen. Now I fall into this trap frequently myself. Part of that is because I'm an analyst by nature. So one of the things that I my brain just does is I come up with alternative scenario. So if I know I have a project coming up, my job really is to figure out where I could go wrong, what resources I need and how I'm going to respond. And if I'm not careful in how I do that, I can go down this path of getting lost in the what if scenarios. Do you find yourself what I being like if you know there's a test coming up or something? Absolutely. My main problem with it is when it comes to the various projects I get at the end, usually at the end of a marking period, which is why I've now basically dreaded any sort of end to a marking period, because that's when all my classes pretty much put in a project. They have a set amount of days to do and yeah, I just that's like when I do the most future tripping because I never think I'm going to be able to actually finish a large project. And the amount of time that I've been given and I begin to panic. And not only do I have one of those that I have to worry about, but I have like three others that I have to worry about as well. And it gets really stressful and I hate it. Yeah. And again, this is the same type of scenario where a certain amount of this is constructive because in your specific scenario it helps you to plan out what you're going to do to make sure that you've got five things that you need to do. This is the order in which I need to do the different things in order to get them all done on time. Yeah, that's like what? Summer reading in the ways of how I plan out, how much you're going to read so that I have most of it memorized in case, you know, something comes up in school when I start. Right. So there's a fine line of being constructive and crossing over to the obsessive deconstructive side of things and understand where those warning signs are is really the key to kind of controlling these types of overthinking scenarios. What else did we have. The last what type of overthinking we have is analysis paralysis. Say that five times fast. That five times fast. Anyway, this is indecision that keeps you stuck spinning your wheels. You may see many sides of a situation, but still got to choose a single course of action. You may fear choosing the wrong solution, doing things imperfectly or otherwise, not maximizing your choice, and then hesitate and then hesitate or procrastinate as a result. So I'm going to have to ask again, Do you ever suffer from this? Um, yeah, I'd say I also probably suffer from it. Mainly something I've been doing over the summer at this point now, because of like I have certain projects that, hey, I should be doing cause I have all this free time. But then ultimately I just don't choose any of them and kind of just sit and play video games because at that point I'm just procrastinating on everything else because I just have so much that could be done. Yeah, it's funny, I notice that you suffer from analysis paralysis almost exclusively when it comes to creative endeavors, writing or drawing or music. That's usually when you tend to try to look at all the different angles and try to put all the pieces in place so that when you sit down to do it, you want to make sure that you optimize and maximize your time, which is good. But when it gets to the point where you're not doing anything and getting anything accomplished and it's bad, obviously, yeah, I run into this issue again, being an analyst myself, by nature, my job often times requires me to go down all these different rabbit holes and there are times when we're making one good examples where we have to get a new printer contract for a lease printer. One of our facilities and one of the internal policies that I have is we need to get at least three quotes. We need to have three different vendors coming in with an offer of business that we can then look at. And that process alone often can bogged down looking at the finer things. I mean, we're down to the point of looking at, you know, what's the cost per print, per page. And I've got one guy who comes in at a half penny more than another guy. That's the level that we're looking at it from an analysis standpoint right now. Right now, this particular scenario is deliberate because what I'm trying to do is train my my team at this facility how to do a an RFP, a request for price analysis and stuff like that. So I would have already normally made the decision already by now, but I'm trying to take them down that path to have them learn how to do it, and they're getting to the point where they're getting hit with analysis paralysis. So and I and I want them to take that journey because it's important to go down that path so we can step back at some point in time, look at where that mistake is and figure out how we're going to correct it. So this one is kind of an intentional one like that, but it happens all the time when you're when you're in business and you're you're an hours analyst by nature. So which type of overthinking do you think you fall into? Most of the three we discussed? Well, I don't think I'm really connecting as much with analysis paralysis, considering it's really only for one aspect that I've only noticed recently. So I'm not really feeling that much. Probably future tripping, honestly. Like, yeah, of course Romnesia. And like I repeat thoughts in my head, even though they might vary in like how I exactly spot it, I still can do have it repeated, but I think future tripping is the one I resonate the most with because I tend to worry a lot about the future and whether it be finishing a project attached or when it comes to my own actual future. I genuinely think that's the one I suffer the most from. Okay, And I think a lot of people do. So I don't think it's anything that's exclusive to you. Now. We've kind of been discussing the fact that there's a constructive side to to this type of mentality and there's a non constructive side. The constructive side is often referred to as deep thought. So let's talk a little bit about the differences between deep thought versus over thinking. So we all have thoughts running through our minds. Most of the time, thinking intentionally and deliberating through issues is key to being effective. But how do you know if you're deeply thinking about an issue versus overthinking? Well, first, deep thought moves you forward where overthinking keeps you stuck. Deep thought is solution focused. It aims to solve problems and it's purposeful. Overthinking, on the other hand, is open ended circular and doesn't provide useful thoughts. For example, being preoccupied with what your colleagues think of you does nothing to move your head. Putting together a plan to build your relationships is what will get you results. Deep Thought focuses on what matters while overthinking is obsessing over the inconsequential. Let's say you have a test coming up. Do you spend your time studying and reviewing the material, or do you agonize over the last test you had that didn't go well and create a scenario in your head that the same thing will happen this time over Thinking keeps us attached to the past, worried about the future in turns, minor situations in the major ones. Deep thought is emotionally neutral. Overthinking is emotionally draining. If you're in deep thought, you may thoroughly analyze an issue or problem, but you're not judging yourself. You're focusing on neutral observational observation of all facts. Overthinking is driven by negative self-talk. Your thoughts may not reflect the truth of the situation and tend to be very self-critical and harsh. So the difference between deep thought and overthinking isn't about the amount of time you spend deliberating. Rather, it's how much of the quality of your thoughts enhance your performance. So as long as you're in deep thought, like when, for instance, you have your summer reading, you spend a chunk of time upfront there figuring out how much you need to read each week in order to get it done by school. And that helps you set a plan in motion to move forward and then you accomplish what your goal is, right? Yeah. So what's an example of something that's overthinking that you run into from time to time? I suppose that's normally when I mean, this is the thing is most of my scenarios of overthinking tend to eventually turn into deep thought. But some examples I can think of currently are when I have those marking period projects or I would have a quiz or test coming up in my history class because I know what happened. Because. Because I know what happens when the marking period arrives and I get slammed with all the different projects or I know that I haven't done well on certain quizzes in my history class that, like it makes me nervous that I'm probably not going to be doing good again. And like even with that, I ended up studying for a while and I've still and I ended up still not getting a lot of progress with it, which had brought me down. And that's the example that I probably would go with. Was your tests and your quizzes. It's it's interesting because the scenario isn't a give and take with you. So there are situations where you aced three tests in a row, but that fourth test, you'll still be nervous to take it, having no confidence build over those three tests that you just aced. But as soon as you get one bad test, you're you're a pile of worrying. You think you're going to fail school at that point in time and it's too much of one, not enough of the other. Right. So the one thing that I'm always trying to get you to do is have more confidence in yourself because of the achievements that you're you're acquired. And usually that's one of those things that helps to build your confidence. And, you know, we used we started it at the end of last year having little friendly wagers. You know, you would have a task come up and I would say, What do you think you're going to get on it? And your answer would be, I think I'm going to get a 60. And I said, I'll bet you you're going to get an 80 or better off. And how many of those bets that I lose. Not many. Know. Not many, because I had confidence in you, because I sat with you, we studied and I knew that you knew the answers. We would go over study guides. And when we went over study guides, you were answering questions before I even asked them. So I knew that you knew the material as long as the test was on the material, you were going to ace it. Now, there were a couple of situations where the tests weren't on just the material that was where you struggle. But any time that you pay attention in class and you have that material available to study on, you do fine. So what you need to do is not overthink the concerns that you have. It's fine to be concerned because if you're not concerned, you're going to get indifferent, you're not going to study and you're going to have a whole different set of problems. So it's good to be concerned, but do it through deep thought. Not overthinking is the key here. I think we would take our first break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about important steps to overcoming overthinking. We'll be right back. For over seven years, the second self empire has been the premier community guild. In the online game star Wars, the Old Republic with hundreds of friendly and helpful active. Members. A weekly schedule of nightly events. Annual guild, meet and greets, and an active community both on the Web and on Discord. The second season of Empire is more than your typical gaming group. We're family. Join us on the Star Forge server for nightly events such as Operations, Flash Points, World Boss Funds, Star Wars, Trivia Guild, Lottery and much more. Visit us on the web today. At w w w dark the second slip and fire dot com. Welcome back to insights into Teens. So they were talking about overcoming everything cooking. And one of the important steps to overcoming overthinking is to practice self-awareness. One of the biggest problems with overthinking is that you often don't realize you're doing it until it's too late. This is where self-awareness comes in, or the ability to pay attention to your thoughts. Monitoring your inner world not only helps you to get to know yourself better, but it also keeps you from falling into unhelpful thought patterns. Self-awareness can be hard, especially when school or life are demanding. It's easy to be on mental autopilot.

I know I am probably go at least 10:

00 every morning when I go to work. It's it's a good thing I have a routine that I can do everyday

because until 10:

00 it's I'm really not even self aware that way just going through the motions during the day. The good news is that self-awareness can be cultivated with a little bit of effort and attention. Mindfulness practice is prompt you to reflect on your thoughts throughout the day. Meditation is a great option if that's not your thing. Try taking a moment for reflection at that natural point during the day, perhaps after lunch or before you pack up for the day. Tune in and examine what's going on in your head. What's your inner dialog? What's thoughts that are preoccupying your mind? It will take some time and practice to become more aware of your inner dialog, but do your best to be aware of the stories going through your head. Maybe you're thinking nobody likes me or I'm going to fail. Whatever it is, write it down, then determine what type of overthinking your thought represents. Is it rumination, future tripping or analysis? Paralysis? A note of caution here as as you pay more attention to your thoughts, do not get hooked into overanalyzing them. Your goal here is to become more aware of your habitual thinking while having healthy detachment. Another part of overcoming overthinking is to create psychological distance. You start the week raring to go, feeling confident and on top of the world. Usually, I mean, Mondays really aren't my best days, but. But then it happens. You don't speak up during class. We have a chance afterwards. The critical voice in your head takes over. How could you let that opportunity go by? The teacher's probably assuming you're not engaged. You try to brush it off and work on assignments in your next class, and just then you catch a type I want to pay for. You submit it and you think, Can I get anything? Right? Maybe this is a sign I'm not any good. This story is just one example of the harsh judgment you may make. You may make about yourself. When overthinking to stop, you first need to step back and evaluate whether your thoughts are realistic or helpful. You can do this through a technique called psychological distancing. This involves stepping back and gaining perspective, creating a mental breathing room one to consider the bigger picture and evaluate the situation and your next steps more objectively with a cooler, calmer head. This helps people to make better. This helps people make better sense of their reactions, feel less stressed and reduces emotional reactivity. In the long term, it makes people less vulnerable to reoccurring thoughts such as overthinking. A good way to create psychological distance is by personifying your inner voice. If you had to give your inner overthinker a name, what would it be? You might call it Bozo because he tends to be annoying. You might name it the worry water Gremlin. Choose something lighthearted or a fictional character. Get a figurine or photo to make your inner overthinker even more concrete. You can also play the role of Observer. Imagine you're a scientist studying your thoughts as you would a specimen in the lab. What do you notice or pretend is a viewing your life as a movie with you as the lead character? What would you hope to happen next? There's also the concept of the swap. Use your own name when thinking about yourself. For example, instead of thinking, I'm having trouble deciding whether to take this assignment, or you would think Maddie is having trouble deciding whether to take this assignment, thinking in the third person helps you to create the psychological distance. Obviously, you know, insert your own name into that. It's not easy to form new habits, but with practice, you can master it. What's great is that psychological distancing works equally well for past events and future events. A recent study found that people felt less anxious about stressful future events, like taking a test or speaking to a group when they imagined it as a as an outside observer. So what specific situation do you find yourself over thinking about where you can practice psychological distancing? Maybe it's a test or a quiz, or maybe an important project with a tight deadline. Something I could probably see myself practicing psychological distancing from. I'm I could use it on my grades, but I think I'm going to have a lot harder of a time doing that, considering how much I strive to have perfection when it comes to that. Right. So that's not my go to. Well, one of the things that that I've done with you in the past, which is a form of this, is looking at the bigger picture. You know, I'll say you'll be worried about a test. You'll say, Oh, I got an 80 on a test. And I say, okay, what's the worst thing that can happen? Let's just let's just think. Worst case scenario, you've got another test coming up. You get an 80 on that. What happens? It'll bring your grade point down by so many percentage points. That's literally the worst thing that can happen. So that type of psychological thinking is really a 30,000 foot level. Let's take a step back away from the situation. You know, you've got a little, little campfire here in the middle of a farce. You're not burning the whole thing down. So that flame of psychological distancing helps as well, because it helps to put the the bigger picture into perspective. Yeah. And sometimes stuff like that, you know, like talking about yourself in the third person gets a little weird. You sound like a professional wrestler at that point sometimes when you do that. Yeah, but when you try to look at it from a different perspective, the one thing that I like is if if I'm having a problem and I can't, like if I'm trying to fix something. Well, you know, first of all, I'll yelled at it and screamed at it and cursed at it and everything else. Then I'll take a step back, realize how ridiculous I just was. And then that helps me to center myself, to go back in and start looking out for a more objective standpoint. And that's the one thing my guidance counselor from school kind of got me to do. Basically, when I was upset about the grades that I ended up getting, she was saying, Well, what if your friend had ended up getting that kind of grade? Would you be that mad at them? And I'm like, No, I wouldn't. I'd say that you can that it's not that big of a deal. It's it's always a, you know, improve and such. And basically, you know, proving the point that I wouldn't think about, like my friends the way I think about myself. Right. You would hold them to a different standard. You would you would be sympathetic to them. We've done it on the podcast a number of times. You know, when there are situations that I know we're discussing something that might be a little more sensitive, I'll ask, have you had any friends that have gone through this? Tell me how you how you helped a friend through this, Because when you do that, you can sort of divorce yourself from the emotional side of it and talk about what you did objectively to help that person. So psychological distancing is a very effective way of trying to get yourself out of these overthinking ruts sometimes. What else do you do? Is there anything else that you do when you find yourself overseas thinking something, or any other hints or tips or tricks or anything? Kind of. Like I say, a lot of times when I deal with this kind of stuff, I step back from it. You know, I if I just having a problem with something, the best thing I can do is just not worry about it and take a step back. Yeah, it's one of those things you need to distance yourself emotionally, physically. If you're working on a project. Psychologically, if it's starting to wear you down, you go off, you distract yourself, you do something that you enjoy, and that gives you that distance that you need. After you do that, you gain a better perspective on whatever the problem was. And almost every time I wind up solving a problem, if I take that little mental break. Yeah. So we're going to take our next break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some more helpful tips for overcoming overthinking. We'll be right back. Insights into entertainment, a podcast series taking a deeper look into entertainment and media. Our husband and wife team of pop culture fanatics are exploring all things from music and movies to television and fandom. We'll look at the interesting and obscure entertainment news of the week. We'll talk about theme park and pop culture news. We'll give you the latest and greatest on pop culture conventions. We'll give you a deep dive into Disney, Star Wars and much more. Check out our video episodes at YouTube.com. Backslash Insights into things are audio. Episodes at podcast are inside or into entertainment dot com or check us out on the web at insights into things icon. Welcome back to Insights Sonatine. Today we're talking about overcoming overthinking. And then we're going to talk about some helpful tips in order to help overcome overthinking. You know. There really is that. Very redundant title, might I add. So our first tip here is to listen to your gut, hunch, instinct and deeper knowing there are many names for gut feeling. Your gut is the seed of your intuition, which, put simply, are things we know unconsciously. Your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all of your memories, past learnings, personal needs and preferences, and then makes the wisest decision. Given the context. In this way, intuition is a form of emotional and experiential data. Research shows that pairing intuition with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, more accurate decisions, and gives you more confidence in your choices. More than relying on logic alone, this is especially true for major life, career and career decisions like what city to settle down in or whether to take a promotion. Even if you don't feel 100% ready for it. Tapping into your emotions can feel a little unsettling and abstract at first. You can hone your intuition and leverage and leverage it as a decision making tool. Start by making minor decisions, by listening to your gut. Pick a restaurant for dinner without reading online reviews or take a walk without choosing a specific route. Taking quick, decisive actions with small consequences gets you comfortable using your intuition. Intuition is like an internal traffic light. Is your gut feeling flashing red with a feeling of repulsion or dread telling you to stop? Or is it flashing green with excitement? It's simply a sense of calm and peace. Another tool is the snap judgment test on a piece of paper. Read a question like, Well, will going to the dance make me happy? Then list yes and no below. Then list. Yes. Then list yes and no below it. Don't know why that was so hard to say. I wrote it the way you just said it, so it's not my fault this time. After a few hours, come back to the paper and immediately circle your answer. It might not be an answer you like, especially if the question is a big one. But there's a good chance that you forced yourself to responding honestly. You can also try and test driving your decisions for two or three days. Act as if you've chosen options. Observe how you feel and think. Then for another two or three days. Try option B at the end of the experiment. Take stock of your reactions. Simulating the outcome can tell you a lot about what you really want. The few people say they've regretted going with their gut. Chances are this is true for you as well. So take a moment today to prove yourself to yourself. You can be trusted. Set aside a few minutes. Tell us three times you trusted yourself in the past and how it turned out. You'll find your gut is a more powerful decision making tool. Another important tip is to handle fear with confidence. Picture it. You're overwhelmed with homework. Thank you. A really important project that's due soon. Your mind is filled with worries and doubts. Can you really pull this thing off? Is this the right strategy to be focusing on? What if I can't deliver on my promises? What emotion you do think is driving your behavior up? What emotion do you think is driving your behavior at that moment? It's fear. Fear and overthinking tend to go hand in hand. That's because fear triggers your body's fight or flight response, alerting your nervous system to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. The frontal part of your brain, which is responsible for self-control, concentration and focus, tends to go offline. The primitive part of your brain called the amygdala. Thank you. Called the amygdala takes over no matter how intense the feeling. You can take charge of fear before it takes charge of you. Let's explore a few ways to handle it with confidence and take decisive action. You can get back in the driver's seat with a mindfulness technique called grounding. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the opposite. So you could have got that set of amygdala. Okay. I was good in what I gave you. Yeah, that's the opposite of your stress response. And get your frontal brain online so you can think clearly. There are many great grounding exercises you can try, including controlled breathing and a quick body scan or short meditation. You has a tendency to launch us into chaos, into catastrophizing, where we expect the worst possible outcome. So instead confront the worst case. Take the fear out to an extreme. You'll find you can create a plan for almost anything life throws at you. Likewise, consider what could go right in equal measure with what could go wrong. Flip your whatevs. What is the class really loves my presentation. What if it isn't stupid but brilliant and entertaining? After you've confronted the worst case. Make a plan to deal with it. Use an if then formula to brainstorm how you'll over come obstacles. For example, if I find myself avoiding writing, then I will commit to writing just 100 words no matter what they are. In psychology, this is called implementation and implementation intentions and studies. It is shown to reduce fear and boost emotional control. Another slightly unusual suggestion scheduled time to worry. Really do it. Set aside 15 to 20 minutes to review your fears and constructively. Problem solve. Make a list and circle of fears. You have some control or influence over, whether by taking an action or changing your mindset about a situation. This may also sound counterintuitive, but the more you expose yourself to fear, the more you'll reset your amygdala to not get triggered. So this is kind of deep in the psychological weeds here. A lot of big words in here, I know, but I think there are some very important things to kind of talk about here. The first one being gut instinct. Now, do you think you've got a good gut instinct? Maybe kind of. See, I think you do, but you don't listen to it like your gut kind of guide you. Like if I really sit down with you and we're talking about one of these topics, you know, what's the likely outcome is you know what the right answer is, but you don't have the self-confidence to go with it. And the one thing they talk about here at the very end is the more you expose yourself to that fear, the easier it becomes. The handle is like kind of exercising a muscle. So avoiding it's not a good idea, but dealing with it and seeing what you've done and the accomplishments that you've made should help you with that. The other things that they talk about in here, about activating different parts of your brain, stuff like that. It's pretty sophisticated stuff on paper, but in reality you're doing it all already. Meditation, you know, your form of meditation could simply be stopping what you're doing and going the pedicab, anything that comes you down, get your mind off what you're doing and helps you to relax is meditation. You don't have to learn some kind of, you know, Zen transcendental meditation technique or something like that. You know, it calms you down. You know, it makes you happy, you know, it makes you feel good. And I'd venture to guess that most people out there do as well. So as long as you can recognize and that's really the most important takeaway here, I think, is recognizing when you're to that point of overthink, just as it's important to recognize when you're stressed out or when you're depressed, you need to be able to recognize this. This all goes back to our emotional intelligence series of podcasts. The important thing is knowing when you're in this state. Once you recognize that, you've got the power to change it at that point. True. So the struggle that's the hard part is knowing when you got it over. Thinking is a tough one because Deep Start can very quickly become overthinking. So you kind of have to know where that line is. And I think you have to objectively look at it because overthinking is when it becomes a non constructive way of taking you backwards or when it's impeding you. So when you're when you're deep start processing something and it stops feeling constructive to you, you know, you're putting that piece of furniture together and you just can't get that last boat. And the more you sit there and struggle, the more frustrated you're getting. That's when you're overthinking. That's where you need to go. Sit down, grab a drink, watch TV color with a cat, do whatever it is you can do to calm down. And then after you calm down, come back a little while later, you tackle the problem, you solve it. You do it every time. Yeah. I see you do it when you're putting things together. I see you do it on projects. I see you do it when you're writing stuff. You just need to be able to recognize those times and focus. And I think that's really key. And it's not. It's not easy. It's not easy to do, but it's one of those things that over time you can you can learn. So you just have to sort of practice. Do you ever hear the word amygdala before? Yes, I have heard the word amygdala before. I've never seen it written down. A lot of people never have never heard about it. Where I actually heard about it was a movie called Happy Gilmore. They talk about a lot of there was actually kind of a funny movie, not meant for kids. So yeah. I think that was all we had. Do you have anything that you wanted to close the show out? I mean, you know, outside of my closing thoughts. Well, that was kind of was getting at. Did you have closing thoughts? Yeah. All right. Because you like to get the last word. I don't get the lost. Well. You do, but nobody can hear it because it gets cut out in post. Why? Because it's in the credits. But then don't put the credits so early. We'll be right back. And we're going to get your closing thoughts when we come back. Uh huh. Okay. So to everybody out there, I just wanted to say, much like with everything in life, there's a balance that kind of needs to go when that needs to exist. When thinking, I guess, you know, over thinking, deep thought to the point. If you're at the point where you're overthinking something, then you've crossed over to one extreme. And then, of course, being too relaxed is crossing over to another extreme. It's good to be concerned, but it's not good to be concerned in the way that you're going to be over criticizing yourself and your own abilities. I tend to struggle with that a lot myself, and I know a lot of other people probably feel the same way. The best thing to do is to know that you should be concerned or at least have some sort of concern. But don't let it. They don't matter. Then influence your thoughts about your own self-worth. That's deep. And I know. Sage words, as always. Thank you. Before you go, I want to once again implore you, ask you. I encourage you to plead to you, bribe you. If I could find the podcast. You can find audio versions of this podcast listed as insights in the teens, audio and video versions of all. The network's podcasts can be listed as insights on the things, and we're available on Pandora. Castro Pod B buzz from anywhere in your podcast these days. I would also encourage you to check us out and give us some feedback. You can email comments and insights into things to come. You can hit us on Twitter or X or whatever Ellen's calling it this week at Insights underscore things. What are you? If you're not sending tweets anywhere, these zits that you're sending now and some. Yeah, just call them zits or something. Yeah. Like if you have a whole bunch of zits and are in a thread. Is that called acne now or something? I don't know. I don't get it. Anyway, you can find our podcast streaming five days a week on Twitch at Twitch TV slash insights into things and you can find that much more on our official website and insights into things that come at you. And don't forget to check out our other two podcast, Insights and Entertainment hosted by you and Mommy. And then dinner tomorrow are not monthly podcast anymore hosted by my brother saying that we did put out a new one for. So that's something. Yes, it is. That's it. And one of the. Books by everyone.

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