5 Practical Tips on How to Overcome Overthinking

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Anything that is too much in life may bring a bad impact on us, including our thoughts. Overthinking is a problem that will persist if you let your head be flooded with negative things. You should do something about the problem if it begins to bother you. These 5 approaches on how to overcome overthinking might help you to solve your problem.

Negative thoughts that come to our heads can be in many kinds of form. We may think about failures, self-doubt, fear, or any other things which make us feel demotivated and stressed. Doing that frequently is bad for the state of our body and mind.

According to Ashley Carroll, a psychologist at Parkland Memorial Hospital, overthinking has destructive impacts on us. It can make us isolate ourselves from other people, have headaches, and feel depressed or anxious. Surely, those things are bad and should be avoided if we want to be happy and healthy in our life.

However, the ways on how to overcome overthinking might be hard to find sometimes. Therefore, it should be beneficial to find tips we are able to implement to make us calmer in our head.

How to Overcome Overthinking: 5 Approaches You Should Try

So, what are the tips on how to overcome overthinking that we should apply? Here are some ideas to do that which you may find useful to apply:

• Lookout for some calming resources

  The first tip on how to overcome overthinking is related to the vast resources that we can access in this era. The negative thoughts that keep hovering in your head probably have been felt by others before.
  
  Some of them may have documented their relevant experiences and positive solutions in online or offline resources you can access. Search and dig into them so you don’t feel alone and be calmer in facing your thoughts. There might even be some ideas of things you should do to your specific problems which you get from those resources.




• Discuss with relevant people

  There might be people you know whose opinion your respect regarding the matters you think about. They probably have experienced things like you before and know what to do about it. Discuss with them about the problems you overthink. It can be the media where you let things out from your head too so you can clear your mind.
  
  There are also relevant forums or groups in which you can discuss with people who should give helpful opinions and feedback. It might be helpful to join them and open the talk in there regarding your negative thoughts.


Read also: How to Create Your Own Happiness



• Schedule a period to exclusively reflect on it

  Instead of having yourself keep thinking about something which is unhealthy, allocate time to do it specifically. Schedule a period in a day when you calmly reflect on it and plan your actions related to the thoughts.
  
  Make sure that the period you allocate is enough for you to think about your problems thoroughly. This is so you are able to avoid overthinking about it before and after that time. When you have done the exclusive reflection, promise yourself that you will stop thinking too much. After all, you have given yourself enough time for their reflection.




• Adopt the “able/unable” thinking

  If we think about it, there might be things that are in and out of our control. If we can’t change something, then why bother keeping it in our mind? Doing that won’t bring anything positive for us and can even give a bad impact on our health too.
  
  Evaluate your negative thoughts then decide what can be done and cannot be done about them. The things that can be done should be worked on immediately and the things that cannot shouldn’t be thought over again. This “able/unable” approach on how to overcome overthinking might be what you need to take a strong stance to your thoughts.




• Think about the worst possible outcomes and anticipate them

  At the end of the day, we overthink our negative thoughts because we fear their worst possible outcomes. What if the outcomes happen someday? Well, because of that, the solution you can implement so you don’t think about them too much might be to anticipate. Make some preventions too to reduce the chance those worst outcomes will happen.
  
  What are the worst things that may happen and what should you do for that? Make plans and take action after the answering those so you can be more serene yourself. As the bad scenarios have been prepared over, the overthinking should naturally decrease in frequency too.

Final Takeaways

What do you think about those practical tips on how to overcome overthinking? Do you think that they can help you to solve the overthinking problem which can be bad for you?

Thinking about bad thoughts too much is detrimental to ourselves. Trying some solutions on how to overcome overthinking is the action you should take if you face this problem. Hopefully, the approaches given here can be the solutions you need!
You may also want to see:

• 10 Best Self-Motivation Quotes to Spend Your Days Optimally
• Why Do We Doubt Ourselves?
• 10 Best Be Kind to Yourself Quotes to Make You Appreciate Yourself Way More

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