How to stop overthinking.
Be a sherpa to your mind.
“Just relax,” they say.
“Let it go.”
But as your mind continues to fixate on The Big Bad Thing, throwing off sparks as it spins its wheels, this ‘advice’ only makes things worse.
“But how?!” you wonder, as frustration grows.
If it were that easy, you’d have already done it.
Now, you’re getting stressed about being stressed.
A good sherpa knows that standing on the mountaintop and shouting the destination at the climber is useless—he must go down and meet the climber where he is, then guide him from there.
In the same way, telling ourselves to relax or let it go or forget about it makes little difference to a powerful mind preoccupied with something, and it may even make it worse, creating an added layer of frustration that we can’t seem to follow what is surely sound advice.
When we get into these patterns of overthinking, obsessing, ruminating, rehearsing the future or reviewing the past, it’s like we are cutting the same grooves deeper into the record our mind. The more we do it, the deeper that groove gets, and the easier it gets to fall into it.
Like the sherpa, we have to meet the mind where it is and guide it out of the groove.
But how?
The first step is to identify the pattern and label it:
“The mind is ruminating on the past again.”
“The mind is worrying about hypothetical outcomes again.”
“The mind is making a mountain out of a mole hill again.”
Notice that ‘the mind’ is the subject is these observations: not ‘I’; because I is much more than the mind. The mind is something separate, which I have influence over. This framing is important.
By labeling it, we make it smaller and put it into a neat little box, where we can hold it and not let it consume us. We give it defined edges and distance ourselves from it.
A good second step is to question it.
“Is this objectively true? Or am I just catastrophizing?”
“Is this actually as big of a deal as I’m making it out to be? Will this matter in 2 years? Or in 2 weeks?”
“Is thinking about this giving me any advantage? Or is it clouding my mind from acting effectively?”
Here, our Big Self is almost being parental to our small-self mind, gently asking reasonable questions.
Once that’s done, a good third step is to reframe it.
“Actually, nature is constantly organizing opportunities for my own evolution, even if I can’t see how yet.”
“Things have always worked out in the past, even if there were some challenges. This will be no different.”
“I did the best I could at the time, and now I’ve learned a valuable lesson.”
This is like cutting new grooves in the record.
At first, the groove won’t be so deep, and it may feel like acting or pretending.
The more we do it, the deeper these new grooves become.
One day, we notice we are defaulting to the new grooves instead of getting trapped in the old ones.
At this point, you’ve taken most of the energy out of the thought process. The mind may continue reeling for a little while, but it will quickly run out of steam once we are no longer feeding it.
How Vedic Meditation Helps
Vedic Meditation is no different—we don’t control the mind, and we don’t focus or concentrate.
That’s because trying to control the mind is as useless as trying not to think of an elephant.
The very same mind which needs to be controlled cannot also do the controlling.
What makes Vedic Meditation different than all other styles is that instead of attempting to control the mind, we employ the use of a personalized mantra, given to us by a qualified teacher. Our mind finds the mantra more charming than whatever it was previously thinking about and naturally follows the mantra, transcending thought entirely into a state of supreme inner contentment.
We don’t yell instructions at the mind. We meet it where it is, and provide it with a more evolutionary path.
The more often we de-excite the mind in this way, the quieter it becomes, and the more space we’re able to insert in between a stimulus and our response to it; thereby helping us to perform the above steps and avoid falling into old grooves.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday June 5 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or click Subscribe on this page to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your preferred calendar.
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