How to Stop Overthinking: Clear Your Mind, Get Rid of Negative Thoughts, and Find Inner Peace Using Meditation and Minimalism

By John Miller

How frequently do you obsess over daily occurrences? Fear not! It is possible to get out of this destructive routine!

You lose mental control as you travel down the tunnel of overthinking.

You experience great confusion and bewilderment on a constant basis.

This book contains a wealth of knowledge that will help you overcome your mental obstacles and live a happier life:

• the role of our brain, how we process information and why we tend to dwell on everything that can go wrong.

• how thoughts and doubts monopolize the day and how they are influenced by external sources

• the causes of mental stress: what makes us vulnerable, the negative distortions that concatenate in the mind, social anxiety, emotions

• recognize the existence of a problem and become aware of one's identity

• how not to focus too much on the present and how not to fall into the deception of being able to control the future

• many exercises on how to maintain control, concentration, on mindfulness, and on the different types of meditation, but also writing therapy

Overthinking is something that can happen to anyone.

But if you have a great way to deal with it, you can drive away negative, anxious, stressful thoughts and turn it into something useful, productive and effective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223905721

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

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The discomfort created by overthinking, by thinking excessively about something, can have an intensity that varies from simple annoyance for having lost a few minutes chasing an involuntary thought up to true obsession that generates considerable mental suffering. The good news I can give you right now is that, in any case, there are many solutions, all at hand and easy to implement to solve the problem and voluntarily direct one's mind like a train launched on linear tracks, without getting lost in unnecessary setbacks due to overthinking.

But what does the expression think too much mean?

In my humble opinion, there is no wrong amount of mental work. Rather, our brain friend has a problem with the quality of his work in some key moments of his activity. We are partially aware of this when we realize that a certain way of thinking has produced negative results, which, most likely, you too have experienced. Obsessively and involuntarily thinking about something empties us, with a feeling of heaviness and discomfort that persists throughout the day or even for longer periods of time. It's a really unpleasant feeling and many times we find ourselves engaged in furious recollections of past quarrels, or returning to critical moments, reliving traumas, or again, we wake up after entering seemingly harmless mental loops but which then, when we go back to the real world, to the here and now, we realize that they have wasted us a lot of time.

How many times have you fallen behind with a job or useful activity because you wasted time with negative thoughts or fantasies without practical use? Another thing you have probably noticed is that certain mental recollections or certain projections of worries also have a bad influence on your health: nervous hunger alternating with lack of appetite, a choice of comforting foods and drinks that prevents you from making healthier choices, laziness and apathy that distracts from physical exercise, headaches and irritability that hinder work and study... Yet, you can live better than this. You know it, you are convinced of it and that is why you have chosen a book with this title. You know you are thinking too much or thinking badly, the advice of those who said to you come on, stop thinking about it, think about your health! and of course this kind of talk has done nothing but irritate you, and I rightly say so.

People tend to overestimate their knowledge and skills and since we all have experience of psychic activity (our own thoughts), many believe that the work of the psychologist, psychotherapist, mentor, counselor and coach is nothing more than a waste of time, just don't think about it.... The truth is that mental suffering is very insidious and one of the reasons that makes it heavier to overcome is that we have to fight with those who, given that they do not see hemorrhages, bruises or abnormal values in blood tests, do not recognize that this is a form of malaise. Your suffering is real, I want to reassure you that you are not exaggerating if you think you need to eliminate it because we all want to live happily and to do that, we have to change something, but we don't know what. Our thoughts sometimes seem to want to attack us, bring up negative conditions or create painful scenarios. Yet, I repeat, we all tend towards happiness and try to let go of unhappiness. Therefore, it will be appropriate to ask oneself: why is my mind, my instrument of knowledge of the world, giving me these negative signals? Isn't that confusing?

Yes, exactly: the mind gets confused and confusion is one of the main reasons for mental suffering.

This book won't magically make you go away the mental confusion that steals your time, good mood and energy just because you bought it, but I guarantee you that if you follow the instructions contained herein you will have a great benefit.

You will learn to re-inhabit your body in a conscious way and you will accustom your mind to follow the best course of thoughts.

However (and this is a big but) it is necessary that you and I make a pact right now. To explain the pact, think of that old story where a man entered the church every day begging San Gennaro to let him win the lottery. Every day he went there begging to let him win, but not out of greed, to settle his accounts, and every day he continued... until at a certain point the miracle happened: the statue of the saint moved and spoke, saying And play it, it's bet slip!. Well, our agreement is that here you will find all the indications to obtain that improvement of which I am sure you will be capable, but you will have to follow the indications written in the book. I assure you that it will be worth it and that it will not be difficult at all.

So, good luck and let's begin to understand how we think.

CHAPTER 1

HOW WE THINK

In order to understand how to unhinge the involuntary thoughts that get in our way, we need to understand how thoughts arise, how they are formed and why some of them remain obsessively in our heads.

What is a Thought? Well, it's not something we can isolate on a microscope slide or contain it in a jar of formalin. Its immaterial nature makes it the subject of discussion (rightly so) for philosophers and theologians, for physicists, psychologists and even for computer scientists. There is a moment, a lapse of time of a thousandth of a second, in the space of a millionth of an inch between one brain cell and another: the thought is there, present but immaterial like the computing bit of a computer hardware which switches from one physical medium to another on the motherboard.

This thing that almost seems to come from a purely abstract and theoretical field is the fulcrum of human life as we know it and that distinguishes us from any other known form of life, it is what allowed us to tame fire, to take poisonous plants and turn them into food or turn wild beasts into pets. We have been able to explore the planet, send machines into the depths of the sea abysses and interstellar space, we have been able to make words immortal thanks to writing... and all thanks to this electro-chemical physiological process that happens hundreds of times in a few minutes in a single brain .

Only a few other living beings have a similar ability to express concepts, recognize themselves and create communications on this basis thanks to parts of the brain useful for this very purpose. In fact, it is thought that even some cetaceans such as dolphins and whales have intentional relationship and communication skills that make their way of thinking similar to ours, but it is above all primates such as gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and above all bonobos that have an already documented ability to think, with the development of mirror neurons somewhat similar to human ones for which these distant cousins of ours come to recognize us as similar (demonstrating it, in some cases). The more we do neuroscience, psychology and anthropobiology research, the more we realize that this neural machine is capable of doing great things and every day there are new discoveries in the field.

You too are part of this incredible species known as homo sapiens and you too have the opportunity to use your brain by making the most of the potential that nature has offered you.

For the next chapters we will focus on thinking, we will understand where we unknowingly create confusion and, above all, we will learn to untangle the knots that are in our mind.

1.1 - THE BRAIN AND THOUGHT

The binomial brain and thought is clear to everyone. In ancient times it was not clear what was the role of this organ and for many traditions the soul was the fulcrum of an activity that we could define as psychic, with the result that many cultures of the past intuited there was a correlation between the heart and mental activity. On the other hand, they observed that those who were hit in the heart died, while the head was more linked to the sensory organs. In the embalming of mummies, the Egyptians of the civilization of the Nile and of the pyramids threw away the brain because it was considered useless, while instead the heart was the focus of attention of certain funeral rituals, in the belief that in the afterlife it would be weighed on a balance for determine the purity of the thoughts of the deceased.

For a long time, until the medical discoveries between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gray matter was underestimated, then misunderstood by phrenologists and other charlatans who associated the shape of the skull with personality, up to the empirical and scientific studies of neuroscientists such as Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, who, by observing the traumatology of some aphonic patients or with language disorders, determined the first communicative functions of the brain in some specific areas, respectively in the frontal region (where the ability to speak is elaborated) and temporal (where enters and understands the meaning in the content of an utterance).

The brain has thus become the center of investigations by eminent scientists and the brightest minds, but in the common imagination it has produced a dissonance that still remains in popular culture today, excluding everything that is not part of the central nervous system, i.e. all nerve fibers not contained in the braincase.

The important discovery, made by other scholars of different schools that we will see later, in summary is this: there is no barrier between the neural machine of the central nervous system and the terminations of the peripheral nervous system. Everything participates in the experience of life, in the elaboration of thoughts and, obviously, in the onset of involuntary