Hello, I’m Conan Milner, and this is Words of Wellness. A show where we discuss health, from mind to body to spirit.
The human mind is a powerful force that allows us to reason and problem-solve. But if the mind becomes obsessive and anxious, this power can turn against us.
It might be the merry-go-round of self-criticism, or the back and forth of a heated, yet imaginary argument. But anybody who has been at the mercy of an overthinking mind knows how exhausting the ride can be. It’s tiresome, tedious, and usually unproductive. But for some reason, you just can’t stop.
Many justify their overthinking as a safe, quiet place to rehearse for the rigors of real life. However, the process rarely involves the here and now. We usually ruminate on some traumatic event from our past, or fret about the threat of a worst-case scenario thought to be looming in our future. Either way, you end up wasting your precious present in the process.
You run your problematic scene in your mind over and over again, in hopes of somehow resolving the matter. And yet, it only makes you feel worse. So why do we do this to ourselves? What do we get out of it? And can we ever be free from the force of this mental whirlpool?
To help answer these questions, I'll be talking to Nancy Colier. She’s a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and author of “Can’t Stop Thinking: How to Free Yourself from Obsessive Rumination.”
I’ve seen overthinking in my practice. I’ve been a therapist for almost 30 years. And what I saw was that there’s a lot of challenging stuff in our lives; a lot of situations with what’s happening in our world. And the majority of our suffering goes on inside our heads. It’s what we do with the information we’re receiving.
And I saw this over and over again: people torturing themselves with their own thoughts. And I’m human, I was not immune to this either. And I would replay conversations over and over in my mind. I suppose at the time trying to get a different resolution, or trying to say exactly what I wish I had said—that was my particular brand of overthinking. But I have seen every kind of rumination and overthinking strategy come through my office, and they lead us to suffer it. That’s why I addressed it, because we think that thinking more about problems will help us, and ultimately, it doesn’t.
The difference with OCD is it’s generally behavioral. There will be some behaviors that go with it, whether it’s handwashing, or another repetitive behavior. Overthinking is a part of OCD, for sure, because we can’t stop rehearsing the same thing over and over again. But OCD corresponds with the behavior that goes with it.
Overthinking is, I’m sad to say, just sort of the human condition at this point. And as far as what it is, it always makes me laugh. People want evidence-based definitions. And I always tell them, “When you’re overthinking, you don’t need a lot of definitions.”
[Overthinking] is when you can’t stop going down the rabbit hole of the same conversation, or thinking, “What do I need to do to prepare myself?” But we want to be moving on. We want to stop the chatter and we can’t. We literally feel like we’re crazy-glued to the thoughts.
We’re overthinking when our thinking is causing us suffering. When it’s making us feel bad and it’s not helping us, that’s overthinking. We don’t really need an official person to tell us we’re overthinking. We know we’re overthinking.
But where it gets tricky is when we are using thought in the same ways we might use an addictive substance. We are using overthinking to not be present. Paradoxically, in order to not feel what we’re feeling, we get wrapped up in what we will or won’t do. Or we go over the same things over and over. It’s because we don’t actually want to feel it. You don’t want to be present in it. It might look like we’re trying to get out of it in a healthy and productive way, but what we’re really doing is avoiding the moment just like we use alcohol or shopping or drugs or anything.
And at the same time, an addictive substance is something that we want to stop, but we can’t. I have spoken to hundreds and hundreds of people on this issue, and the feeling is like when they need to have a drink, but they can’t stop thinking.
What makes it so tricky, though, is that we have this incredible reverence for thinking. We think it’s the best thing. We’re in love with our thoughts. Our entire world is built around reason and thinking things through. And it’s heralded as this really wonderful thing. And so often, we use it in ways that work against us.
So it is a bit more like an eating disorder to some degree, where we have to find a way to be able to think. But we also need to be discerning when we go down the rabbit hole and torture ourselves. It’s tricky because it’s not like alcohol or drugs. We can’t be abstinent, and we don’t want to be.
It’s about recognizing when thinking is the right tool, because very often we will apply thinking to situations that are really the wrong situations. It’s a bit like trying to open a door with a banana. It’s a good tool, but it’s not the tool for this. In matters that are really more heart matters, or body matters, where we try and do our pro and con list, and we try and think it through again and again, and there’s no stone we haven’t left unturned, then it’s the wrong tool.
There are so many ways of knowing: our intuition, our bodies, our hearts, and our spirits. And all of these have been discredited. To some degree, everything is now evidence-based.
I’ve been in practice, as I said, about 30 years, and what I get asked all the time is: “What is the evidence base? Where are the MRIs that you’ve seen? What’s the science in this? How do you figure this out, and we have put all our eggs in the figuring out basket, and it is at the exclusion of so many other ways of being a human being.
And I think at times in history, when situational anxiety is kicked up, like now, and all the things going on in our world, we double down on our thinking in an effort really to try and get safe again, to find solid ground. But it’s not where the ground is. And that’s something we really have to learn ourselves, boots on the ground.
What we’re really trying to do is control what feels uncontrollable. If it feels out of our control, thinking is all about letting me get a handle on this. Let me understand it, understand it, understand it. But we may never be able to understand it, or we may understand it and not feel any peace from understanding it.
Some of the practices that I teach people and talk about in the book are this very counterintuitive, not-of-our-society approach. It’s to surrender to not knowing. The very thing we don’t want to hear is often where we find our real peace, not more understanding of it in the mind.
Either way, we have to think. So when do we use this tool? And when do we put it down and use something else?
The first thing is to just start to notice that your thoughts are someone talking to you. There’s this ticker tape playing in your mind telling you something. But who is it telling? And do you want to listen? That’s already in terms of how we’re conditioned. And that’s already revolutionary, right?
The reason that we need everybody to agree with us, our opinions and thoughts, is because we’ve been taught again and again that we are that. So if you don’t agree with my thoughts, then I’m somehow not okay, or I’m being denigrated.
But we don’t need everyone to agree. Our thoughts are not universally true. They’re just thoughts. And we wear them more like a loose garment. You start to notice, “Oh, okay, so the thoughts are talking to me. And I have some say in which ones I want to go for a ride on. I have some say in which ones I want to turn away from, or just tell them to stop terrifying me, or you’re not helping,” or whatever I might turn and say.
But at the same time, we get better at noticing where our thoughts are writing a script, storyline, or narrative about our life. So we might hand our friend something, and we see her make a face that we don’t understand. And the mind is off to the races with: “She doesn’t like me. She didn’t like the present I gave her last year. She’s angry at me. She’s always hated me. I have no friends.” And before we know it, we are just a worthless piece of nothing.
What we want to notice, and people really can learn this, is [to ask], “Where did that happen? And the narrative our thoughts wrote about it, where did they break apart? Where did the narrative begin?”And that’s all of our own making. That’s all our fictional story writing in our thought patterns. So we start to notice, “Oh, that was my narrative. What I know is, she made a face. I don’t know if she just had dental work. I don’t know if a raindrop just landed on her head, I actually don’t know anything.”
So we start to identify that. And then one of the things that I really am a very strong proponent of is, we’ve got to get back down into our bodies. What I teach people is that you can think and look, make the plane reservations, and do the grocery list. The mind is really a wonderful servant. It just doesn’t make a great master. So use it where it’s useful, like figuring out problems and so on.
Most of us walk around like these little disconnected floating heads. But we want to remember that this head, where all the thoughts are bouncing around, is sitting on top of a body. And so we start to practice remembering that there’s a body here, feeling the body, sensing the body. What does the body know? It’s a whole different way of living.
And the thing is that we start to notice how all of these thoughts, as you said in your introduction, are taking us out of the present moment. We’re not here, we’re not here, we’re lost. If we’re lucky, we’re on a beach in Hawaii. If we’re not, we’re probably in that conversation with our mother from when we were 11.
It’s noticing, “Wait a minute, I’m not here,” and then you come back, feel your feet on the ground. What is this person saying? Listen in again about what this other person is saying. Rejoin the present moment. That’s where joy is. Joy and peace can only exist here.
So we are now again, one step away from the direct experience of it. We are in the narrative about it. What is this doing for me? How will this help my health? We’re talking about the present moment rather than inhabiting it.
If you exercise, there’s just exercising, it’s not about me doing it. But all of these new apps are now putting me back in my head. “So what will this mean for me? What will this mean for my identity?” and so on. And that’s very unfortunate to me to see the corruption of that.
We have been taught that the mind is who we are. So when you start to drop out for a minute and just notice what your mind is telling you, it’s existentially terrifying, because we don’t really trust that we could continue to exist if we’re not the mind. That takes some slow going and recognizing the fear of that.
Once we get the hang of that, we can inhabit this place that is more present, or of the one that the mind is talking to. But in the beginning, the only way we feel ourselves in existence is when we’re thinking, so it is quite a challenge for us to separate enough to see what’s happening and that thoughts aren’t who we are.
Meditation is really just taking a snapshot of your present moment. What’s happening here in this present moment. We notice the mind is jabbering on like crazy. But you wouldn’t yell at your pancreas for monitoring your insulin, or you wouldn’t yell at your lungs for monitoring and working with oxygen, or the heart for beating.
What the mind does is produce thoughts. That’s not such a big deal. We have this idea that we’re successful meditators, or spiritual if we can get our minds to stop. But that’s nonsense. That’s hogwash. What we’re doing is stepping back and saying, on any given day: “What’s up in my mind? What’s happening in my mind? What’s happening in my body?” We’re just turning the lens on what is. We’re not really going there with an agenda. And just that process of building this muscle that is sitting on the shore of the beach, and looking out at all the waves in the ripples, that’s what we’re doing. We’re building a second place that can look and see.
What’s so important in meditation is not what you find. It’s not what’s actually happening. It’s that whatever is happening, that we’re meeting with curiosity and friendliness. That’s our job. That’s the only thing we do with whatever is coming. “Wow, look at my mind. It’s a crazy day in the circus. Oh, look at my mind. It’s a little quieter today on the Western front there. My body is pinging and popping, and maybe there’s a background, a sensation of sadness, or I’m just looking, I’m just looking at this organism that I think is me, that I call me.”
What’s really there is just all these moving thoughts and feelings in perpetual motion. Meditation has really been misunderstood as stopping thought. You wouldn’t want your heart to stop beating. That’s what the mind does. Forgive it.
But when we’re just dropped into this moment, rising and falling with the breath or feeling the sensations or noticing the thoughts, whatever it might be. Our sense of who we are shifts, and we’re afraid of that. We’re very, very afraid of that. And yet, paradoxically, that is where the peace is.
One of the things that I love when people realize in their work, is that we think that when we have a thought we have to think it. We have to go towards it. We have to engage with it. And when you start doing some of these practices you realize: just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to engage with it. It’s not inherently anything. We don’t have to go.
I had a client that would have these crazy, crazy thoughts. And she spent years trying to unravel that. Was it about her early experience? Was it her pathology? And then one day, she’s like, “You know, what? We just have crazy thoughts. They just appear. We don’t really have to spend all this time with them.”
When she stopped feeding the thoughts with her attention, which is their juice, they went away, because they just weren’t that interesting. So we think we can only make them go away by understanding them and beating them down harder. And yet, it’s really saying, “Okay. Another crazy one moving through the system.”
There are a lot of ways, in addition to meditation, that we just start noticing what we’re doing with our thoughts, and how we’re engaging with them. How we’re believing them. How we’re investing them with so much value.
But [if the thought is], “This person hurt me. This person treated me disrespectfully. And that reminded me of blah, blah, blah,” those get stickier. The more family is involved, the stickier they get. So we need tools in those cases, to talk to the thoughts, and acknowledge the hurt in those thoughts. They’re really trying to get rid of it, in reliving it, pleading our case, or telling us how wrong we were.
But we need to start to bring compassion to that thinking mind and say to ourselves, “Sweetheart, you are really caught and reliving this awful experience again. And it hurt when that person said that. But thinking it through more and more and more, and going over how you were hurt, will that really help you? Does that make you feel better?”
We start to talk to the thinking mind, like someone we love who’s trying to plead our case, to a jury of one, ourselves. So when the thoughts get sticky, we need some more hearty tools there. Because we can’t always just let it go.
So then we try to understand what is the real pain that is being rehashed here. And perhaps there is a better way of taking care of ourselves than continuing to go over how we were harmed by this person. We want to acknowledge that we’re repeating those thoughts, because we feel that our suffering has not been heard properly. It has not been acknowledged. So we need to do that work. We need to say, “It did hurt. It was unfair. It was disrespectful.” And then, can you come back into this moment and feel what your hands are touching? Or can you hear the birds singing at this moment?
So it’s a process of first recognizing that we are trapped in this cycle of suffering. And then ask, what is it that the mind is really trying to heal? Because so often it’s just this mistaken way of trying to feel better. And then recognizing, from the wiser, more evolved self, that, “Sweetheart, this is not going to be the path.” And investigate it without judgment. That’s where we have to really be mindful of not bringing in judgment, and trying to take the side of the very instrument that’s causing us suffering in the mind.
That becomes more natural as you do it, because we’re not so identified with the mind. We can see what it’s up to, and bring some kindness to what it’s really (in a very primitive way) trying to make happen. And that’s not to say that there aren’t times that we need to say, “Stop it” to our mind. “Stop doing to me what that parent did. Stop talking to me in that tone of voice. It’s not helpful.” It’s these internalized tapes. “I’m not interested in your attacks anymore, okay? They’re not helpful, and they’re not true.”
So we learn to reality check what you’re yelling at yourself about. “I always do these things like this.” Is that true? Most often, it’s not true. But like every human, sometimes I do things this way. But stop repeating that thing that was never true.
With these tools, we’re either compassionately trying to understand, or we’re just saying, “Stop it. It’s enough now. You’re not helping my life anymore.” You’ve got to show your mind who’s boss.
[We think], “If I were to be compassionate with myself, I would lay on the couch and eat bonbons all day,” or “I would never do anything productive.”
But what we find, though, is compassion unleashes this incredible productivity that comes from a different place. It’s not slave driven. What we really have been raised with is incorrect (there’s really no other word for it): that more harshness, more criticism of ourselves, will improve us. It doesn’t. What it does is it paralyzes us, and creates a life that is pretty darn miserable.
So we have to, in little ways, start taking baby steps to say, “What if I treated myself in this moment like I was someone I liked? What would it take?” You probably wouldn’t say you’re a piece of nothing, and you never do anything good. I don’t think I‘d motivate anyone that way. I would probably remind them of all the things they’ve done that have been positive. We’d be on the person’s side, essentially.
But when we’re yelling at ourselves in this primitive way to think we’re motivating ourselves, and we’re going to be better somehow, that is a mistaken belief. And so we have to try other techniques like, what if I liked the person I was trying to encourage now? Would I yell at them to get them to be more productive? Probably not.
So it’s shifting our relationship, ultimately with ourselves, where we are friendly with ourselves. And that that won’t lead to some sort of debauchery and that we can be really powerful. It’s like the compassionate warrior. But it doesn’t come from these standard ways of yelling at ourselves. That does nothing.
It does take a leap of faith, all of this, because we’ve been so heavily conditioned to say the only solution is more mind, more thoughts, more doing, doing, doing, and telling ourselves what we need to do. But our peace is in the surrender. We don’t know everything. We can’t control everything. What we can be is on our own side, and have it in our toolkit no matter what. That’s what creates a life of well-being. That’s what will create our happiness at the end of the day. Not that we figure everything out, but that we’re on our own side.
Or what if you looked at your intention in all this? Not will you succeed? Or what will come out of it? But what if you focused on what you are wanting to have happen here, to create here? What if we moved your focus from, will it work? Or won’t it work? What’s the goal and the result? [And instead, focus on] what you long to happen. We’re just going to try it for a day and see. Do you get off the couch? Do you turn into a vegetable? What happens? Because we don’t trust it.
There are aspects that are built into our whole way of thinking that the harder it is somehow the more honorable. And that doesn’t have to be the case when it comes to living good lives that are really productive.
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