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Hello you guys welcome back to another episode
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Hear and Now podcast. I’ve got a little bit of a heavier topic today but I feel
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like it’s kind of relevant for
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anyone and everywhere, no matter
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where you are in life, because today we are talking about overthinking, and the ways for you to overcome it. And just as a quick disclaimer I am not a mental health professional these are just tips that I’ve been given. I’ve seen etc. I will leave a link down below for you guys to contact a mental health professional if needed. But again, this is just my opinions and research that I’ve done, just from seeing blogs and stuff like that. So, just wanted to give that out there, so you guys had a heads up.
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But anyway, overthinking
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overthinking
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can leave you mentally exhausted distressed, physically drained. Raise your hand if this has been you at some point in your life.
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Even though I can’t see you.
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I know that at least one person is raising their hand. And guess what, so am I. So, let’s give a little situation here. Let’s say you’re having a conversation with someone just casually and you say something jokingly
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on text.
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After you send it. 1015 minutes
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go by without an answer.
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And you start swirling all the possibilities through your head. Did I offend them did I just cost us our friendship, do they hate me now, maybe they blocked me and never want to speak to me again. Whereas in reality their phone just died or maybe they lost cell service. It happens to all of us. And for starters, there’s an example. That’s an example of short term overthinking, where you can have an answer to your problem quickly, but long term overthinking might be dwelling on something that happened in
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middle school 10 years ago, etc.
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If you’re listening to this, and
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you’re not sure if you’re an over thinker. Here’s some four ways that might suggest that you could be overthinking. So number one, you aren’t in the moment, when you overthink. You are always in your head and not emotionally present with other people. I’ll give
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you an example.
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Let’s say
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you’re having a conversation with one of your friends and they say something that kind of reminds you of something you did years ago, and from then on, you’re kind of just distracted because you’re thinking like, Oh, maybe I did upset that
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person or.
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I can’t believe I said that uh you know who knows what
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would have happened if I didn’t say that, you know. So that’s number one you’re not in the moment. Number two, anxiety restrains you. So if you’re having a hard time going out and your anxieties holding you back from moving forward in your life, you might be thinking, What if,
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or this is gonna go wrong and
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again this happens to me this happens to the best of people.
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Number three,
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you’ve ruminate.
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So going over the same situation in your head,
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or thought is called ruminating, it’s like something that happened last night
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or last week the thought is on constant replay.
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Again, I’m sure a lot of people were like yeah yeah yeah I do that.
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And number four is insomnia so if you’re having a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep, it could be because You’re overthinking, and not sleeping can lead to anger, you know, bad concentration being more emotional. Any can hurt your relationships.
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So those four tips were from a great website
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called positive thinking mind calm.
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And I’ll leave a link in the show notes, if you
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want to read the article in full. But anyway, if you answered yes to any of those, it’s quite possible that you might overthink things.
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And you might be saying yeah i know i overthink things but how can I stop, and I’ll answer. There’s no right way, there’s no one right way to stop overthinking. There could be different things that might change your perspective, or might help you out.
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So let’s go over some tips
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that again are from this article that I found. And I’ll leave a link down below for you guys to check it out as well.
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But number one.
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Change your viewpoint.
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So it’s human nature to
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think things and make the situation worse than what it is. So, like I said about the whole texting example, you might be thinking, oh wow I really upset this person, and they’re probably never going to speak to me again, whereas in reality, their phone probably just died and they’re waiting for it to charge they can text you back.
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That happened to me,
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not proud of it but that was that did happen to me.
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So taking the time to see if if you’re any situation.
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Almost refocus your viewpoint, say, oh no like let’s just see what happens. And play it out. And if all goes all goes well, then perfect. If it doesn’t, then go from there. But just almost be present in the moment, to see where things are right at that moment.
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Number two, being aware of your overthinking things. So like I said if you know that you tend to think things through multiple times. And they tend to be
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on the negative side of things,
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then
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maybe you need to be aware of your overthinking in the future.
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Once you become aware
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of the fact that you overthink things, or
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call attention to it,
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it becomes easier to
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redirect your thoughts and train your mind to think positively. And again the site that I mentioned. I think it’s, yeah positive thinking mind calm. They have an article on training your mind to think positively. It makes a world of difference when you can start to see the best in a situation. And that’s not always easy, but it really does make a huge impact
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on your life. If you do.
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So that kind of goes with the next one is perfection is never gonna come. How many of you guys listening are perfectionist. And I’m raising my hand, because I tend to be a perfectionist.
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In some situations, that’s good,
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and other situations, not so
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much.
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I tend to want things to go a certain way and I want things to be perfect. And you never will be. Because we’re not perfect we’re human, only God is perfect.
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And once you realize that perfection,
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complete perfection is unattainable.
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Things will start to be more in perspective for you. You can want something to be perfect, but just know you’re always going to fall short of making it perfect. And so changing your expectations, is going to make it
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a little bit more in the moment, and
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you’re just going to be less anxious, knowing that things are not going to be perfect.
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Instead, try and make progress because progress. Makes perfection, even though perfection never comes. I hope that makes sense. The last one is think of what can go right instead of walking go wrong.
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And again, raise your hand if that’s you.
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I tend to
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do that in situations where I’m like
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why am I thinking like this. I know that
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1,000,001 things can go right but you tend to focus on the one thing that can go wrong.
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So look for the positives look for what can go right.
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Think of all the good things that are going to happen.
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And to keep those thoughts in your mind.
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And every time you have a negative thought, write it down, because sometimes. You’re right, for thinking those things, but it will be better if you just write it down so you can almost just say it’s out of my brain out of sight, out of mind.
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Keep the positive thoughts in your mind.
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The next one is using affirmations.
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I have
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several affirmations that I repeat to myself,
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not every day because now I don’t always think about them every single day. But having something that you think you know you live by repeating in
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your head will just recenter you
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refocus you
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snap you out if you are in like in your head way too much.
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So, an example is, I know I can accomplish things that I set my mind to, or I have trust in myself, you know, so just even affirmations like I trusted you guide or something. So, just have something that you repeat to yourself. Over and over when you need to kind of refocus yourself, and center yourself, because it takes your mind out of a cycle of negativity.
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And
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it’s, it’s good, it’s good to get out of that. And just refocus on the present.
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The next one is taking time to reflect
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and I wrote a blog post. A couple weeks ago,
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on the importance of journaling and reflecting,
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and I talked about taking time to journal and reflect on your day. And so taking the time to, you know, maybe 1520 minutes to write something down reflect on your day.
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I usually tend to do at the end of the day,
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just so I can look back over the whole day.
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And just write things down that happened during the day or if you notice that you were overthinking things, write it down. It’s so important to write it down because like I said sometimes it’s out of sight, out of mind.
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If you can just write it down, it almost feels that you’re getting it over with.
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And that’s not always going to happen because things sometimes might be bigger than you can handle than just writing down but it can be really important to just reflect on your day and reflect in inside yourself and take time to pray and reflect, with God and ask him to help you get through the next day without overthinking. The next one that I have and I think it’s so last one is accepting who you are. And that you can be the best.
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So, the more we learn to accept ourselves, and more we accept who we are. We can be honest with ourselves and know that we’re going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. And we can try our hardest and we might not always me our own expectations. But we have to learn not to criticize ourselves and be hard on ourselves, and we have to take the time to accept who we are, because each one of us is made in the image and likeness of God. And that’s beautiful. And we’re all children of God, and self acceptance can be hard for all of us. But acceptance begins with a sea of mind. Which kind of feeds into this one is gratitude. So I think I put an episode out a couple months ago about gratitude and I’ll leave a link below. But it’s being thankful for what you have and who you are. So take a time maybe when you’re doing your reflections to write down a list of what you’re thankful for. Make a list of what you’re thankful for in yourself in your life, things that you’re looking forward to things that you’re grateful for. Just to recenter yourself because gratitude is
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a very very powerful thing.
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It really centers, who you are, in what do you have so that we can learn to be faithful and
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be okay with what we have.
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And again it just takes you back to this moment. So, this is just kind of, you know, a random list of things that I’ve seen work for overthinking, and most of these actually came from positive@gmail.com. So,
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I will leave the link for you guys to check out the whole article.
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There’s a couple more that I didn’t mention that I think will be helpful for you.
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So yeah, if you are
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overthinking things just take the time to recenter yourself.
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It’s important that we
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have our head on our shoulders, and, you know, put our shoulders back and carry on confidence in ourselves and in where we’re going. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode.
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Thank you for listening,
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and make sure you leave a rating and review on this show, that would be very greatly appreciated. Let me know what kind of content you guys want to see in the future. I’m always open and open to hearing your suggestions and knowing that you guys want to keep coming back for more. Each week, so again thank you guys so much for listening. Have a wonderful week and I will see you back next Tuesday. Bye guys.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai