How to Stop Overthinking: The End of the Doom Loop

You're still overthinking, aren't you?

Have you tried the clinical advice yet? It's backed by evidence, you know.

But distracting yourself hasn't worked in the long term, has it? No matter how many hobbies you start or audiobooks you listen to, the thought loops are still waiting patiently for you.

Scheduling time to worry works about as well as telling the loud traffic exactly when they can pass your window.

Naming your thoughts and feelings has been as effective as naming the mice that live in the walls of your garage.

I have found the most helpful pieces of advice for the long term to be exercise, gratitude, and taking action on what I can. I've tried them all.

Because I'm an overthinker.

I'm a ruminator.

I have lived in mental doom loops for years, and have tried all the techniques.

In fact, it wasn't until I had a bad rumination day last week, where I spent the morning stuck thinking about a list of mistakes I made twenty years ago, that I realized I have largely overcome my negative thought traps. They aren't a major part of my life anymore.

And I didn't meditate them away, though I gained a lot from meditation.
I didn't distract myself so much the negativity gave up on me, though I've learned amazing things from literally thousands of hours of audiobooks.

Yes, I had a bad morning. But it's no longer a habitual trap. And I know exactly why it showed up, and exactly what to do about it.

I want to show you what helped me. I'm confident it will help you.

But first, we need to understand overthinking more deeply before we can deal with it. We are going to stop distracting ourselves and start healing.

Why We Overthink

Most of the advice to stop overthinking treats our mental loops as a glitch. A sort of short circuit, and they give you methods for resetting the breaker.

But your brain is not glitching during your doom loops, it's doing what it does best. It is pursuing a goal.

If you want to stop overthinking, you have to change your brain's goals.

The three types of overthinking have three different goals.
You will probably recognize these three types of Doom Loops. You've heard advice about the first two, but nobody talks about the third. If you're a true overthinker, I think you'll recognize it.

Regret: Stuck in the past

• The message: I did bad things.

• The feelings: I feel sad and ashamed.

• The goal: I need to punish myself.

• Root cause: Fragmentation. You continue to reject the unpleasant parts of yourself in order to avoid unpleasant feelings.

In the regret loop, you're stuck thinking about what went wrong, what you should have said, the years you wasted, your terrible decisions.

The unpleasant emotions provide the motivating energy for your mind to try to do something about it. So your mind believes you have unfinished business. You did wrong, so you must be punished. Once the punishment is served, the situation will be resolved.

Except, there has been no verdict given, no sentence passed. There is no bill to pay. No debt to settle.

Your past failures remain undefined, and there is no form of justice to appease.

So it remains unresolved, and you punish yourself a little more every time you have a spare moment, with the unconscious goal of satisfying your accusers.

You criticize yourself. You internalize your failures. You hold yourself back because you don't deserve any better.

If restitution can be made, you should make it. But most Regret Loops have no restitution available. They only have punishment.

When can the self-punishment stop?

When you satisfy the demands of justice.

Worry: Stuck in the future

• The message: Bad things are going to happen.

• The feelings: I feel afraid and powerless.

• The goal: Identify all possible dangers because I don't know what to do.

• Root cause: Serving a future assigned to you rather than a future you have chosen.

The Worry Loop is a fixation on the potential threats of the future. What you're unprepared for. What people are going to do and say. What tragedies are going to happen. What bad news you're going to learn. The disappointments you're going to experience.

It's all based in fear of harm. Your emotions are screaming at you that you aren't safe, and like a gazelle on the savannah, you keep scanning, scanning, scanning the horizon because you know there are cheetahs around.

Of course you can't stop worrying. You feel threatened and powerless to deal with the threats, and your mind is trying its best to keep you safe.

You know when I am most vigilant? When I'm swimming in the ocean. The ocean, for me, is full of threats, and I don't know what most of them are. At any moment, I could be bitten, stabbed, stung, suffocated, or slimed. Humans are not at our best in the ocean. Sure, we enjoy it, and many people love it, but everyone eventually has to come back to a dry surface.

We were not designed to survive in the ocean for long.

You are afraid of the future because you are living in an environment that was not designed for your wellbeing. It was designed by someone else to benefit someone else, and you intuitively know that in your current situation, you are the prey animal.

Until you change your situation, your mind will keep scanning your horizons for danger because, above all, it's trying to keep you safe.

Revenge: Stuck on offense

• The message: They beat me.

• The feelings: I feel angry and ashamed.

• The goal: Hurt them back.

• Root cause: Being in a state of vulnerable poverty.

If you're an overthinker like me, you'll recognize the Revenge Loop. Someone wronged you. They stole something from you, insulted you, got what you deserved.

They won the fight. They targeted you and succeeded.

They beat you.

You feel a combination of anger at them and shame that you could be beaten. You never want that to happen again.

You want to get them back. You want to beat them.

So your mind goes to work, circling the offense, trying to figure out ways to hurt them.

But you're stuck in the loop because you are powerless to actually beat them. You are more impoverished by what they did and powerless to undo it.

You can't undo the insult. You can't get the money back. You can't restore your lost status. You can't force them to give you what you deserve.

You might be fantasizing of getting actual revenge on them, or just telling yourself over and over how terrible they are, and exactly what they did. Either way, your mind circles, reinforcing your rage, plotting their destruction.

Your mind will keep planning restitution and revenge until the loss feels recovered.

You are stuck overthinking because your mind has unfinished goals. No amount of distraction, no amount of grounding will satisfy your mind before it feels like it has achieved its goals for taking care of you.

To stop overthinking, you have to give your mind more beneficial goals. More mature goals.

Healing Regret Loops

If Regret Loops are caused by fragmentation, healing comes through integration.

Parenting is hard. My wife and I have often struggled to manage our own frustrations while dealing with the crazy situations kids throw at you. Once, we were complaining to each other about one of our kids, and I just blurted out, "He is so immature!"

This kicked us both out of the complaining cycle. Of course he's acting like a five year old. He's five. He is immature. He is acting like the child he is. Of course he caused that problem.

We should have the same grace for our past selves.

There is no justice that needs to be appeased. There was no crime.
There is no atonement that must be made. There was no sin.

Only immaturity, ignorance, and foolishness.

We have aspirations for greatness for each of our kids, and we often struggle to hold them to the standard of their present, rather than the standard of their potential.

Stop punishing yourself for being less mature yesterday than you are today. You can stop punishing your present self for the mistakes of your past self. Those are functionally different people.

It's unjust to punish a child for acting childish.
It's a violation of justice to punish one person for the crimes of another.

Stop punishing.

Instead, start integrating.

The path to healing is the path of welcoming all parts of yourself into yourself, to become a whole person. The Self of the past is not you, but it is part of you. You cannot be whole as long as you keep rejecting parts of yourself, regardless of how painful or embarrassing those parts may feel.

Subconsciously, you believe that if you punish yourself enough, the faults of your past will be erased. You want them to go away. They keep coming back because they are part of you. They can't disappear. You can only fight them or welcome them.

Carl Jung had a name for the parts of ourselves we reject. He called it The Shadow. It's the dark parts we want to avoid seeing, but the more we try to ignore them, the stronger they grow.

Integration is the process of welcoming into us the parts we have rejected.

I am not as wonderful as I present myself. I make good decisions and I make mistakes. I am smart and I am foolish. I love people and I hurt people. I am generous and I am selfish. I am ambitious and I am lazy. I am growing and I am immature. I am infinitely valuable and I am cosmically insignificant.

I am human.

So are you.

The years I wasted are part of me whether I like them or not. But they will only stop haunting me when I stop insulting myself for them and welcome them as a valid member of my wholeness.

They had a role in my life. They were my wanderings. They brought me experience and revealed my foolishness. I couldn't be who I am today without them. Welcome home, Wasted Years, you belong here, and you don't owe me anything.

The next time you notice the Regret Loop, name your mistake, recognize who you were when you made it, and open your heart to that part of yourself. Welcome them home, with their muddy shoes and foul language and everything. They are part of your wholeness, and you won't feel truly at home without them.

The goal of the Regret Loop was to punish your present self.
Your new goal of Integration is to welcome home all your beautifully messy parts.

Healing Worry Loops

Worry Loops are caused by living an assigned future. Healing comes through designing your own future.

You worry because you have no control over your future.

If you could control your future, you would remove all the threats, all the dangers, and you would sleep through the night like the dead.

There are three things that determine your future: chance, other people, and you.
If you don't control the future, who does? It must be some combination of chance and others.

Most people don't design their own lives, they follow the pre-programmed path to "success." Go to school, get a job, make a family, retire, and die.

Few people design their lives within this path, and even fewer create a different path altogether.

You worry about your future because you are subconsciously rejecting the future you have been given. That future is hostile. It is unpleasant. You don't want it. Your worry is an active resistance to what tomorrow promises.

What if you had a different future?

Can you imagine a future you want to live in? What would a pleasant tomorrow look like? Can you see it?

Who are you in the future you want? What are you doing? What are you creating? How are you taking care of your chosen people? What skills do you have? What are you practicing? Who do you spend time with?

I want you to take a moment to close your eyes and see it in your mind. Step into the vision. Experience how it feels. Smell it.

If you had that future, it would draw you forward into tomorrow. No resistance. No worry. Enthusiasm. Excitement. Energy. Hope.

Yes, you say, but that future only exists in my imagination. Real life is still a major bummer.

And landing on the moon only existed in John F. Kennedy's imagination until he made it happen.

Healing from Worry Loops comes by taking on projects that create the future you envision. You first have to design the vision. Then, identify one project that will help you grow into the person you must become for that vision to be reality. You might have to learn a new skill. You might have to start creating assets and offers. You might have to initiate the hard conversation you've been avoiding.

Yes, your transforming project might function as another distraction technique, but it will begin healing your underlying lack of vision, changing your environment so it nurtures you instead of keeping you trapped as the gazelle, jumping at every shadow in the grass.

The goal of the Worry Loop was to keep you safe by identifying all the possible dangers.
The new goal of Vision is to take on projects that transform you and your world into a future of your own design.

Healing Revenge Loops

Revenge Loops are caused by living in vulnerable poverty. Healing comes by creating abundance.

Imagine you are a pinecone. You look good, but you're sort of brittle, and you have to stay prickly to be safe. You are sitting there, minding your own pinecone business in the forest, when someone comes along and drops a rock on you. You are crushed.

Now, imagine you are the pine tree. You look good, but you're not brittle. You might still be prickly in places, but not because you have to be. You are standing there, minding your own pine tree business in the forest, when someone comes along and throws a rock at you. It bounces off. It may have stung a bit, but it was really no big deal.

That is what abundance feels like. In abundance, you have enough. Enough that insults are meaningless. Enough that you can be generous toward thieves. Enough that doing extra feels like an afterthought. Enough that attacks fail as they materialize.

Abundance means that you have so many resources, both internal and external, that the cost no longer matters.

My wife and I once took care of some homeless kids for a couple weeks while their mom traveled for a short work assignment. I was dropping the sister off at the bus stop, and she kept trying to cut me down, make me feel stupid, insult me. She was trying to get under my skin any way she could. I just kept making lighthearted banter and laughed when she insulted me.

After she got on the bus, my own kids asked how I could handle all that without getting angry. I told them she was going through a really hard time and is trying to figure out who she can trust. Her insults can only hurt me if I let them, and there is no threat to me if I don't feel them as threatening.

I was abundant enough that she could take everything she wanted from me without it costing me anything.

A journal entry from Marcus Aurelius helped me gain this type of internal abundance.
He wrote, "I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. ... I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him."

That is internal abundance.

But how do you create this type of abundance?

It starts with one response: "No big deal."

She insulted me? No big deal.
He took my opportunity? No big deal.
They broke into my yard and stole my kid's bike? No big deal.

Does it cost? Yes. But nothing you can't handle. You're abundant. You have so much internal strength, depth of vision, and creative energy that such a small thing could never hold you back.

You're going places. Why would you stop to deal with every barking dog along the way?

It takes more time to create abundance in external resources.

These are the physical, financial, institutional, and above all, social resources that form the web of strength that ties up the attacks before they can reach you.

Physical resources include the health of your body. Are you physically strong enough to have the energy and resilience to fuel your life?

Financial resources include incomes, assets, and offers. Income is money that comes to you, especially the cashflows above your expenses. Assets are anything you control that creates more cashflow. Offers are ways you offer to be valuable to others in exchange for cashflow. If you don't have financial abundance, it's time to increase your income, acquire assets, and design offers. You can create assets and offers with nothing more than your mind and an internet connection.

Institutional resources are the services society provides to create stability and prosperity. Everything from public assistance to public libraries. Public transportation and public defenders. Small claims courts and departments of labor. Stock markets and hospitals. Doctors and detectives. Accountants and attorneys.

The more familiar you are with navigating institutions, the more resources you have available, the more recourse you have, and the more connected you are to the administrative power centers of your community.

Social resources are your connections with other people. This is the connection made with people you can look in the eye or talk with on the phone. People with names who care about you because you care about them. Your family, friends, neighbors, employees, employers, customers, and coworkers. It's that girl you see every day at the coffee shop and the guy at church with the pickup truck. It's a network of goodwill, a collection of people who have each others' backs.

Abundance comes from vast internal and external resources. Begin creating them today.

Create abundance. Have so much extra that you can turn theft into a gift. Loss into a game. Insults into a joke. Threats into a party among your comrades.

The goal of the Revenge Loop is to hurt them back.
The new goal of Abundance is to create so many resources that their attacks seem silly.

The End of Overthinking

We can't overthink our way out of overthinking. We have to heal. We have to exchange the immature goals of the ruminating mind for the constructive goals of the mature mind.

Will you overthink again? Probably. But you'll know how to heal it, not distract it.

You will be able to state truthfully:

• I am Integrated. I am an infinitely valuable and deeply flawed human growing out of immaturity into a life of care that makes my mistakes irrelevant.

• I am Visionary. I am building the future of my own design where my problems are puzzles of the creative process.

• I am Abundant. I have overflowing internal resources to be generous to even the lowest of people, and powerful external resources to thrive through both peace and hostility.

You will shift from a reactive mind that is a victim to the events of your past, present, and future, to a proactive mind that shapes the world around you.

You will address the underlying structural weaknesses so your mind will have more interesting things to circle around.

Imagine, instead of negative loops, you spent an entire day with different types of thoughts.

Who am I taking care of? How can I provide value? How can I make their lives better? What do I want for my future? What abundance am I grateful for? In what ways are my plans succeeding? How have I grown? Who do I want to become? Who can I meet? How can I grow today? What can I create today?

If you were stuck overthinking thoughts like these, would you even want to stop?