Overthinking as a concept in Spiritual Growth has been largely generalised over the time. The common accepted definition of overthinking is “when you think about something too much or for too long”. Overthinking should not be measured in time but as a cause for ‘inaction’. If you have not been taking action and spending most of the time analyzing and planning, perhaps that’s when you can say that you are overthinking. However, there may be situations of high intensity or impact in life that may require to think over for even a few days, or may be it requires a sub-event to trigger and the resultant impact will help you decide the further course of action, then it’s not overthinking.
There can be multiple approaches and perspectives to look at the habit of overthinking such as a Spiritual Approach, Psychological approach and Ayurvedic approach (yes, you read it write ayurveda). Let me explain them briefly.
Approaches
A spiritual approach to look at the habit of overthinking is from the lens of the spiritual outcome of ‘living in the present moment’. Whenever we are overthinking, we are either attaching ourselves to our past by revisiting the memories or living in the future by imagining it. Hence a spiritual solution is to train your mind to remain in the present experience of life. There are multiple methods of doing this, meditation and visual affirmations work best.
Psychological approach to overthinking is to first understand your personality type and dominant brain side (left brain or right brain). There are multiple personality assessments that give a correlation between your personality type and emotional wellbeing. Overthinking is often a byproduct of certain personalities like planners and strategists. However, Finishers and Executors are often busy with operational thinking. The self awareness of the personality helps in building a roadmap for personal development where a Mentor or a Life Coach can be very useful to overcome this habit.
There is an Ayurvedic Approach to overthinking as well. According to ayurveda there are 3 types of body compositions /nature-conduct (prakrities) i.e Kapha, Pitta (fire-heat element) and Vatta (wind-movement element). All human bodies are combinations of these nature-conducts. I.e way the body functions. Imbalance in any of these causes disease in the body. However, apart from their medical properties, these prakraties also have an impact on a person’s behaviour. It is seen that people with a dominant Pitta prakriti have a hyper-active mind and they are very spontaneous in nature with short attention span, whereas people with dominant Vatta prakriti are the ones who will generally get swayed easily and are prone to overthinking. People with Kapha prakriti are the ones who take life as it comes and go easy with the flow. Many people also have a dominant combination of any 2 of these prakrities. Hence keeping them (also referred as Tri-doshas) in balance helps in bringing peace of mind.
In my opinion we think-over to seek clarity in life, but we overthink due to following reasons
- Fear of failure & Success: overthinking delays the action temporarily
- Negative motivation (when motivation is derived from a “running-away” motive)
- Inactive body or inactive and sedentary physical life
- Lack of clarity in purpose and goals in life
The Solution
A close friend, mentor or a life coach can play an important role in bringing self awareness and clarity. With clarity comes roadmap and this is followed by the zeal to work. But the most dangerous state is to be in the state of fear of failure and success. Not having belief in one’s capability creates the fear to fail and contrary fear of being alone at the top and losing everyone in life and lack of trust in one’s ability to maintain success leads to the fear of success. In either of the fears one tends to delay the action by putting the maximum time and energy in planning and strategizing. It’s good to spend quality time in the planning stage to reduce waste in execution but not compromising on the action time. The time division and scheduling should be pre-established to keep a check on over-planning and over-analyzing.
You can take any approach to counter overthinking – spiritual, psychological, ayurvedic or any other logical approach, what remains fundamental to counter this habit is to develop a strong mind-control and strong sense of purpose and discipline in life.
Sending Love, Laughter and Joy
Parth