Straddling the Line Between Thinking and Overthinking
The struggle is real.
I think. A lot. About a lot of things. Some of this comes from my deep love of learning. One reason I read as many nonfiction books as I do is to learn new things about life, the universe, and everything. There is always something new to be learned.
More than that, I always have new things to learn about myself. My inner being, the things that live in my subconscious, are variable and fascinating. Some make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Others I can recognize as old data I haven’t bothered to remove, repair, or replace. And still other things in my subconscious weren’t placed there by me; I just allowed them to settle in rent-free.
When I started practicing active mindfulness, I began to live better. My depression was easier to put in check. I gained the ability to make more conscious choices and decisions to drive who, what, where, how, and why I desire to be. The empowerment of this has been incredible. Not perfect; there are still bad days and moments when the black dog manages to tackle me. But overall, living mindfully and more in the here and now has made me feel more in control of my life.
However, there’s a lot in my subconscious that I struggle with. The subconscious mind is complicated because it’s always in the background and only comes to the foreground when you access it via the conscious mind. The subconscious mind is where the line between thinking and overthinking tends to come into play.
Please allow me to elaborate.
The three-mind problem
Every single human being on Planet Earth is of three minds. One you control, one you don’t, one you can’t so much control as alter.
Let’s start with the mind you don’t control. The Unconscious Mind is how you, as a living being, function. It drives your organs, the beating of your heart, breathing, the firing of neurons, muscles, and all that. The only control you have is when you use your conscious mind to deepen or shallow your breathing and speed up or slow down your heart (which not everyone can do). The unconscious mind is always on, doing its thing.
The Conscious Mind is your mindset/headspace/psyche self, here and now. This is where you make choices and decisions to do things, be things, make and break things, and so on. The conscious mind is how you pick what to wear, drive your car, write something like this blog, and the like. This is you in the driver’s seat of your head, heart, and soul. Ultimately, you control the conscious mind.
The Subconscious Mind is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories live. Everything you experience, all the sensations and such, creates imprints in the subconscious. This can be literal and figurative, as the intangibles you encounter make the same imprint as tangible things do.
The subconscious mind is like a sponge. It absorbs everything. Hence, when you let it keep absorbing unchecked, it holds onto stuff you’d probably rather it didn’t. It can’t be controlled, but it can be altered.
How? By applying active conscious awareness. Practicing mindfulness is how you find what’s in your subconscious, then choose what to do with that – whether you keep it or discard it.
There is, of course, a complication that comes with accessing and altering your subconscious mind.
Thinking and overthinking
Much of what takes root in your subconscious mind is not entirely yours. Or rather, it’s not current and up-to-date. For example, I was told things in my youth about money and weight loss that I consciously know are complete bullshit, but still subconsciously subscribe to.
To deal with that, I need to give it some thought. It takes choosing to look into my subconscious beliefs and address that old bullshit. Once I recognize and acknowledge it, I can move forward altering it.
Except that’s an oversimplification. Sometimes the root I think I’ve found is only a small part of the greater whole. I need to look more closely, dig deeper, and try to find the much more complicated reason.
Or do I? This is where thinking and overthinking come in. For example, I often fight a fear of failure that’s equal to my fear of success. However, neither of these is my true fear. No, the true fear is fear of abandonment.
Except that’s not the whole picture. It’s deeper than abandonment. It’s a fear of exile, of utter disregard, rejection, and worse. Kind of like some bizarre living death, maybe? I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it.
This is where thinking turns into overthinking. I can focus on this until I drive myself mad, and I have. The real question is, will overthinking this help me change it? More often than not, the answer is no.
The key to straddling the line between thinking and overthinking is mindfulness. That’s because overthinking is rumination in your subconscious that can easily take you out of the here and now, and active mindfulness.
Thinking, overthinking, choices, and decisions
The only genuine control you and I have over our lives is in our conscious minds. That’s because nobody but you is in your head, heart, and soul. Nobody else is in your mind, body, and spirit. No matter how much access you give someone, they’re not in there with you.
Ergo, your conscious mind, your mindset/headspace/psyche self, is controlled by you alone. This is done by making choices and decisions right here, right now, in the present. Your subconscious mind, however, is always there in the background, holding data old and new, which only you can access, accept, reject, and/or alter.
Changing habits is a perfect example of how this works. First, you identify the habit. Then you recognize and acknowledge it. From there, you make a new choice and/or decision to alter/remove/replace it. Then there are additional actions until it becomes a new habit.
This is thinking versus overthinking. Overthinking is when you identify a belief or value that no longer suits you and work on changing it. While it’s good to get at the root to remove what’s there, sometimes you can’t get all of what’s beneath the surface.
Why? Because often this involves trying to find a way to change the past. Overthinking often involves examining the past and considering what you could have done differently, who you could have been that you weren’t, why you chose what you did or didn’t, where you were, and how it all went down. And that just drives you crazy.
The past has come and gone. It can’t be changed, altered, undone, redone, or what-have-you. All you can do is learn from it and move on.
Overthinking, unfortunately, can get you stuck and interfere with changes you desire to make.
Be here now, thinking
You make the choices and decisions about who, what, where, how, and why you are. Yes, sometimes they’re complicated; sometimes there are less-than-optimal choices available, circumstances, and other things that impact them. Yet when all is said and done, you choose and decide.
In this way, you can see when you are crossing that line between thinking and overthinking. As I explore how I’m self-sabotaging and blocking myself, I’m working on better recognizing when I reach the point where I have what I need to make changes.
The thing is, there is ALWAYS room for change. That’s not a bad thing, though. That’s because the one and only constant in the whole universe is change. Choosing it for yourself is where you can take control, but only when it comes to yourself.
When you find an answer and make a change, you might discover it’s just a stepping stone. Now you need to take a new approach, a new path, and implement another change. Overthinking is when you dive in so deeply that you don’t do anything. You don’t act. Before you know it, the molehill is a mountain, and it feels harder to scale it.
By practicing active conscious awareness, being in the now, you can determine if you’re thinking or overthinking about this, that, or the other thing, and choose and/or decide what to do from there.
Are you familiar with the struggle between thinking and overthinking?
This is the seventh-hundred-seventy-seventh (777) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share my philosophy because I desire to make a difference in the world and help as many people as I can to find their empowerment with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to share and/or repost where it might do good for you and others.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
Also, please check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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