So you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed or perhaps are going through a hard time. Repetitive negative thoughts that seem to take on a life of their own can be exhausting, so here’s a quick explainer and tip!

Eckhart Tolle makes a great point that negative thoughts have an obsessive, multiplying quality to them, whereas positive thoughts are more able to let themselves go. This strongly determines the balance between overthinking and being in the creative present.

Let’s use a story to illustrate this dynamic and how it can be turned around.

So it goes like this, Dave gets up and bangs his toe on the coffee table, spills his coffee over him, and gets a text from a colleague who is meant to help him to deliver a key presentation, saying they can’t come in today. Dave is feeling sorry for himself and rather hopeless at this point, but at the forefront of his mind is this — he’s pretty pissed off!

Driving to work, Dave’s anger is then directed at his job more broadly; his boss, the demands of the job, and it goes on and on. He’s sure Sam’s being sampling his lunch. He’s giving them all a piece of his mind in his head — not that it’s going to happen in all likeliness. He’s been here before.

So instead, Dave catches a breath and notices what is going on, tracing this thought chain back, the first events of the day are what set him off. Dave forgives himself for making the ‘mistake’ of hitting his toe and spilling his coffee and lets himself create a wider space for this colleague, who may be ill or even terrified of the presentation. Heck, he may even have been abducted by aliens and forced to call in sick at probe-point. Poor guy.

Their job isn’t easy, it’s demanding too, Dave wonders if others feel like him, and empathy washes over him and cleanses his anger, letting him return to a more productive equilibrium for the day ahead. Now that he’s in awareness, he purposefully directs his thoughts towards the good things around him and the better possibilities of the day; like that he will be appreciated for delivering the presentation solo, and he’s glad to do it.

This story encapsulates a set of useful tips:

• Notice when you’re overthinking, that’s the first step
• Get into your body and the environment, take a breath
• Trace how you may have gotten into this spiral and the framing/assumptions at play, that are driving these multiplying feelings
• Expand the frame to include more possibilities which will give you a wider space for understanding and positive emotions.
• You can take your assumptions and the possibilities to the extreme to amuse yourself too. This will create a pattern break in your emotion-thought loop.
• Now that you’re more able to guide your thoughts, create some grateful thoughts for the day so far, the past, and things you can look forward to in the day and in the future.

By this point, you’ll have given yourself an emotional reset and will find yourself in a more useful and joyful state for the day! This is a short-term solution that can become an empowering habit.

Hope this can help you, and let me know your thoughts and other tips for overthinking!