3 Phrases You Can Use To Shut Down Over Thinking

Welcome to planet Earth and the human race where the mortality rate is 100%, and you will spend a lot of your quiet moments overthinking. As humans, we love to indulge in the self-soothing of figuring out every worst case scenario that could befall us with every decision we have to make. Think of how many minutes a day you spend with your thoughts swirling around in a soup of what-ifs?

Even I fall prey to this on the daily, and I pride myself in being a person who truly does not give a flip about most things and takes life as it’s served up. Want to know what I was overthinking about before I sat down to write this article? Yoga. Literally the tool we are supposed to use to stop overthinking and live in the moment, I was overthinking about. What time should I practice? What flow should I do today? Do I repeat what I did last Tuesday or is that wrong? What playlist would be the best?

I burned brain cells on nothing. Absolutely nothing. I stopped the swirl and reminded myself of the three things I always say if I’m jumping on that mental treadmill that just keeps me busy, but doesn’t actually get anywhere.

SO WHAT?!

I love the phrase, ‘so what?’ because whether you say it to yourself or to someone all up in your business, it’s a great way to diffuse something intrusive. So what if I do the same workout? Are the yoga police going to kick in my door and arrest me for not varying my practice enough? Nope. Saying this to yourself makes you give yourself tangible reasons for why a particular thought is taking up so much rent free space in your head. It’s also a fantastic way to get your mind in it’s rational place again.

WHO CARES?!

No one in the world cares about what I do for my yoga practice today. Not. One. Single. Soul. Do you care what I do? Nope. Does my dog care? Not if I walk her first. Do my kids care? Not if there’s food in the house and their phones are working. Nobody thinks about you as much as you think about you, so trust me when I say, literally no one cares about 99% of the things you’re overthinking about. Chances are, you won’t even care about it tomorrow, either.

AND?!

This is probably the most effective out of all of the three phrases, because it forces you to give yourself tangible outcomes to whatever scenario you are intellectually beating to death. So I repeat last Tuesday’s yoga practice this afternoon to a crappy playlist. AND?! What is the outcome of this decision. Nothing. I practiced yoga. Thank you, goodbye, the end. Nobody dies, the house doesn’t burn down, and I have realigned my body in a healthy way. That’s really all that can happen.

Hopefully this little trick I’ve practiced over the years can help you stop overthinking in its tracks, or at least allow you to get out of the vortex of your own thoughts and back to being rational about things. Remember, it’s okay to get it wrong sometimes. Don’t waste too much time avoiding it and missing out on what can potentially be awesome.