How I Stopped Overthinking

Key Takeaways

hey friends welcome back to the channel in this video we are going to be sharing I'm going to be talking about five practical strategies that help me stop overthinking now I have been an overthinker all my life and overthinking has nearly stopped me from doing lots of things that have ended up being very good for me overthinking nearly stopped me from starting my business from starting my YouTube channel and from asking my future wife out on our first date but over the years I have found strategies that have been actually quite helpful in combating this natural desire that me and I've heard other people have to just overthink the hell out of things and that's what we're going to talk about in the video so firstly let's talk about what is overthinking in the first place and generally if you search Wikipedia overthinking comes under broadly the same category as analysis paralysis and that's basically where we stop ourselves from doing things because we're in our heads about those things too much and we are sort of thinking that the more we think about the thing the more information we're going to get and that's in theory going to result in a more legit decision than if we just acted sooner rather than later now the opposite of analysis paralysis is X extinct by instinct which is kind of funny and that's basically the opposite problem where you're the sort of person that acts too rashly and you don't think of things enough but usually for me and most people that I know it tends to be the other way it's not that we struggle with like acting too fast it's that we struggle with acting too slow because we're just stuck in our heads trying to overthink all the time so where does overthinking come from and why do we do it and then I promise we're going to talk about the specific strategies afterwards but essentially overthinking there's probably two types of it there's like past overthinking past event overthinking and then there's future event overthinking now past event overthinking is when someone has said something or done something or something has happened in our lives and we like to construct this mental narrative about the thing and we tell ourselves this elaborate story like oh that person sent me this sort of text and therefore that must mean a b c d e f g and we construct this ridiculous narrative around it that just serves to make us feel bad when in reality that person probably didn't even mean it that way they probably weren't thinking of it in those ways and we just sort of make ourselves miserable by ascribing all of these different different this different sequence of events to something that could be just completely innocuous but that's not the kind of overthinking I want to focus on here I mean the solution to that is stoicism and like CBT and a bunch of other things along that category um I like to think about the future kind of overthinking where it's analysis paralysis in terms of we want to do a thing in the future but we find ourselves overthinking about the thing and then it stops us from actually doing the thing and I think it's really that kind of overthinking that leads us to not following our dreams and ultimately living a life that we regret because we were in our heads too much we over analyzed and that stopped us from going after the things that we really wanted to and broadly the reason that happens is anxiety slash fear now I'm going to take a page out of brene Brown's atlas of the heart which defines anxiety and fear in different ways and I think this is actually quite a quite a helpful helpful definition to appreciate basically what she says is that fear is a response to a threat in the moment and that threat might be a threat to your survival so for example if a lion were to walk into this room right now I'd feel fear because there is a threat to to my survival right now whereas anxiety is where I perceive that in the future there may be a threat to my survival and so it's worrying about this potential thing that may happen at some point in the future now no one overthinks when it comes to bug standard fear if a line came in I'd run I wouldn't overthink the hell out of out of the running but we all tend to overthink when it comes to the anxiety side of things when there is some sort of thing in the future where we think that like ah if this thing I'm thinking of doing goes badly that could be a potentially huge threat to my survival and generally it's not really our physical survival mostly when we think of overthinking in the in the modern world it's not like oh I'm really worried I'm going to be jumping over a cliff or something like it it tends to be more about social risks I'm really concerned I'm overthinking uploading my first YouTube video I'm overthinking oh asking that person out on a date because what if they rejected me and what if that would be bad and the amygdala which is the part of our brain that deals with fear and threat and stuff is very very attuned to social threat because back in the day back in our caveman times um any kind of social threat if that meant that you got Outcast from the group suddenly that means you're basically dead because now you have no friends to help protect you and that thing which was adaptive back in the day that stopped us from taking risks and that caused us to evolve this overthinking mechanism it's now not particularly helpful in the current world today where we're still operating in caveman brain mode where it's like oh my God if my friends are gonna judge me that's going to be bad for my survival when in reality it's really not and so recognizing that that really overthinking is just when we are scared of something there's a few different things that I like to keep in mind that helped me kind of take action despite my tendency to overthink the first one is what I call thinking in terms of experiments and this is like a pretty magical thing because I find that for me whenever I'm overthinking or on the verge of overthinking something I just tell myself the phrase hey it's just an experiment and there's something about that word experiment that just automatically takes all of the pressure off the decision if for example I was overthinking which I was uploading my first couple of videos to my YouTube channel ages ago when I was making Musical singing covers I kind of treated that as a bit of an experiment hey it's just an experiment I don't have to I'm not signing up to do this forever it's just an experiment and I'm going to see what happens I'm going to see how I feel and it's like when we're when we're thinking in terms of experiments we're approaching things not with a sense of wanting things to be a certain way but we're approaching them with Wonder and curiosity huh I wonder how I would respond in this kind of situation I wonder what it would be like to try and film a video of me and my friends singing a song and I wonder what it would be like for me to edit that video and that decision I made to run the experiment essentially of making music videos on my YouTube channel like way back in the day ultimately taught me how to edit videos and helped me get over that first hurdle of putting myself out there on YouTube with my channel five years ago when this thing kind of started so that was thinking in experiments and I find that that really does help my tendency to overthink things secondly I find it really helpful again to avoid overthinking to think about the idea of expected value now in the world of probability in the world of gambling in the world of Poker and actually in the world of anything in general expected value is where you multiply apply the magnitude of you know good or bad with the probability of said good or bad happening so for example if I flipped a coin and if it landed heads I was going to win a hundred dollars then the expected value of the coin flip would be 50 because there is a 50 likelihood of winning a hundred dollars now this concept is super interesting because if you start applying this to your life then you start thinking in terms of rather rather than in terms of oh my God like is this decision going to succeed if I ask that girl out is she going to say yes you're not really concerned about that all you're trying to do is weigh up is this plus EB or minus EV is it a positive expected value if I were to do the thing enough times would I expect that in the long run I would come out on top or would I expect that actually the risks do outweigh the benefits of the thing and therefore it's negative EV minus expected value and the cool thing about this is that it removes the kind of uh pressure on a single decision and it's not so much of like being wedded to the outcome of a particular decision or a particular course of action it's more about hey it's plus EB it's worth running the experiment anyway and it's like I was interviewing a friend of mine Chris box is a professional poker player and poker players judge the quality of their decisions not on the outcome but on basically the quality of the decision they made based on the information that they had was it a good decision even if it ended up losing it still could have been the right decision because you know that if you make enough of those decisions over the long term you are likely to come out on top and that's why something like sending a cold email to someone saying you want to grab coffee with them is always plus EV it's like there's basically zero downside to it and if you do it enough times you're probably going to get a response and someone's probably going to say yes to you similarly putting yourself out there on the internet starting a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel these things are generally plus EV you are very unlikely to experience significant downsides of them but if they go well as in the case of this YouTube channel it's completely changed my life it's a very plus EV decision whatever the outcome might be and so whenever I find myself in this Loop of like overthinking stuff and that analysis paralysis stops me from doing anything I think like okay what if I treated this as an experiment and then what is the EV here if it's plus EV I might as well just do the thing and just not worry about the specific outcome too much alrighty tip number 3 is the idea that fear is your compass I first came across this from my friend Nathaniel Drew who is a fellow YouTuber that that phrase put a lot of things straight in my mind because broadly what I've realized over the years is that whenever I'm scared of doing something it's probably the right thing to do because really we're only scared about doing things where we feel uncomfortable in some way we feel like it's out of our comfort zone and that is where growth is found and so if I think back to my life anytime I've made a decision where I've been scared of it I've always been glad of it and whenever I've made a decision which is safer than the option that feels scarier I've always kind of thought oh maybe I maybe I should have gone with a more scary option and so these days when I'm at a Crossroads and I find myself overthinking one easy heuristic is fear is my compass let me go towards the option that scares me more because chances are I'll be I'll be able to learn more from that than the option that's more within my comfort zone alrighty tip number four for dealing with overthinking is something that I I do all the time when it comes to publishing stuff publishing videos podcasts blog posts like any kind of creative thing any kind of business thing which is that I'm allowed to overthink all I want but it has to be on the foundation of consistent action so what do I mean by this I mean like I I see this problem in my YouTuber Academy all the time if you don't know I run a course I teach people how to be part-time YouTubers and everyone always really really really struggles with overthinking the hell out of their YouTube channels because they're always like oh I could upload this video but it's not very good the production value is not great the lighting's not great I don't know how to speak to a camera I don't know how to edit et cetera Etc et cetera and because we teach them a bunch of stuff in the course they get into this overthinking analysis paralysis mode whereas the people that succeed on YouTube the ones you know you know are students who do really well or the people the creators that I know who've succeeded on YouTube and any other business and any other content thing since the start of time have always treated consistency as the fundamental Bedrock whereby you just have to keep on publishing videos every week on top of that you know the way I think it is I can overthink the hell I can I can overthink all I would like but I have to just keep on publishing the videos every week and that means that overthinking and Analysis is all well and good but it's on top of consistent action which means I'm never in the point and I've done this occasionally and I've always kind of regretted doing this but I don't want to be in in the position where by over analyzing I actually stop doing the app action which is ultimately the thing that matters similarly this sort of attitude has stopped me from taking my health seriously a lot because I would always think that like oh you know I couldn't possibly start working out I couldn't possibly start running I couldn't possibly start eating healthily unless I had a completely firm plan and unless I knew exactly what I was doing and unless I read all the papers that showed the evidence base on XYZ now I'd speak to friends who were into running or into working out and stuff and they'd be like broke like just get started honestly showing up and going to the gym some more consistently is the main thing for getting henched all of the other stuff fine you can read about it but if you don't show up to the gym regularly it's just never going to happen for you and so I try and kind of incorporate that whenever I'm I'm worried about overthinking final concept that I find really helpful is something that my Coach Corey introduced me to a few months ago and I've been using it a lot since then and that's the idea of the MBA the mental Board of advisors one of the mental Board of advisors a mental Board of advisors is where you have people in your brain people that you admire living or dead you know it might be creative as it might be authors it might be entrepreneurs it might be your parents it might be people you look up to in some kind of way and you imagine in your head like that's your mental Board of advisors and you ask them for advice on what you should do in a situation so for me my mental Board of advisors are like Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport and Ryan holiday these are people who write books who I I like their writing basically and generally if I'm overthinking a situation if I'm analyzing the hell out of something that I don't necessarily need to be I think all right cool let's just mentally consult my mental Board of advisors what would Tim Ferriss say what would Derek's ever say what would Cal Newport say what would Ryan holiday say and it's like the that actually gives me a reasonable idea of what the reasonable plus EV response in the situation is obviously my mental construction of these people is never really going to be able to predict the future but that's not the point the point is I just need to have a bias towards action rather than a bias towards anxiety and overthinking which is kind of my default State and that's really what combating overthinking in this sense is all about it's all about replacing our bias towards thinking about stuff with a bias towards doing stuff and recognize that if we are in the thinking amp more than most people then chances are we just need to nudge ourselves more towards the action camp and I've met very few people that are in the action Camp who need to think harder about decisions most of the people that I meet including me we we tend to struggle with this idea that we're over analyzing things when really we should just be acting because once we do the thing then we get feedback and then we can improve and then we can iterate over time but at least we're moving forward rather than staying static anyway those were just some general thoughts on overthinking hopefully you found them somewhat helpful if you like this and then you might like to check out five strategies on how to beat procrastination whereas this which is a similar chilled out video where I just kind of walk around here and talk about my thoughts on how I personally beat procrastination which is another thing that I like many of us struggle with as well so check out that video over there thank you so much for watching do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you in the next video bye uh still recording isn't he what a snake