Does anxiety take control of you sometimes? Is it possible to break free from the endless cycle of overthinking?
Managing anxiety and overthinking isn’t a mysterious process; it’s a skill anyone can develop. Expert insights and practical strategies can help transform overwhelming thoughts into manageable ones, leading to a calmer and more balanced life.
Keep reading to discover how to overcome overthinking and anxiety with five proven approaches that can help you regain control of your thoughts and emotions.
Overcoming Overthinking and Anxiety
Many specialists argue that, though the effects of anxiety can feel overwhelming, they’re surmountable. You can break the cycle that creates and reinforces anxious tendencies. We’ll discuss expert advice on how to overcome overthinking and anxiety, exploring five approaches for disrupting the cycle:
- Adopt a positive mindset to curb anxious tendencies.
- Anticipate and preempt anxiety-inducing triggers.
- Implement healthy stress-relief strategies.
- Analyze and challenge anxious thoughts.
- Reflect and learn from anxious experiences.
Strategy 1: Adopt a Positive Attitude to Curb Anxious Tendencies
In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie argues that a positive attitude reduces anxiety’s power over you, helping you handle concerns rationally and focus on life’s positives. A negative attitude does the opposite, making small issues seem large and promoting constant worry.
Physician Lissa Rankin (Mind Over Medicine) notes that being positive doesn’t mean suppressing negative emotions. Instead, acknowledging them helps process them effectively.
Let’s look at three ways to stay positive and anxiety-free.
Method #1: Cultivate Meaning and Purpose
Amelia Nagoski and Emily Nagoski (Burnout) state that having purpose enhances resilience and helps contextualize stressors. Rankin adds that embracing spirituality expands awareness and promotes gratitude. Carnegie recommends developing spiritual connections through reflection and prayer, which provides emotional support and clarity.
Method #2: Engage Your Mind Productively
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow) explains that focused engagement prevents anxious thoughts by keeping you present. Carnegie advocates pursuing engaging work while taking regular breaks to prevent fatigue and promote clear thinking.
Method #3: Nurture Your Relationships
The Nagoski sisters emphasize that supportive relationships are essential for maintaining positivity. Key elements include:
- Balanced give-and-take
- Empathetic connection
In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal recommends being open about struggles to build supportive connections. Carnegie suggests doing daily good deeds to strengthen relationships and maintain positivity while distracting from personal worries.
Strategy 2: Anticipate Triggers and Develop Preemptive Strategies
A key part of maintaining a positive attitude and managing anxiety is preempting situations that might trigger negative or worrisome thoughts. Experts suggest two methods for preempting anxiety-inducing triggers: focusing on what you can control and making life more predictable.
Method #1: Focus on What You Can Control
According to Nick Trenton in Stop Overthinking, you’re more likely to feel anxious when you fixate on things outside of your control. Therefore, he suggests limiting your focus to what you do have control over. For example, instead of worrying about an economic downturn, focus on how you can manage your money to increase your financial security. Once you’ve pinpointed triggers within your control, Trenton suggests two preemptive actions you can take.
- Avoid them: Cut out unnecessary people or situations that make you feel anxious. For instance, if driving on the highway in heavy traffic makes you feel uncomfortable, try taking a local route or using public transportation.
- Change them: When you can’t avoid a stressful situation, consider what you can change to reduce your anxiety. For example, if you must drive on the highway, incorporate calming activities into your routine, such as meditating before you set off or listening to classical music while you drive.
Method #2: Make Life More Predictable
Robert Sapolsky says that making life more predictable helps eliminate minor, daily fears that add weight to your anxieties—such as worries about getting your kids to school on time or concerns about meeting work deadlines. Ways you can introduce predictability into your life include making schedules based on various timeframes (daily, weekly, yearly) and making a budget to keep track of expenses.
Trenton takes this advice further, suggesting that you make deliberate choices about how you spend your time by identifying your top priorities and setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. When you make these decisions up front, you’ll know exactly how to focus your time and energy, which will leave you less room to overthink and worry.
Strategy 3: Implement Healthy Stress-Relief Strategies
When anxiety strikes, control your thoughts and emotions through three methods.
Method #1: Release Pent-Up Energy
The Nagoski sisters recommend physical activity to alleviate anxiety, as it mirrors our primal stress responses of running, fighting, or yelling. Options include exercise, screaming into a pillow, crying, or muscle relaxation exercises. Sapolsky notes these provide catharsis and distraction from anxiety.
Method #2: Engage Your Five Senses
Trenton recommends grounding yourself by:
- Looking at five things
- Touching four things
- Listening for three sounds
- Detecting two smells
- Noting one taste
Method #3: Replace Stress-Inducing Habits With Mindfulness
In Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer advocates mindfulness—paying attention to the present moment without judgment. He favors mindfulness for several reasons:
- Always available, requiring no special circumstances
- Inherently rewarding and doesn’t diminish over time
- Free from negative side effects, unlike other coping mechanisms (drinking, avoidance) that can increase anxiety
Strategy 4: Analyze and Challenge Anxious Thoughts
In the previous strategy, we focused on how you can calm your stress response and feel more in control of your thoughts and emotions. Now, let’s focus on reframing your thoughts about the cause of your anxiety so that you can approach it more positively and prevent additional anxieties from taking root in your mind.
In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains that you need to actively challenge your anxious thoughts to defeat them. He suggests asking yourself analytical questions such as how likely a feared outcome is, what you could do to prevent that outcome or deal with it if it occurred, and whether your worrying is actually helping you. Carnegie clarifies that the process of analysis neutralizes negative emotions created by anxiety—such as fear, panic, or dread—by breaking worrisome situations down to their basic facts. This helps you to view your situation objectively and come up with solutions to resolve your concerns.
Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) offers another practical way to analyze your anxiety and come up with solutions for alleviating it: Ask yourself problem-solving questions:
- What’s good about this situation? This shifts your mindset from being anxious about the circumstance to what you can learn from it.
- What needs improvement? This question looks for ways to resolve your anxiety, presupposing your circumstances will improve.
- What am I willing to do to improve the situation? This question generates specific actions toward resolution.
- What am I willing to stop doing to improve the situation? This question identifies disempowering habits getting in the way of resolution.
- How can I enjoy the resolution process? This question encourages you to find pleasure in resolving the cause of your anxiety and motivates you to take immediate action.
McGonigal adds that you’re more likely to feel capable of finding a solution that alleviates your anxiety if you take account of your resources. You might do this by acknowledging your strengths, reflecting on moments in the past when you’ve handled similar situations, or thinking of friends or colleagues who can offer support.
Strategy 5: Reflect and Learn From Anxious Experiences
Once your anxiety has passed, take time to reflect and learn from your experience. According to Trenton, this will help you productively process your anxious thoughts and emotions, understand what triggers them, and glean insights on how you can better cope with anxiety in the future.
Trenton suggests that you can reflect and learn from your anxious experience by writing in a journal: Start by recounting the situation and describing the thoughts and feelings you had at that moment. Consider using a rating scale for your anxiety levels and try to notice any patterns of what’s most frequently causing you anxiety. Then, shift your focus to extracting something positive from the situation.
For example, if you felt anxious after a sudden workload increase, you might record feeling overwhelmed and rate your anxiety as 8 out of 10. Then, you might focus on how you managed to complete your work efficiently despite the pressure.
Additionally, if you adopted a positive anxiety-relief strategy, such as engaging your five senses or practicing mindfulness, make a note of how it helped you. According to McGonigal in The Willpower Instinct, the next time you get the urge to engage in an unhealthy stress-relief habit, this note will remind you that there are healthier ways to alleviate your stress. Over time, this process will reprogram your response to anxiety by turning your attention away from unhealthy habits and toward constructive ones.
