PDF Summary:Stop Overthinking, by Nick Trenton

Have you ever spent a long time worrying about a problem only to end up feeling stressed and no closer to a solution? In Stop Overthinking, Nick Trenton explains that you were probably overthinking the problem: reflecting on it so much that it made you feel bad. He argues that by adopting stress management skills and replacing your negative thought habits with a positive mental framework, you can stay grounded in the present moment and live a productive life driven by action and control rather than endless worrying.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what overthinking is and how it’s connected to stress and anxiety. Then, we’ll explore ways you can manage stress before, during, and after it happens with various research-based techniques. Finally, we’ll show how you can reshape your negative thinking habits into positive ones. Along the way, we’ll compare Trenton’s strategies with those of other coaches and thinkers such as Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant) and Judson Brewer (Unwinding Anxiety), and offer additional actionable insights to overcome your negative thought patterns.

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During: Empower Yourself to Handle Stress

Although good time management habits can help prevent stress in your life, you won’t be able to avoid it entirely. When stress does happen, you can take a constructive approach to it and calm yourself through grounding practices.

Constructive Approaches to Stress

Instead of letting your anxious thoughts take over, try practicing four stress approaches to regain a sense of control:

Avoid the situation. Cut out unnecessary people or situations that cause you stress. For instance, if driving on the highway in heavy traffic makes you feel uncomfortable, try taking a local route or using public transportation.

Change the situation. When you can’t avoid a stressful situation, consider what you can change to reduce the stress. For example, if you’re struggling to concentrate on your work because of a construction project outside your building, purchase noise-canceling headphones. Also, people around you often aren’t aware of what’s bothering you about a situation. To change it, you often must speak out and express your needs and limitations. For example, if a friend needs to rant but you have a project due at the end of the day, respectfully communicate that you can’t hear them out right now.

Make peace with the situation. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to make a stressful situation better. Instead of worrying endlessly, acknowledge your feelings and make peace with the situation. For example, if your relative is in the hospital and you’re worried about their condition, acknowledge and accept that you feel concerned and understand there’s nothing you can do to alter the situation right now.

Adapt to the situation. Ease the stress of a challenging situation by changing your expectations. For example, if you’re frustrated because a project didn’t turn out the way you envisioned, reduce your stress by practicing forgiveness toward yourself and identifying what you learned from the experience.

A Step-By-Step Approach to Managing Immediate Stress

In The Chimp Paradox, Steve Peters explains that your stress response gets triggered faster than your rational mind can process the situation, which can make it difficult to cope with a stressful situation calmly and productively. He provides a step-by-step guide on how to calm your stress response in the moment so that you can better approach the situation. This guide includes some aspects of Trenton’s above approaches.

• First, acknowledge your feelings. As Trenton advises, accepting rather than suppressing your emotions is an important part of most stress management approaches.

• Next, consciously commit to changing your reaction to something else. Similar to Trenton’s advice of changing your expectations to adapt to a stressful situation, deliberately deciding on another reaction helps you take control and ease the stress of the situation.

• Then, pause before you react. Like Trenton’s advice of avoiding stressors, Peters recommends you try to remove yourself from the situation.

• Look at the situation from a long-term perspective. This might be a helpful way to make peace with a stressful situation as Trenton recommends.

• Think about what actions you can take to solve the issue. Like the technique Trenton suggested, look for ways to change the situation.

• Finally, Peters advises you try to exit the situation on a positive note, such as smiling to yourself or someone you were interacting with.

Grounding Practices for Stress

You’ve learned the four approaches to managing stress, but what if you still feel anxiety bubbling up? Trenton suggests you distract yourself from racing thoughts by engaging your five senses. This keeps your brain occupied and grounded in the present moment so that you don’t drift into overthinking. To ground yourself with your five senses:

1. Look at five things in your surroundings. For example, look at the sky and observe the texture of the clouds or how fast they’re drifting.
2. Touch four things around you. Run your fingers across your desk or stroke your pet.
3. Listen for three sounds. Pay attention to the sound of your breath or the hum of your air conditioner.
4. Try to detect two smells. Observe the scent of your coffee or your clothes.
5. Tune into one thing you can taste. You might notice the lingering taste of your breakfast.

(Shortform note: This method that Trenton proposes, also known as the 5-4-3-2-1 technique, is a common grounding technique to combat panic and disrupt your fight-or-flight response. In addition to using your five senses when practicing this technique, you can also consider focusing on one positive thing about yourself, like a good deed that you’re proud of. This technique has benefits beyond relieving anxiety—it improves your quality of life by encouraging a habit of appreciating the present moment.)

After: Reflect on Your Thoughts and Feelings to Cope With Stress

Trenton also advises that after a stressful event, you can prepare yourself to better manage future stress by acknowledging and reflecting upon your stressful experiences. Ignoring your stress won’t make it go away. However, if you instead work through it constructively, you’ll gain more awareness about your emotions and what triggers your anxiety so that you can better approach similar situations in the future.

(Shortform note: In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal echoes the importance of acknowledging your stressful experiences, adding that you should be honest and realistic about your stress. Rather than force a positive outlook on every stressful situation, recognize your feelings but choose to focus on the positive side. One way you can do this is by considering how the situation might benefit you in the future.)

Trenton’s recommendations for reflecting on stress draw from the practice of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This is a form of psychological treatment based on the theory that changing your thoughts can improve how you see the world and yourself. To reflect upon your thoughts and cope with stress, Trenton recommends you journal about your anxious thoughts and explore your feelings about it with curiosity.

(Shortform note: In Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Judith S. Beck elaborates that the main goal of CBT is to change your dysfunctional behavior (like overthinking, in this case) by changing your belief systems. The main question that CBT practitioners encourage patients to ask themselves is: “What was just going through my mind?” Asking this question allows patients to become more aware of their automatic thoughts and learn to recognize the negative biases behind them, which ultimately allows them to shift these beliefs into more positive ones.)

Journal About the Stressful Event

To manage stress, Trenton suggests you work through it by writing in a journal. When you ignore your anxious thoughts and feelings, you’ll struggle to understand what causes them. However, by writing them down in a journal, you can productively process your emotions, understand what triggers them, and glean insights on how you can better cope with stress in the future.

(Shortform note: In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky provides additional reasons why you should understand triggers in order to manage future stressors. He explains that when you’re able to predict a stressful encounter, you’ll be better prepared to cope with it and less affected by it. At the same time, knowing when a stressful event will occur allows you to relax when you’re not expecting something stressful. Trenton’s advice of journaling your anxious thoughts helps you identify patterns to better predict and cope with future stress. Sapolsky provides similar strategies to make your life more predictable: make schedules, prepare budgets, and plan ahead for your activities.)

Trenton recommends a research-backed approach to journaling about your stress: Start by recounting the stressful situation and describing the thoughts and feelings you had in that moment. Consider using a rating scale for your stress levels and try to notice any patterns of what’s most frequently causing you stress. Then, shift your focus to extracting something positive from the situation.

For example, if you argued with your partner about who will drive the kids to school after a miscommunication, you might record feeling frustrated that your partner didn’t express their time conflict beforehand and rate your stress as 7/10. Then, try to transition your focus to something good, such as being grateful that neither of you raised your voice in front of the kids.

(Shortform note: This journaling approach that Trenton recommends is called positive affect journaling, which is a type of expressive writing that focuses on noticing the positive aspects of your life and past experiences. One study suggests that positive affect journaling can be more effective than simply recording distressing experiences. It found there are numerous health benefits that include a decrease in symptoms of depression and anxiety and an increase in resilience.)

Be Curious About the Stressful Event

Another way to process stressful events is to be open-minded and curious about your response to them. Instead of judging your thoughts and emotions, simply observe them. When you focus on being curious, you’re less likely to get caught up in feeling bad about yourself and how you reacted, which improves your ability to cope with stress.

(Shortform note: In Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer provides strategies on how you can be more curious about your thoughts: encourage curiosity by paying attention to your breathing or even widening your eyes. These strategies disrupt your anxious thoughts and allow you to observe them from a more neutral standpoint. Another technique he recommends is saying “hmm” to yourself when you’re feeling stressed to trigger yourself into being curious rather than frustrated.)

To be curious rather than judgmental about your thoughts and emotions, Trenton argues you must first separate your personal identity from your problems—such as your tendency to overthink. Rather than trying to fix yourself, think about it as finding solutions to external problems that you’re just experiencing. When you distance yourself from your problems, you gain a sense of control and open yourself to new perspectives that can help you solve them.

(Shortform note: In Chatter, Ethan Kross agrees with Trenton on the importance of detaching yourself from your problems and recommends you avoid using the first-person “I” pronoun in your thoughts. He explains that other pronouns such as “you,” “he,” “she,” or “they” don’t trigger your threat response as much and that people tend to experience fewer negative emotions when using these pronouns.)

Trenton suggests you use mantras and visualization to detach from your thoughts and emotions. A mantra is a statement you can repeat as a reminder to, for instance, distance yourself from your problems—“This problem doesn’t define me.” Visualization allows you to practice putting distance between yourself and your problems through your imagination. For example, imagine putting your stressful thoughts in a bottle and sending them out to sea.

(Shortform note: Trenton doesn’t explicitly define what a mantra is. Traditionally, a mantra is a calming sound or word spoken in Sanskrit that is used to focus during meditations. In a more modern sense, however, a mantra is a positive statement that focuses your intentions and supports self-esteem. Visualization is a form of meditation that can also be useful beyond helping you gain distance from your negative thoughts and problems. Imagining peaceful images can have other mental health benefits such as reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and it even has the potential to relieve physical pain or discomfort.)

You can even distance yourself from your anxious thoughts by personifying them or by seeing the humor in a situation. When you personify your thoughts, you give them a form outside of yourself, which allows you to analyze them with curiosity. One way Trenton suggests you do this is by imagining your anxious thoughts as a chatty friend trying to tell you a story. You can also personify your thoughts by giving them a silly name. For example, if you’re feeling guilty about a past mistake you made at work, give that moment a name like, “The Old Work Chronicle.”

Finding humor allows you to distance yourself by creating a new perspective on the situation that puts you in control. For example, if you’re embarrassed because a teacher called on you during class and you didn’t have the answer, picture what you must have looked like at that moment—perhaps like a character from your favorite cartoon caught in headlights.

(Shortform note: In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris offers additional insights on how you can gain distance from your anxious thoughts, a process which he refers to as defusion. To separate yourself from your thoughts and emotions, he advises you to recognize them as only a story—nothing more than words and images—instead of as fact. By doing this, you diminish the control of your negative thoughts. Like Trenton, he also advises you to give your thoughts another voice, such as imagining a cartoon character saying them.)

Conquer Overthinking With a New Mindset

Now that you’ve learned strategies to effectively cope with stress, let’s discuss how you can conquer your habit of overthinking in the long term by transforming your negative thought patterns into a positive and resilient mindset.

Trenton explains that, in many cases, your overthinking habit is perpetuated by negative thought patterns. These are unsupportive ways of thinking that hold you back rather than strengthen and empower you. Positive beliefs, on the other hand, encourage you to advocate for yourself in spite of your flaws and motivate you to move past obstacles. To manage your tendency to overthink in the long term, you must identify your negative thoughts, challenge them, and replace them with positive beliefs.

(Shortform note: According to Tony Robbins in Awaken the Giant Within, negative beliefs can be especially harmful when they’re global rather than specific. When a belief is global, you think something is always true, like that you’re awkward in every social situation. This can lead to learned helplessness, or the belief that nothing you do will change anything, which holds you back and perpetuates your negative thinking. To combat this, Robbins advises you to build powerful references that support your positive beliefs. You can do this by consuming media like books or podcasts that allow you to learn about other people’s experiences or reflect on your past positive experiences.)

Step 1: Identify Your Triggers and Negative Thinking Habits

The first step to adopting a positive mindset is to identify what triggers you to overthink. This could include anything from other people, your environment, or a specific word someone said. For example, you might spiral into doubt whenever someone says “never mind” after you ask them to repeat something.

(Shortform note: Specific people and words are personal triggers that you might develop over the course of your life. However, researchers have determined other common triggers for anxiety, such as drinking caffeine or skipping meals. To better understand your triggers, they suggest you consider consulting with a therapist, writing in a journal, or using apps to track your anxiety.)

In addition to specific triggers, you should also identify broader cognitive distortions, which are inaccurate and negative beliefs you might have about yourself and the world. These often drive anxiety and overthinking. For example, you might have a habit of taking everything personally, such as assuming you’ve done something wrong if your friend forgets to text you back.

(Shortform note: Closely tied to Trenton’s discussion of cognitive distortions and negative beliefs is the concept of self-talk, which Ethan Kross defines in Chatter as the thoughts you hear as words inside your mind. Like cognitive distortions, negative self-talk is critical and holds you back in life rather than providing support and encouragement. Trenton suggests identifying specific cognitive distortions so that you can eventually disprove and replace them. However, Kross says you can’t rid yourself of negative self-talk completely. Rather, you can learn to quiet it by seeking support from others and increasing your sense of control in life.)

To identify your triggers and cognitive distortions, Trenton suggests making a table with columns where you describe the stressful situation, how you behaved, and how you felt. For example, you might write that you had texted a friend about something you’re proud of and they never responded. Then, describe your behavior as a result of the situation: You might have neglected your chores and checked your phone every few minutes. Lastly, reflect on your feelings: Perhaps you felt anxious or unwanted as a friend.

(Shortform note: In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield offers different categories of negative thoughts that may help you in applying Trenton’s advice of identifying your cognitive distortions using a table. Common types of negative thoughts include: believing someone thinks negatively about you, fixating on the worst possible outcome, giving yourself a negative label such as “incompetent,” making the situation about you, and viewing things in extremes.)

Step 2: Challenge Your Negative Thinking Habits

To challenge your negative thought patterns, reconsider the moment through a positive lens and gather evidence to support or disprove your belief. Ask yourself whether there’s any proof for your interpretation of the situation, then write down alternative possibilities in another column of your table. To continue the above example, you might record that you later learned your friend was studying for an exam when you texted them and that you have no evidence that they’re unhappy with you.

(Shortform note: In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz echoes Trenton’s suggestion to reframe your memories through a positive lens, elaborating that regularly thinking negative thoughts can lead you to make false assumptions that don't reflect the reality of a situation. Instead, he argues that you should focus only on the facts of a situation rather than how you feel about it. To reinterpret situations more rationally, Maltz suggests you practice pausing before reacting to stressful situations and forgiving yourself for your past mistakes.)

Trenton also suggests you challenge negative thought habits by experimenting with doing the opposite of what you’re feeling. While it’s important to validate your feelings, you shouldn’t let them take control of your thoughts and actions. For example, if your anxiety makes you reluctant to go to lunch with your colleagues, try to go through with it. This way, you might find evidence that they enjoy your company, which challenges your anxiety-driven beliefs.

(Shortform note: Trenton’s suggestion of doing the opposite of what your emotions tell you to do is a technique known as opposite action in dialectical behavioral therapy. This is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that focuses on regulating your emotions. Psychologists add that for this method to be successful, you must fully commit to the opposite action and believe that it will be successful.)

Step 3: Develop Positive Beliefs

Lastly, replace your inaccurate, negative beliefs with positive ones to become more resilient to stress and curb your overthinking. By reframing how you view yourself and the world, positive beliefs strengthen your sense of control and improve your ability to manage stressful challenges productively and effectively.

(Shortform note: Once you’ve replaced your negative beliefs with positive ones, Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) suggests you reinforce your new positive beliefs with rewards so that you aren’t tempted to revert back to your old negative thinking habits. For example, when you overcome a negative belief with a positive one, give yourself a small reward, such as your favorite snack. When you strengthen your positive beliefs, you’ll find it easier to think of them more automatically and consistently.)

Trenton suggests you focus on three things to develop a positive mindset:

1) Be in the present moment: Focusing on the present promotes a positive worldview because it allows you to find solutions to your problems without stressing about concerns you have no control over. Instead of ruminating on periods of time you have no control over (the past and the future), you direct your attention to the resources you have now.

(Shortform note: Focusing on the present not only helps you curb overthinking but improves your overall happiness in life. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle argues that you can only connect with your true self by being in the present. When you’re connected with your true self, you’re able to silence negative thoughts, which Tolle refers to as your ego, and achieve inner peace and happiness. He suggests one method to focus on the present: Practice being fully immersed in an activity such as walking.)

2) Let go of what you can’t control: Anxiety and overthinking happen when you fixate on things outside of your control. Trenton suggests you focus on what you do have control over. For example, once you’ve signed a lease for an apartment, rather than worry that you’ve chosen the wrong one, focus on ways to increase your happiness with the one you decided on. Research nearby restaurants or parks and make a plan for a smooth moving experience.

(Shortform note: Other experts agree with Trenton on the importance of focusing on what you can control. One way you can do this is by practicing gratitude, which allows you to focus on what you have rather than on what you don’t have. In The Power, Rhonda Byrne argues that practicing gratitude allows you not only to take control of your thoughts but to recognize the control you have to find something to be grateful for in every situation. She advises you to build a habit of appreciating things by intentionally identifying what you love in your daily life and surroundings, such as things you see in nature and the people in your life.)

3) Identify your needs: Rather than worrying about and optimizing every little thing in your life, concentrate on meeting your needs and not your wants. Focusing solely on what you need helps you achieve a more positive mindset by allowing you to let go of unnecessary things that would otherwise drain your time and energy.

(Shortform note: Trenton argues that you should focus on your needs rather than your wants. In 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, Brianna Wiest adds that you should also concentrate on meeting your needs rather than doing what other people expect from you. Like Trenton’s suggestion of letting go of unnecessary concerns, Wiest suggests you stop chasing external validation, such as approval from your friend group and, instead, learn to be more mindful of your own feelings to discover your true needs.)