Whether it’s getting better with women and relationships, connecting and relating with people better in general, sales or other people-centric careers, or just generally building your confidence, learning what overthinking really is, much less how to stop overthinking is a crucial piece many men miss.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2018.
Men especially tend to be very analytical, and that’s more true than ever as more and more of our waking hours – for some people, every waking hour – is spent wrapped up with smartphones and other screens. While many careers – or at least parts of them – reward a strong analytical mind, that often comes at the cost of not knowing how to shut off or quiet down the analytical part of your mind and relate to feelings and emotions – yours and other people’s – unless you happen to “just get it,” during your upbringing.
People don’t stay connected to you when there’s no emotions to grab onto. We bond through emotional relating and listening. When there’s no emotion or sense of feeling in your words, there’s no depth. You’ve got to get out of your head, into the present moment, and into being in touch with feeling and emotion and your body.
And out of anticipating what you’re going to say next, if you should say it, what they’re going to say next, and etc. That’s overthinking. That’s being in your head.
If I speak to someone, I’m listening for their emotions and feeling them while they speak.
All this is happening in the body, not the mind. The analytical mind is powerful and it’s created a lot of the world. But when the mind begins to dominate you, you lose touch of your very reason for being alive. You want to feel something!
Don’t you want to feel love? Passion? Turn-on? Excitement? That’s what life is all about.
Some of the tools you can use to learn how to stop overthinking and get into your body are incredibly simple.
The first one I want to bring up is meditation. Now, some clients will come in and tell me they’re in these bliss states in their meditations….but they are still unhappy.
The problem is that these clients are dissociating from their bodies in their meditations. Then when they come back to real life and their bodies, where emotions are stored, the pain is still there. They’re creating a little safe space bubble where they are not feeling themselves anymore, but they’re not actually moving forward in terms of being present, in touch with feeling in real life, and actually dealing with their emotional baggage.
The type of meditation I’m going to present here is about beginning to feel more.
So without further ado, here are my 10 Steps to Learn How to Stop Overthinking and Get Out of Your Head:
1. Sit, relax, and get into a meditative place.
Sit and just relax and begin to feel the environment all around you as you take in more and more. Remember, this is how to stop overthinking – just rest your mind and feel.
2. Get in touch with and build awareness of your heart.
You are going to open up and build awareness all the way down through the central pillar of your chakras, or through the core of your body if you’re not a fan of the chakras idea. We’ll start with the heart.
Become aware of your heart – drop your attention to the feeling of it in your chest. If you get still and quiet your mind, you can even start to feel your heartbeat. If you’re having trouble, gently tapping your chest over your heart can help wake up sensation in that part of your body so you can get in touch with it.
3. Feel the environment around you and the rest of your body.
Feel the room you’re in, and the building, even. Then keep working your way down your body. I feel into every spot in my body, the throat, the heart, I feel my sense of personal power.
Below the belly button is where your creative energy, sensual energy, and sexual energy is. Go all the way down to the perineum area and feel downward into the legs, into the earth and imagine what it’s like to feel through the ground into the earth and back up again.
Then you start coming back up the spine. The Daoists call this a microcosmic orbit. Take your time with it. As you keep going, you’ll get a sense of full-body breathing. As you do this over time, you continually get a greater and greater sense of your whole body. You want to always be relaxing into it. Wherever you feel tension, ask your body if it can let some of it go.
4. Take it out into the real world.
Over time, your awareness of your body, feelings, and everything around you will expand more and more.
You want to to take this out into real life so you can actually start to get an experience of how to stop overthinking, so take this meditation outside.
Do it somewhere noisy and more chaotic and work on getting more comfortable relaxing around people.
5. Practice grounding the stimuli from the world & get into your lower body.
So many people that are into meditation these days are becoming more open-hearted but they are missing the grounding. Imagine how it feels to have your heart wide open and someone yells at you. It blows you out, right?
Now imagine if you are grounded into the earth. Now you can manage the emotions while still keeping your heart open. It makes you more solid as a man and thus more powerful.
So I want to invite you to begin to develop the awareness of your lower body and to form a real relationship to this part of your body.
I’ll stand up and start slowly moving so I can feel just my hips moving. I’m doing this to form a stronger relationship to my sensual energy. Moving forward and feeling it down my legs, and moving back and feeling it up through my spine. I try to relax into it.
Then I start walking around while keeping the connection to the feeling. I ask myself, “Can I continue to feel this area while walking?” That’s the beginning of this process. Because you don’t just want the connection to this meditative state while you are sitting still – that’s not where life occurs.
That’s what yoga was really for originally – a moving meditation. It’s been bastardized by the West – it wasn’t supposed to be exercise. It’s meant to restore the flow to you the different areas of your body.
Remember, your body is like a satellite dish sending out vibrations, and pulling things back to you all the time. If you’re not connected to your body, how are you supposed to achieve things in this world? It’s your vehicle, you need to take good care of it. Try different movement practices like BJJ or Judo. I want to invite you in to developing this relationship, especially if you are highly analytical or walled off or numbed out.
6. Practice feeling your body and emotions in conversations.
Work on slowing down your analytical mind, being present with the people you’re interacting with (like we talked about near the beginning of this post), and feeling your body, just like in the meditations but in the midst of connecting with people. Try to ask and feel into your body – your heart, your gut (especially), and your sensual/creative/sexual energy for what you want to say rather than THINKING so hard.
I know that might sound weird, but it’s powerful. It’s intuition. You can develop it. The more you work on this stuff, you might start to feel pangs of feeling and emotion from different parts of your body – whether it’s tightness in the throat, or a feeling in your chest or gut or somewhere else where you’re feeling emotion that’s driving what you really want to say.
And a big part of this is to just stop filtering yourself, stop hesitating, and speaking what’s really on your mind with indifference to outcome. Being ok with ruffling some feathers, getting rejected, and people not liking everything you say…or even you. I’ll include a post all about that at the end.
7. Speak with feeling.
Really feel the words and the emotions you’re expressing. Don’t just say them from your head.
A lot of men will go to complement a woman, for example, but they’re not really feeling the words and the emotions behind the words as they say them. The words may be true, but because they (often nervously) go up in their heads while speaking and they’re not even enjoying the woman they’re complementing, the compliment loses its power and authenticity. It’s the same thing in numerous communication situations.
So slow down your speech and, like I talked about with the slow movements to wake up the lower body, really feel the words as you say them. This can really change how you come off to people and the connection you have with them.
8. Listen to others with feeling.
This is another important piece of learning how to stop overthinking.
Don’t just look at people you’re interacting with. Don’t even just look at their eyes.
Look into them. Really feel curiosity about them in your body and the emotions underneath their words. Don’t analyze the words so much – explore what you feel from them, in your body as you look into their eyes and connect with them.
9. When you get nervous or anxious, feel down the backs of your legs and your feet – Ground.
Relax into those areas. That alone can often slow down your nervous mind and bring you back into the moment. Channel your nerves down your body into the ground. I’ll provide more resources for grounding at the end of this post.
10. Focus on just enjoying the people around you and the moment for what it is.
This will be easier as you develop more awareness of your body and emotions, and the emotions of others.
Take this all in, and check out the related posts below, but then focus on practicing one of these things at a time. Doing too much at once, especially at first will only make you overthink in a different way.
Let me know if this helps you learn how to get out of your head, if it makes sense, and if you want to hear more content like this going forward.
Related:
– Speaking freely with indifference to outcome (focuses on dating, but applies to most communication-not being in your head)
– The 8 Qualities Of A Confident and Masculine Man: Grounding (Be sure to watch the linked video near the end)
– Be a Great, Connected Listener
– How to Give Women (or anyone, really) Compliments
– How to Release All Emotions – The Basics of FEARLESS Letting Go
