How to Stop Overthinking: Rumination, OCD, and Breaking the Awareness Trap
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and he's also my dad. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm great and psyched about our topic.

Yeah, same. So today we're going to be talking about overthinking, rumination, and what I've started to call the self-awareness trap. There's a kind of irony to our information age. There is so much stuff out there. We have more knowledge than ever. And yet it feels like some people tend to feel a bit paralyzed by all of that information. There are so many ideas and opinions and perspectives that even fairly simple decisions can feel overwhelmingly complex.

And this is maybe particularly true when it comes to working with our minds and improving our lives, the topics that we focus on on this podcast. We've talked before about the 90-10 rule and how to improve our focus, but today I wanted to explore how these concepts apply specifically to breaking free from patterns of overthinking, when we just chew on the same thing over and over again, or we feel overwhelmed by information and can't make a good decision because of it.

And before we begin, I wanted to give you a quick reminder about Rick's five-week online rumination course that starts on March 29th. It focuses on helping us learn how to let go of repetitive patterns of thought, which is, of course, part of what we're going to be talking about today. And you can learn more about that at rickhansen.com slash ruminating and use coupon code BEINGWELL25 to receive a 25% off discount. So Dan, let's start with this self-awareness trap that I just mentioned.

I have talked to so many people who say something to me along the lines of, "I feel like I'm a very self-aware person." And I even have a conversation with my therapist where I get into the room and I say, "Here are all the things that are going on in my life, and here are all the patterns that I have, and this is everything that I know about my past and how it's affecting my current behavior."

And they'd say something to me like, wow, that's great. You're so self-aware. But I can't seem to do anything with all of this information that I've cultivated. And if anything, it kind of feels like it gets in the way. So as a longtime therapist, what do you think is going on here? As you might have inferred when you first floated this topic past me,

I thought it was pretty dumb. I didn't get it. Damn. Ouch. All right. Well, I say this as now I understand what a five head, big brain kind of topic it actually is. Oh my God. You trying to leverage the Gen Z lingo out there is absolutely killing me, but please go ahead, Dan. All right.

So let's suppose that of the three great ways to engage your mind skillfully, being with what's there, plus letting go of what's problematic, and third, growing what would be beneficial. The three great movements, the first one of which is being with, the second two, summarize working with. We need to do both. Let's suppose that this person has been getting the benefits of being able to be with,

Their thoughts, their feelings, their emotions, their desires in a way that is mindful and disidentified from them. They're watching the movie go by of their consciousness without being hijacked by it. Let's give them that. Now, that alone is a really good thing.

I think you've already gotten to advanced self-awareness here, Dad, for sure. Yeah, totally. I think a lot of people who are having this kind of experience are in fact not doing that. But anyways, keep going. Okay, so let's put a plug in. It's one thing for just saying, essentially, I'm still really sad or I'm still really hurt or I'm still really anxious. And you can tell that they're very identified. They're very in that experience. There's no air around it for them.

But at a certain point, hopefully you catch your breath or you find your footing just a smidge and you start getting some breathing room between you and what you're experiencing. That's huge and extremely important. So let's say they're doing that. Yeah. They, as a result of being able to be with their mind in that way, they have a lot of self-knowledge. They can relate what they're feeling to their childhood. They can track what's emerging inside them and

But that has limited benefits. It takes us a little bit, but because we're not also working with the mind, the benefits are very incomplete. And a classic example of this is someone who has a lot of meditation practice. They can

drop into the witness position quite readily, and they're still as neurotic and annoying as ever and unable to move forward in their relationships and their life. We need to work with the mind, not just be with the mind. I think a lot of therapists just stop at being with the mind, and they rest in a nice, unconditional, positive regard with the person, and they just leave it at that, and they lose...

They miss the benefits that would come from more actively helping people to let go of what's problematic and let in what's good.

Yeah, so off the record, when we were talking about this topic before we clicked record, I think it was even a day or two ago, your first response to me was something along the lines of, "Well, I would ask them a question about how good they thought their therapist was." That's true. Yeah, there's kind of a question in this about, okay, if you're actually having that exchange with a mental health professional, are they helping you get to

those next stages that you're talking about? Are they moving you out of self-preoccupation and to actually doing something with that self-knowledge that you've generated? Yeah, exactly right.

And then just the other side of it, though, not just being potentially the absence of the good, the good being working with the mind, not just being with it. There can be also morbid self-preoccupation and other quote-unquote bad things that can occur alongside

too much self-knowledge in which, for example, we become very self-conscious and that really impairs performance. If you want to really mess somebody up, ask them to, as you know, as a performer yourself, pay a lot of attention to what they're doing in the moment rather than letting it flow.

There's a reason that NBA players are worse at shooting free throws in high pressure situations because they're doing something that they know how to do automatically in practice, but now they're really thinking about it. Yeah, totally. That's a great example. When people do become aware of themselves, sometimes they become aware of things that are scary or they feel ashamed of or they just don't know how to handle.

The human brain is a very thin skim of civilization sitting on top of 600 million years of very primal evolution of the nervous system. So that can be problematic for people. So okay, I've sketched this. I know we're going to dive into the details, but that would be a quick outline. I think that's a great outline. And there are some distinctions here that I think could be useful for people. First, distinction you're making between self-awareness and self-knowledge.

Are you just kind of aware of what's going on inside of you? You don't have good internal boundaries about different kinds of sensory experiences, or maybe you're somebody who has just greater sensitivity to the world around or the sensations that are going on inside. That could be a form of awareness that could be very overwhelming, but without leading to a whole lot of self-knowledge. Because for me, self-knowledge is more about having a sense of what to do about any of these things. Yeah.

and being able to integrate this awareness information and regulate it in a useful way. So there's kind of a regulatory question here. Then the self-preoccupation part of it that you raised, I think a really good distinction with self-awareness. Self-consciousness, something that can come from self-awareness but isn't necessarily exactly the same thing. So you're raising all these different things that are kind of in the soup as we're going to look at it. I did want to ask you about something because I was really kind of thinking about this.

Do you think that this greater degree of self-awareness or just information overload in general tends to lead to more rumination for people? Do you think these things are linked? That's a really, really provocative question. I think it's useful to distinguish between very healthy introspection from unhealthy rumination.

People can introspect, which is often helpful, and they develop, in the technical sense of the word, in psychotherapy, they develop insight.

you know, they reflect on their past, they form, as you talk about, a coherent narrative in their attachment history. There's a place for that kind of useful introspection, and the godfather of American psychology, William James, really talked about useful introspection. So I think partly what we're getting at is the difference between useful introspection, which involves often a kind of unpacking, a feeling down into the depths of yourself,

from running around the hamster wheel of negativistic rumination. That's not good for people. And I don't think I would say that self-knowledge per se is a major driver of rumination. I actually think that the function of a lot of rumination is to avoid self-knowledge

To avoid the depths of emotion. Oh, that's a really interesting thought. And murky desires, yeah. Yeah, I really hadn't thought about it that way. Yeah.

I guess my prior was to think that the more that we have to consider, the easier that it is to overthink at a baseline level. As we gain more information, we've got more stuff to consider, we start thinking not just about the problem that's going on outside of us but the problem that's inside of us as well. And that self-consciousness that people, particularly with social anxiety, they describe a lot of this kind of a function rolling in the background. That's true.

So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, I think what you're saying is actually really insightful. This idea that we often kind of chew on something in this

cyclical sort of way where we're just going over and over and over with it because we're avoiding--a lot of people talk about rumination as an avoidance mechanism--some kind of painful thought or feeling that we don't want to accept. And thinking about it over and over kind of gives us the illusion that there's something that we can do to change an unchangeable situation. A person might think about a past relationship that has ended that they're still kind of thinking about a lot or whatever it is that's popping into somebody's brain these days.

It's interesting for us, two steps here. So I think it's understandable that in the beginning, when we're facing any sort of a problem or opportunity that has some complexity and significance, it's almost as if there are three phases. Phase one, oversimplification, in which we have this kind of quick judgment, oh, I should do this or I should do that.

Then as we acquire more knowledge, we move into this stage of complication, which slows us down because now we're taking a lot more into account. But then in the third stage, hopefully, this could be productive introspection leading to that third stage, we...

digest that information we've gathered, we turn it into useful habits, rules of thumb, we simplify it, we peel down to what's actually useful. Last recent episode, we find the 10 that accounts for the 90 of all that complex new information, and then we acquire a new habit and then we go forward in, again, a simplified sort of way. Yeah. And I think just building on what you were saying about the avoidance piece of this, that complexification

That focusing on the 90 that gives us 10 rather than the 10 that gives us 90 part of it, I totally think is a kind of defense. And I really see this and have really seen this in some of the people that I've done coaching work with and also, frankly, in myself, where there's a moment where...

For whatever reason, there's a part of you that just doesn't want to do the thing. And a great reason to not do the thing is because you're still thinking about it. You're still in contemplation. You're still weighing all the variables, chewing on all the ideas.

And you've kind of convinced yourself that if I just know enough about this, I'll finally be able to make the choice. But the problem is that the way that we get the information that we need to make the choice is by having real-life direct experience with the world. We don't do it in theory, we do it in practice. And that's just been a very hard learned lesson for me. And it's very scary because you have to make a move based off of incomplete information.

And what's sort of funny is that because overthinking can come from having so much information, but in a weird way we're trying to avoid the pain of admitting that we don't have perfect information. We're never going to really know enough to make a perfect choice. So there's this kind of ironic twist with it. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I was reflecting there and feeling that in the face of this maybe tendency to throw up clouds of complications and reasons why not,

including in the face of certain actions that would be really good for you to take. It would be really good, let's say, for you, whoever you are, to speak from the heart in a significant relationship about something that matters. Or maybe take a step in the world that would start to give you options like exploring what it might be like to work at another company.

These are great examples because you can already paint a picture for yourself if you're the person listening. How would somebody overthink this basically? Like, oh, taking that step inside the relationship. What if it doesn't go well? What if they don't like it? Am I choosing the right step? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Go ahead. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. So in the face of those very understandable

so-called defensive processes and psych lingo. Okay, fine. In the face of all that, and they're coping mechanisms. I mean, Freud labeled them as defenses, which is a little pathologizing. We could think of them as ways of coping that were once learned and gosh, maybe have exceeded their shelf life at this point. You decide, okay. In the face of all that, it can really help to develop and be in touch with a passion for the useful truth.

You yourself have that passion. You want to know it's really true and useful, and you're going to pursue it. You want to really find it out and know what it is and know where you stand and know where you stand from. And even at the cost,

of giving up old beliefs, even at the cost of your own dignity sometimes where you have to admit that you were wrong about something. But what you care about first and foremost, it's your refuge. It's the altar you truly bow to, the actual truth of things. That passion for knowing was true and finding was true, I think is a beautiful thing to value in others and cultivate in oneself.

we can appreciate that impulse that we have. If you're the kind of person who tends towards overthinking, you probably do put a value on that. You put a value on making a good choice and figuring things out and checking, dotting your I's, crossing your T's. Often people who overthink tend a little bit toward anxiety. Sometimes they tend toward avoidance. I think so, yeah.

a lot of the time they tend toward anxiety, that anxiety is often because you want to do things the right way, right? You want to make a good choice. And so just seeing that as a positive impulse inside of yourself I think can be helpful for a person to kind of balance out some of the natural self-criticism here. So I'm struck also by a word we rarely use even in our discussions of rumination, and that word is obsessing.

or obsession. And I'm thinking of classic obsessive compulsive disorder in which a person truly feels invaded by an obsession of some kind and they're thinking about it. It's not so much a compulsive behavior. It's an obsessive thought, including sometimes the notion that I must maintain this obsessive thought to avert some kind of disaster, such as a horrible thing happening to my children.

And that too is a kind of problematic ruminating, you know, just a name here in terms of, you know, broadening the categories of what we're talking about.

With the piece of this that's driven by the more kind of self-awareness aspect, and kind of go with me on this or give me your take on what I'm sharing here. I've really been interested recently in this idea, just going back to one of my favorite lines, the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi line, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind, there are few.

As people go on this journey, this personal development journey, or this mental health journey, whatever it is, just getting into psychology in general, you do a lot of learning about yourself. In that process of learning, I think it's really easy for us to start to develop a take on who we are and why we are that way, including a big take about our tendencies and our limitations.

we've essentially become a kind of expert on ourselves in the process of doing that. We've learned a lot about who we are and why we are that way. And in that expertise development, there's a lot of good stuff. But one of the things that I think is also there is a kind of calcification that can happen for people where they get more and more solidified around the idea that

that things need to be a certain kind of way in order for them to act or that they can only be comfortable in certain kinds of situations. And I was wondering when I was prepping for this episode, is there a connection between different kinds of that rigidity, that becoming an expert on yourself, and overthinking? Like do rigid people tend to overthink more often? And it turns out people have done research on this because neuroticism is one of the big five personality traits.

We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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Want more? Check out shopify.com slash beingwell, all lowercase, and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Shopify.com slash beingwell. Now, back to the show. I think this is really cool. I mean, let me kind of say back to you. Sure, yeah. And I'm kind of workshopping this in real time, so we could play with that. So here's a person.

And they have, we're talking about their self-concept. An image of who Forrest is. Yeah, pretty rich, layered, dimensional, whether it's accurate or inaccurate, positively or negatively tilted, etc., whatever. But for the moment, they've got a big self-concept. And now they are preoccupied with themselves. They're not overthinking a situation out in the world, let's say.

And what you're saying, which I love, now I finally have gotten to the point here, that if a person drops into not knowing about the self-concept, that's like flipping a giant circuit breaker. All these things suddenly become possible. Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's no basis for the overthinking because there's no one to overthink about. Poof.

Totally. No, I think you nailed it. And I wonder about the things that are tied to lower levels of neuroticism. So greater openness to experience, greater flexibility, a general sense of things aren't perfect so I shouldn't expect myself to be perfect. This then supports experimentation. Maybe I'm no longer so attached to the view of myself as somebody who can't land on his feet or can't

accomplish things quite so much because I had these bad experiences of not being able to accomplish it. This then makes me more of a risk taker, which lets me take more things on. So I just think that it's kind of like a snowball rolling down a hill where if you're able to sort of get to this greater feeling of openness tied to it, I just think that that's like an underlying factor that could support a lot of what we might end up talking about. Wow, it's very powerful. I mean, people talk about change your narrative about yourself, change your story. And there's a

Definitely a place for that, including doing some structured things that are therapeutic about that. You're getting at not just change your story about yourself, let go of your story about yourself and don't immediately replace it with another one and see what it's like to operate in that space.

Yeah, and I think that what people will find is that the news story comes along pretty quickly and that's okay. But you need to... I don't know if this is radical stuff. The last time that we recorded, you had a line to me, something along the lines of, I'm not sure, Forrest, if you realize how radical this thought is in terms of the broader literature on psychology. So maybe I'm inadvertently kind of going off the rails here or something. But the idea that you can move from...

I think of Forrest as the kind of person who is bad at bowling. Okay. Two, I think of Forrest as the kind of person who's good at bowling. Like you move from point A to point B.

I really question whether that's how it works or whether that's an effective way to do it. My hypothesis is that a much better way to do it is to move from Forrest is bad at bowling to, huh, how is Forrest as bowling? And then to acquire new information as time goes on. So that's kind of how I would put what you just said, if that makes sense. Yeah.

phenomenologically. Oh, I'm so happy about dropping that word in here. But what's in your experience? What is it like to sustain a don't know moment?

Exactly, exactly. Because then you get the practice of it too. About who am I? And there's some brain science, and I think it's probably more complicated than a simple view, but essentially there's this notion that the right hemisphere and related systems are basically the basis for the ongoing generating of experiencing. And then left hemisphere-based language modules are narrating and interpreting that

movie, if you will, which then becomes input into the next moment of experiencing. And in effect, you're talking about disrupting in the sense of the word radical, getting at the root of things. You're pulling the root of that potential left hemisphere narrator by dropping into don't know mind about yourself altogether. Who am I? And it's important to not do this if you're prone to depersonalization in a psychotic way.

As I think Mark, no, who was it? He'll come to me, said, you need to be somebody before you can become nobody. So we want to make sure you're fairly stably glued together.

I had a teacher, Steven Snyder, who we've had on the podcast, who's just a phenomenal teacher. I'm actually going off pretty soon to a meditation retreat with him. Yeah, honestly, if you want to go listen to an episode in the catalog that you may not have listened to recently, our conversation with Steven is one of my all-time favorites. Oh, that's really great. Yeah. In one of his guided meditations, he kind of opens it up, having laid the ground so it's safe, essentially taking on the attitude, even saying, I

I don't know who I am in a healthy way. Don't know. Don't know who I am. And kind of just like you said, I wonder if the overthinking sometimes is a little bit of a defense against that experience. The fear of that openness and the groundlessness of it, as people might say. Like what if I don't know? Or what if I'll never be able to find out what the right answer is? Those kinds of things that can come up for somebody. So

We've done a little bit of a classic being well here in that we've gone mega wide in the first half of the episode, and then we're going to kind of narrow it back in in the back half and get a little more practical with it. But I wanted to talk about this just because this was kind of the foundation of how I've been thinking about this topic. And this idea just totally blew my mind when I ran into it or when it came up.

Okay, so with that in mind and getting a little bit more practical here, I wonder if we can kind of go back to the 90-10 rule a little bit. What's the 90-10 way to approach overthinking as a problem? Whether you're overthinking about that kind of self-preoccupation that we were talking about, or really more turning our gaze here toward overthinking about stuff that's going on in your life or out in the world. You're trying to make a kind of decision. How are you going to make a good one?

So one way to kind of think about overthinking is that you're really preoccupied with the other 10%. You're really preoccupied with the 90% that gets you just 10 at the end of the day. And so I think that a good framework for people is sort of a four-step process. And I think that these are all tied to things that we've already talked about a little bit. So first step, you need to be able to recognize when you're in some kind of an overthinking loop.

And a good way to do that is giving yourself guardrails and little maxims for what the right amount of thinking about something is. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But that's sort of the first step. Recognize when this is happening to you. Second step, it's what you were saying at the very beginning of the episode, Dad, disidentification. Can you create some of that space around the self-awareness so you're not just swept away by it?

Then third, can you control your focus? Can you move your thoughts away from what you're going on over and over again to something else? Mindfulness is great training for this. You might have some other recommendations for people here. And then fourth, this one's a little off the path of the other three, but man, I think there's really something here about accepting the good enough decision.

overthinking is a kind of perfectionism, if you really think about it. It's a way for us to avoid doing anything by thinking that if we just make it a little better, eventually it'll be good enough for us to make a choice. And so anything that helps us move into a kind of perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good stance is, I think, a great tool for overthinking. So for starters, what do you think about that little four-step process I laid out there? I think it's a marvel of clarity and practical value. We love to hear it.

As a guy who spent years, you know, on my coolest jobs working for a mathematician doing probabilistic risk analyses or probabilistic decision analysis. And there's this fundamental frame of what's the marginal value of the next piece of information compared to the cost of getting that next piece of information.

And at a certain point, you start to realize that I can add information here, but it's not going to improve the likelihood of making a good decision compared to the cost of that new information. And so it's good enough. And if anything, it might make your decision worse because you're adding more information that it's in the wrong side of the 90-10 distribution. It's actually pulling you away from the stuff that actually matters. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So I like this a lot. Check me on this. I'm just mulling here.

two kinds of so-called overthinking that has to do with what's the function of the overthinking at the time. One is the kind I think that we've talked about in which a person is overthinking essentially as an avoidance mechanism.

to avoid the risk of actually making a decision and putting their words on the table, sticking their neck out, or avoiding certain experiences that are kind of trying to bubble up, but they keep pushing down by all the inner chatter, or avoiding experiences they might have with other people if they move forward. They're overthinking to avoid something.

Then there's a separate kind of overthinking. I think the 9-10 plan is very good for the first kind. Then there's this other thing, why do we mull? Often it's because we're not mulling to avoid something, we're mulling to complete something. We're trying to get to the gestalt, the wholeness that completes the package.

For example, surfaces into awareness, what we wish had actually happened in an interaction or a relationship, or names in awareness, what's actually been true for us way down deep.

So you could think of overthinking or looping as a kind of quest for completing a gestalt. Quest for completion. Yeah, totally. When it is completed, releases. Yeah, I would be a little bit inclined to argue sometimes that even that second category is kind of an avoidance mechanism essentially, that maybe there can't be a completion because you're trying to complete around why your last relationship ended the way that it did.

And the truth is it ended that way because the other person's kind of a problematic person or not the best partner for you or was really leveraging different kinds of insecurities that you had or whatever it was, and you do not want to look that reality in the face. And so you can't actually complete the gestalt. Right. I think this is very good. We're talking, I think, about the difference between healthy introspection, call it the quest for completion, and

so-called unhealthy rumination. Yeah, I understand the distinction you're drawing a little bit here. And yes, this kind of a format is built for the negative version of this essentially, the part that's painful, the one that you're not getting any more juice out of the thinking that you're doing. There's a part of you that's trying to defer a decision by just chewing on it over and over. It's less built for the introspective

aspect because I don't know if you can really overthink about in a truly introspective way. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that's great. And thank you for helping me kind of... I feel so complete now, Forrest.

There's been a gestalt here. You got to express your thoughts and come to completion with them. Yeah, you've received my communication and I feel heard. Dan Siegel would say I feel felt. It's great. It's complete. You're so nice, Dad. Okay, so I do want to ask you that because you've spent a ton of time working with people about this stuff, particularly the more negative, ruminatory side of that. Yeah.

And if it's in addition to the little path that I laid out, or if you want to call out any aspect of it, just anything that you think has really helped people work with overthinking practically. Fundamentally, I think it's useful to ask yourself, what do you really want? Do you want to obsess about stuff? Do you really want to ruminate about stuff? Or do you want to get to the bottom of things? I mean, that passion for the useful truth, it drives healthy introspection.

that comes to a sense of completion and clarity about things that is freeing. There's a beautiful book from Rob Berbea, bless his memory, a wonderful mindfulness teacher. His title is Seeing That Freeze.

And maybe in a way we're talking about the difference between the seeing that entangles, too much self-knowledge entangles us compared to the seeing that frees, that is liberating. So which one do you want? What are your purposes here? And I like this quote from Sokny Rinpoche. He says, "Yeah, think the same thought again and again and again. Fine. But 10 is probably enough."

So, you know, what's your stand with yourself? I think that's helpful. I think a second thing is really borrowed from your emphasis on the 90-10 rule to, okay, what's on the short list? What are the most important things for you here? What are the personal stakes that you most care about? You know, what are the few things that are going to give you the most result?

What's the one thing that's missing that you really wish would be present? Stuff like that, that really zeroes in on the fundamental matters. I find that that's helpful for people. To me, a kind of subversive question is to ask of that process, which is you broadly, what is not overthinking? What are the parts of you that are not overthinking? What are they like?

What's going on there? And I find for a lot of people, it just stops them in their tracks. It's a great circuit breaker for overthinking. And it tends to draw them into a widening out because when we overthink, we're caught up in some small part of the totality of our consciousness. And when you ask people, huh, what is not overthinking? What is not obsessing? What is not ruminating?

Initially, it could be almost kind of scary because people feel secure and safe in familiar mental patterns with their familiar somatic markers. Like there are somatic markers associated with ruminating that can feel comforting in their familiarity, even if you're ruminating about something that's unpleasant, like you're anxious about something. And maybe it goes back to what you said about letting go of self-concept. It's kind of scary for people. Sure.

to open out into what's not overthinking. I would love to apply what you're talking about here to a particular aspect of this because overthinking, ruminating in general, is a kind of failure of attention management. We can think about it that way. Our attention has just been captured by something and we can't do what you're describing: open out, release the clenched fist, whatever your metaphor is here.

Now, I've got plenty of thoughts on what could help somebody with some of the focus aspects of this, whether it's deliberately breaking things out into pieces, one piece at a time really narrowly, like I talked about the dance lesson in the previous episode, just straighten your legs one thing at a time. You could set some time boundaries for decisions. You could kind of curate your environment in a way that maybe would support your focus. Okay.

You are a long time teacher of meditation. You have talked a lot about how to control this attentional aspect. And so I'm wondering, is there anything that you've found that tends to help people do what you're describing, that kind of feeling of dropping the rope, letting go, opening out, taking the wide view, whatever it is? It helps to shore up in the moment that you're basically okay.

And appreciate that there's this ongoing trickle and for many people stream of anxiety that's communicating from the inside out, from the bottom up, not okay, scary world, not okay, scary world. And to kind of stand up against that, at least in a moment, like, okay, I'm basically okay. A second thing that really helps people is to lift their gaze to the horizon.

for all the NLP kind of stuff about when people are lost in thought, did their eyes go up to the left or up to the right or down or sideways, so forth. Yeah, but in general, if we lift our gaze to the horizon, that moves us out of a lot of self-referential rumination to a more big picture, bird's eye view, openness, going wide,

I remember our conversation with Judson Brewer, psychiatrist, Brown, doing a lot of work on the brain science really of addiction and habit formation, habit release, and very knowledgeable about meditation. And I asked him, so Jud, long time meditator yourself, based on what you know is going on in your brain when you're in a kind of a good or a bad place, what for you stands out as a key lesson? He said, openness or contraction.

So much of our suffering, including getting obsessed with our self-knowledge and our self-awareness, is about contraction, closing in. And so much of what's good- And that's the expert on yourself thing appearing again. It's a kind of contraction, I think. Yeah, very good. The narrator. I would have to say

Tuning into body sensations, which by definition are nonverbal, just the sensations just in your body, like the sense of your arms and your legs now.

Boom, bingo. Technically, when people engage interoception, where they're tracking their joints or the interior internal sensations, say breathing or the expanding and contracting in the rib cage, that's a circuit breaker in the default mode network, which is the primary neural substrate of

overthinking and being caught up in self-knowledge and self-awareness. So you're just suddenly, you're out of it. You're out of the narrative. You're boom, boom. So I'll leave it there. What do you think of that? I think those are great examples. Really, really good stuff. I wonder if there is a self-trust or even self-efficacy, self-confidence aspect to all of this as well.

Because I think of myself, the times when I've really gotten wrapped up in a pattern of thought or I'm just really chewing on something. Most of the time that that's been the case, it's been driven at least in part by a belief that what I knew was not enough and that I couldn't

make a good choice or I couldn't figure out what the right thing was. There was a lack of self-confidence in my ability to finish the thought or trust that what I thought was true a lot of the time was a big aspect of it. Is this really true? And then I would doubt my own feelings about it. And yeah, I don't want this to sound too much like a

Instagram post, but I do think that there's an aspect of it where there's this self-trust or self-belief piece. And so I wonder if people who overthink, there's a kind of insecurity or a kind of lack of self-confidence that underpins some of it. And I wonder about applying the very large body of content that we've created about developing more self-confidence to this specific issue. I don't know what you think about that. Well, I think as usual, it's right on.

To me, one of the most fundamental and heuristic, like a midwife, generative questions is, what if it were more present in your mind, which is to say your heart, your being altogether, what if it were more present would really help? So what if it were more present would reduce self-obsessing, self-ruminating? Well, broadly, I bet you you're right. If there was a more

general trait of self-worth present, it would tend to reduce problematic self-reflection. I think that's really true. Another element of this kind of goes back to the fear that I think some people have about letting go of the obsessing. It's as if they're writing this ongoing report about themselves.

And I think one thing, one reason why people do that is that, well, at least I'm thinking about myself. It's a way to feel intimate with yourself, especially if you have felt separated or insecurely attached to others. Well, at least I'm caught up with me. And it's very poignant and sweet and tender. And so therefore, what if it were more present?

would reduce at least that factor in this problematic self-involvement. And it would be the sense that others love you and you're connected with them. And there's so much in you that's beautiful and good for others to receive. They value you, they appreciate you, and you're really in that. So there's less need to kind of shore up your sense.

of relatedness by relating intensively to yourself. I'm going to think about this whole self-worth connection, self-confidence aspect a little bit more as it relates to overthinking. I think that it's really interesting that we

we found this topic, which I think people tend to approach in a particular kind of way when they talk about self-awareness and overthinking and rumination. And we've gone in a very positive psych direction with it about these underlying skills, which is very on brand for us and all of that. Toward the end of the episode here, I want to ask you about a piece of this that is so Rick that I couldn't not ask you about it.

A big piece of overthinking is that it essentially impedes doing, as I was talking about a moment ago. And I had this experience recently where I was shopping for two different headphones, or I was shopping for a new pair of headphones, and I looked at a million pairs of headphones. I did a ton of research into this. I was looking at curves of response rate of differing this and that thing. I learned way too much, and I had boiled it down to these two headphones, and I was going back and forth endlessly between the two of them.

and they were very, very similar. And I was like, "Ugh, how do I make a choice?" And I spent so much time on this. I spent way too much time on this. And eventually I just got to a place where I went, "Wait a second, I can actually just order both and return one." Well, that's very on brand for Forrest. Which is very, very Forrest. I actually can. I do have the resources to order both and return one. And that would just save me so much time. And I ordered both, and guess what?

They sounded exactly the same. I could not tell. I listened to a lot of music. I put on a lot of pairs of headphones. I'm very sensitive. I could not tell the difference between these two headphones. Oh, you have bad ears. You're well known for that and in our family system. Thank you. Yeah. Just echolocating around totally. Yeah, yeah. Quick question. It made me geeky. Were the technical specs of the earphones quite different? Very similar.

Oh. They were actually very similar. Okay. So it makes sense. I ended up landing on a style of headphone and there was a lot of overlap between them. They're from the same manufacturer and whatever. I was looking at two different models. It would have been really interesting if the technical specs were quite different and yet they sounded experientially the same. Oh, but they sounded radically different. They sounded essentially the same. But you know what? One of them fit my head and one didn't.

And I would have never learned that if I hadn't tried on the darn headphones in person. And then so I went, oh, okay, great. And so I returned to the pair that didn't fit. Of course, you're like in the Illuminati now. You need white robes. You need like a chair. You can share this job. I got to stop.

You get a whole following. I know this is the most simplistic way of thinking about the world ever. I get it. I get it. But no, I mean, my point here, my point here is that like,

This is so dumb and obvious. And at the same time, it is how overthinking works. This is what we do to ourselves. And you would never have obtained the information that you needed if you didn't move into action. But there's often such an impediment to moving into action. So I gotta ask you, Rick Hansen,

He who is constantly shaking his fist at people on this podcast to try harder, do more, just move into action. What do you think really helps people overcome essentially the fear of commitment, to put it a certain kind of way, and try something, anything, even if it's imperfect? Semi-autobiographically, but I'll leave that out,

Being on your own side is so fundamental. Do you care? Maybe that's the way to start. Do you care? And do you care? And if you don't care or you're so overwhelmed with depression or pain or sorrow, you can't care about anything really or just flutter. Okay. Okay. All right. But if there's at least a little bit of room

in which a person could care who has your life, let's say, about anything? Do you care at all? And more specifically, do you care about other people? Do you care to help them when you can? Do you care to reduce hurting them when you can? Okay. Do you care about yourself? Do you care about helping yourself when you can and hurting yourself less when you can? It's that basic origin point.

And that's a foundation for any kind of useful action in the world. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, beautiful. You can't act on your behalf if you don't care about yourself. Totally. Yeah. And that caring could, for some people, be kind of principled and logical, Spock-like. Okay. For a lot of us included, at bottom, it's very tender and visceral.

And so then that leads to what would help. And now we're starting to move into action inside the mind, thoughts, words, and deeds. What would actually help? And very often, what would actually help is action initially a lot inside your own mind.

Just exploring yourself, increasing your self-awareness in real time, increasing your self-knowledge as the fruit of self-awareness over time. That really is good. You do that and you start sorting things out. I think that's especially useful for people who maybe are fairly impulsive or disorganized in their life and

or they've created a life for themselves, maybe drifted into it or been pushed into it, that increasingly they're chafing inside of. It doesn't feel like them. You know, take some time. Take some time to get to know yourself better. And in a frame in which you're really on your own side and you're trying to discover, as I said earlier, that truth which is useful. At a certain point, though, very often, what's then appropriate is to take that interaction outside.

into words and deeds. And what helps people do that, besides understanding that it's time to do that, is to be prepared to risk the dreaded experience. I have found inside myself two things really have helped. One is to listen to the inner frustration inside that's getting sick and tired of the status quo. One version of that that can be healthy in its nuance is you get tired of your own story.

You're not dropping into some horrible self-loathing. You kind of get being tired of being run by some of your parts. There's a place for that. You don't hate them. You include them, but you're tired of them in the driver's seat. You're okay with them in the back of the bus or maybe in the passenger seat, but it's not appropriate for them to drive the

the car of your life anymore. So you get frustrated. There's a kind of oomph around it, like, okay, I've thought about it. I've thought about it. Enough. You see opportunities slipping by. You see other people acting more quickly. You're left behind. You don't want that. Okay, that. And then there's a part where you just say to yourself, I'm going to run the experiment.

That little trick helped me a lot. I would just say, and it goes to your point earlier, which is genius. Don't know. It's an experiment. I don't know. I don't have to know for sure that it's going to turn out the way I hope. I don't know for sure. I think it's a pretty good bet. And I'm going to run the experiment. And then I'm going to, in a very virtuous way,

Be open to the reality of whatever the result is. And that framing of things like, I know enough to at least run the experiment, you know, has really helped me. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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Now, back to the show.

I really like the experimental mindset part of this whole thing. It was actually something that I was going to bring up if you didn't bring it up. So I'm glad that you did it. And I think that in general, with most of the things that we tend to overthink about, there are some decisions that are really big decisions that it's tough to just experiment with, right? You're kind of either in or you're out with whatever it is that you're doing. But most things we can think seasonally.

we can think of in terms of, I'm going to just try this on for a rep at that party and see what happens. If I go a little outside of my comfort zone, see if I respond a little differently to other people, I'm just trying it on. I'm experimenting particularly with a way of being, which is again, totally supported by less congealedness around who Forrest is. It's totally supported by more openness to like, oh, if I try that on, what happens?

You know, if I experiment with this job path, what happens? If I apply to that thing over there, what happens? If I ask that person out, what happens? Whatever it is. And you develop more of a... You get a lot of reps, and those reps can sometimes be painful. Those don't always go the way that we want them to go, of course. But you get experience, and you get experience kind of pushing your own boundaries a little bit. How have you found...

a good process of moving beyond the bounds of the conceptual model of forest. So we form a self-concept

There's a lot of stuff about this, including related notions like ego ideals. Who do we hope we are? Who do we fear that we are? How do we balance all that? We do that. And particularly for people who are dropped into a quite psychological culture at this point. And you see that reinforced in just everyday culture, TV shows, things of that sort. And people are kind of reporting on their own tendencies. They're familiar with their...

Hase's score, childhood trauma, they're a neogram type, they talk in this way. Yeah, it's pretty verbally elaborated. It's like a report. And yet the psyche altogether is mainly nonverbal. It's vast. It's layered. Its depths involve a lot of what Freud called primary process of just raw emotion and feeling and image versus the secondary process of this elaborated self-storage.

And it's important to be able to have both, to be able to move back and forth between a somewhat accurate and hopefully fairly positive account of yourself while being really open to realizing that that account lives in a kind of vastness that has a certain mystery at its edges. And then how do we be open to that, especially if we're pretty good at verbal accounts of who we are?

Well, to your point, sometimes the verbal account can be a big contributor to that tight sense of self because you get very bought in to all of the story that's tied to the 18 personality tests that you've taken or whatever it is. When the truth is that people are individual, they're complicated, it's layers and layers and layers, all of that good stuff. So how have I opened that up a little bit

Well, I think for me it's a big self-acceptance piece. So for a long time, I'm not sure if I liked myself that much. And from that flowed a lot of second guessing, which is in a lot of ways the core of overthinking. We're just kind of constantly second guessing ourselves. And a lot of concern about

how other people were perceiving the way that I was or what I was doing, which is another storm for overthinking. If you're really spending a lot of time very concerned about what's going on in the minds of other people, that is fertile ground for overthinking.

And so I think that just by over time through a long process that again might be a different conversation, I developed a greater sense of liking myself in kind of a, not like in a narcissistic way, but just enjoying being a forest and having more of an appreciation for my positive qualities and

frankly changing a lot and going through a pretty thorough process of personal development where I think I'm a very different person today than I was 10 years ago. And very deliberately turning myself into somebody that I found more aspirational and more desirable to be around and all of that stuff. And I think that over time that really helped me move away

from so much of the conceptualizing to more of a secure emotional base with myself that supported me in doing less overthinking and making me a little bit less preoccupied about all of this. I don't know if that exactly answered your question, dad, but that's how it just emerged in me as you were asking it. I'm glad to explore this. And one thing that I personally have found really extremely useful is an openness and a not knowing attitude

toward the vastness of the psyche. Humanity has related to nature a lot, especially in the last industrial revolution centuries, as something to be dominated and controlled and bounded. And we can also relate to our own internal nature in much the same way with probably similar negative results. And so

I just think there's a real place for expanding beyond the edge of the peer, the edge of the familiar with regard to your own being. And I'm hearing that what you did in part was that you, like many people do, became dissatisfied with the contracted persona, let's say, or personality as you saw it.

And then you began opening to and becoming increasingly aware of aspects of your being that were always, always true and help them become maybe more in the light and also believed in them more and trusted them more. And it was amazing.

an expanded sense of who you really are over time. Yeah, yeah. Why I'm nodding along as you're saying this, Dad, is because I think you're highlighting something that's really important here, which is I went through a real change process. And yes, part of that process was becoming different, whatever that means. But 80% to 90% of it was actually more of a rediscovery and reconnection process. So it was becoming more the way that

closer to my core nature in a less guarded way and a more transparent and more authentic way. I became in a sense less performative actually. And I still retain the ability to do a little performance, do a little song and dance routine when I want to, but thankfully I have to do that a little bit less in my life these days and I feel great about that. And I don't feel so bound to it. It's not something where I feel required to because

I've got something going on inside of me that's like I'm very wrapped up in. The light bulb is going off for me as well about, I think that when people are caught up in self-awareness, self-knowing, which is really the through line of our conversation here today, they're keeping at bay what's not known because they're preoccupied with what's known. It's sort of like, well, they're looking at the flashing light over here where the bright spotlight is. And because they're focused

at what's under the light, they're really not aware of what's true in their own psyche. There's this great phrase, I don't know if it's from Zen or something, but it's looking at the finger that's pointing at the moon. Oh, very good. Yeah. And that's kind of what you're describing. You're so preoccupied by looking at the finger that you're missing the moon. Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful.

And in, I think, a certain way, what people are trying to do when they're caught up in self-knowledge and preoccupation, they're trying to direct the machine. They're trying to direct the mechanism, if you will. It's kind of top-down. I want to figure out who and when I am so I can drive the machinery better in a kind of doing way that's sort of deliberate. It's top-down. That's really distinct from trusting yourself enough, as you put it.

to just open up more and allow there to be more flow, even if it's a little ragged occasionally, this is decision analysis again, the net gain from allowing more flow will outweigh the occasional cost of a kind of bumpiness.

That's a great point, dad. And this is clearly one of those topics as we sometimes find when we're recording that there's a lot there. And I think there's a lot that we could keep on talking about and exploring. But this feels like a pretty good place to bring it to a close today. I really appreciate all the layers that you added to this. You really changed how I was thinking about it. I think I was thinking about it in a kind of narrow operational way when I got into the room, and now I'm thinking about it in a much more broad way. Well, you know I first thought this was kind of dumb, and now I think it's really quite great.

Maybe I'll just leave it there for the, I'll just fade out on that one. I thought it was dumb, but now I think, oh my God, you're so funny, dad. You're such a funny pumpkin. All right. Thanks. That was great. You killed it. Same at you. And just so you know, Forrest, I always liked you.

Today I talked with Rick about overthinking, self-awareness, and rumination. And this was one of those episodes where I had some idea of what we would talk about, but once we started digging into it, a lot of interesting stuff came up. We talked about self-confidence and the difference between self-awareness and self-knowledge, learning to trust yourself over time,

And a theme that emerged throughout the conversation was loosening up and lightening up a little bit about feeling like such an expert on yourself or on the circumstances around you. Because there's this funny kind of paradox with overthinking where on the one hand, we're trying to acquire more information so we can make a decision that we feel really good about. At the root of overthinking is this kind of belief that if we just know enough, we'll finally be able to solve our problem.

And then on the other hand, overthinking is kind of driven by too much knowledge. The more that we know, the more information we have, the more prone we are to overthinking. So there's this funny kind of thing where just acquiring more information doesn't actually support us in making a better decision. And the question then becomes, okay, how do we acquire good information? How do we act on it thoughtfully? And very importantly, how do we learn when enough is enough and it's time to move into action?

One of the major topics we explored was rumination. And rumination is a kind of repetitive pattern of thought where we just chew on the same thing over and over again. The problem with rumination is that it's really easy for people to think that it's a productive kind of mental activity. In other words, they think that they're getting somewhere with all of the thoughts that they're having. But the key characteristic of rumination is that it's not useful.

It's not, as Rick talked about, developing more insight about yourself. It's not really exploring what it means to be you in a kind of productive way. No, it's just chewing over and over again, but you're not actually getting anywhere with all of that chewing. And this then took us to a bit of a conversation about what the function of these different behaviors is.

And overthinking and rumination function as a kind of avoidance mechanism. They stop us from needing to do things that we would find uncomfortable. Maybe they stop us from moving into action that we feel anxious about. They stop us from taking a risk in a social setting that we're concerned about the consequences of. These are different ways that the mind finds to immobilize us, and that immobilization then kind of keeps us safe from all of these things that we might be worried about.

And this got me thinking about if there's some kind of a connection between overthinking and rigidity, particularly neuroticism, which is a great indicator of psychological rigidity. And it turns out that there is. These things are very closely linked, which then begs the question, if we were able to find more openness, particularly more openness in how we think of ourselves, could that be a kind of pulling of the root of overthinking in general that would really help us deal with that behavior?

What would it be like to reframe different thoughts from I need to have all the information in order to make a good decision to I need to have enough information to make a good decision? Can we develop a general sense of experimentation and openness to possibility, flexibility, a general sense of trial and error?

And there's a kind of bravery to this that we didn't really talk about during the episode, but I actually think it's a huge piece of it. And it's that self-confidence, self-assuredness piece that we did mention a little bit. But it's quite brave to try something without being sure that it's going to work out. But the reality in life is, of course, we're never sure that something's going to work out. We never have a perfect set of information. We never know everything that we can know about something.

And we have to move forward anyway. We have to make the best decision that we can. And that is really scary, but it's also just the nature of life. This then took us to a basic framework for what could help somebody manage that fear, that concern with moving into action.

I think this starts with recognizing when you're in a loop of overthinking, where you've crossed the Rubicon from useful thoughts, useful chewing, to just the repetitive action of doing it over and over again. And you're really kind of trapped in it. Then the second piece is disidentifying, creating some space between yourself and your thoughts. You're learning to observe the overthinking loop rather than really getting wrapped up in it. And you're developing some general practices for taking a little step back from all of that mental chatter.

This is often a stage that people get to in meditative practice when people first start meditating. They think that the goal of meditation is to not think any thoughts a lot of the time. I'm just going to push down all of those thoughts that emerge in the mind. Over time, you start to learn that the goal of meditation is to practice with mental content, not to suppress it. So you see the thoughts come in, they move through the mind, and you look at them as they move out the door.

So you see the thoughts, you recognize them, you feel whatever feelings that come up based on them. And in that experiencing, there's often a kind of releasing that can be associated with it. Then we work toward improving focus and developing different kinds of practices for mental regulation because overthinking is really a failure of focus. We've gotten wrapped up in the kind of thought and we just can't separate from it. And then finally, we find different ways to accept good enough decisions rather than searching for perfect ones.

Then toward the end of the episode, we talked about moving from knowledge to action. For Rick, this begins with caring about yourself, which is the basis for all useful action in the world. If you don't care about yourself that much, it's going to be really difficult to do things that are on your side. Then second, you're trying to create some kind of order inside of the mind, developing that self-knowledge as opposed to self-preoccupation.

then we have to risk the dreaded experience in different kinds of ways. We have to have that moment where we recognize, oh, this process of overthinking is protecting me from something. It is stopping me from doing a thing that I would be really benefited by doing. When we figure out that that's what's going on and we get really clear that, oh, this is a protective mechanism, it's not actually serving me to think about this one more time.

From there, it's a question of courage. Can you step into it? And Rick talked about getting tired with the status quo as something that can support us in doing that, getting tired with this very narrow version of your own story. He also talked about cultivating a more experimental mindset.

A piece of that that is really alive for me is thinking about my life more in the short term as opposed to the long term. I'm actually preparing right now for a conversation with a future guest who's going to be on the podcast. And it's David Epstein. He's the author of Range.

And one of the things in his work that really stands out to me is that very high achievers often have a very short-term focus. We tend to think in terms of like a five-year plan or a 10-year plan or something like that. But people who really get somewhere are often just kind of solving the problem that's in front of them. They're constantly moving into action. So what do you need in order to do that? You need a basic sense of self-confidence.

You need some faith in yourself as an individual, self-efficacy, the belief that you can get things done. And you need that experimental mindset, the willingness to try stuff out and the courage that that suggests. The next time that you're overthinking, the next time that you're really chewing on something, maybe try applying this basic framework. Set a timer, preferably for less than five minutes.

Then write down what you're thinking about while that timer is running, and particularly all of the different factors that you're weighing as you're thinking about it. Ideally, write it down using pen and paper. I find that that really helps. Then when the timer goes off, circle the three or fewer most important factors. What do you care about the most? On a new sheet of paper, write the subject or the decision that you're making at the top of it and the less than three key factors underneath that.

That's it, right? Only those three things. Then from there, based on those three things alone, what would you choose? Can you commit to taking some kind of action, just one action on the basis of those factors in the next day or so, or at least the next couple of days?

Throughout this exercise, it's really important to pay attention to how you feel. What starts to bubble up? Is it a feeling of insecurity? Is it a feeling of a lack of self-confidence? Is it a feeling of anxiety, fear, concern? Does this feel too simple? Do you feel like you're leaving a lot out? Paying attention to that emotional content can give you some incredible guidance in how to move forward or what the emotional stakes might be that are on the table that you're dealing with, which can then give you some insight into what you might want to try next.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really liked putting this one together. Rick was really bringing a lot to the table that was making me think about how I think about overthinking in general and how I might approach this topic in the future. It was super helpful for me.

If you're interested in learning more about overthinking and rumination from Rick, he has a five-week online rumination course that starts on March 29th. So that's coming up. It focuses on helping us learn about how to let go of repetitive patterns of thought. And you can learn more at rickhansen.com backslash ruminating and use the code beingwell25 to receive a 25% off discount.

If you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And the best thing you can do to support the show is just to tell a friend about it. Best way we have to reach new people. If you could also subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet.

That would be great. We have a YouTube channel if you're listening to the podcast feed. We're on every podcast feed if you're watching on YouTube. We always love getting emails if you want to reach out through email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com and you can find us pretty much everywhere on social media. So until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.