How to escape the overthinking trap: stop judging yourself | Mark... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/escape-...

How to escape the overthinking trap: stop

judging yourself
Mark Rice-Oxley
The despair from comparing ourselves with others is the original fake news. We need to
develop a new relationship with our thoughts

Rodins The Thinker. Thinking is what gives human ascendancy. Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

Monday 16 January 2017 08.00GMT

Before Christmas I took a young relative to a jazz concert. The thought of it ruined his
whole day. He scued around the house like an alt-right voter at a refugee camp.

In the event, even he acknowledged that we had a ne time. But neither of us would ever
get back the dreadful hours that preceded it. Hed fallen prey to a cardinal paradox
poisoning the present by agonising over a future hardship that never materialised.

Weve all done that. The homo sapiens is so damn clever, and yet sometimes so stupid
with it. We are the only species that can really think oine wrapped up in things that
havent yet happened or things that are long gone but can never be changed. This makes
us excellent problem solvers, but appalling worriers at the same time.

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Thinking is what gave humans ascendancy. But overthinking is threatening to bring us

down. Critical thinking has undoubtedly advanced our cause and become one of the
essential assets of being so brilliantly human, but introspective thinking our near
constant self-evaluation, who we are, where we t, how we compare is becoming one
of the most destructive aspects of modern life. We must purge it.

We are in thrall to the rigid, judgmental thoughts we think about ourselves, prisoners of
the sinewy web of cogitation that tells us we are strong, clever, important, unassertive,
patriotic, hopeless, old, fat, hard done by, forgotten when actually we may be many of
these things rolled into one. This narrow view of ourselves shapes impossible
expectations that can only lead to disappointment. It ripples outwards into our emotions
and our behaviour. The results are to be seen daily on our front pages. A father thinks he
is the ultimate authority in his family. When his daughter challenges him, he has her
killed. A young man thinks he is strong, identies through his supposed manliness; it
directs his violent behaviour.

Our obsessive thinking about ourselves even informs the air of political revolt that made
2016 such a big turning point. In the richest, healthiest, most prosperous era we have
ever known, people punish themselves by ruminating and nding that their lives dont
match up to those they think others are leading. Its a short step from disappointment to
blame, and a protest vote.

But this overthinking tendency is not limited to politics. It embeds personal misery in an
era in which we are tempted, even encouraged, to compare ourselves with other people:
the teenager who feels low because of what her Instagram feed makes her think; the
thwarted youngster, demoralised by the success of others; the employee who feels
insecure because she thinks the boss blanked her on the stairwell; the hypochondriac
who thinks he is dying of everything. Think bad, feel bad. Compare and despair. Its no
wonder there is a mental illness epidemic out there. Time to wake up, people. The voice
in your head is not who you are. Its just an excitable commentator. You are the game.

Too much of our behaviour is determined not by how things are, but how we think
things are. But this thinking is not worth paying too much attention to, for two reasons.
First, it is probably incorrect. Lets face it: we are hardly objective in evaluating
ourselves. We overexaggerate both our talents and failings. This is the original fake
news.

And second, whether right or wrong, these self-evaluations simply are not helpful. They
just make us feel worse.

We need a completely new relationship with our thoughts. Instead of viewing the world
and our experience as we think they ought to be, we need to treat them as they actually
are. We need to recognise when we are ruining a day, a week, a moment or a relationship
with catastrophic thoughts and judgments, and understand that often it is the thought
itself that makes us feel bad, not the experience itself.

But how to cultivate that sense of detachment from a poisonous, unhelpful or just plain
wrong stream of thinking? Visual clues can help: a post-it on a computer screen (mine
just says thinking ) or a screensaver on a phone. I wear a black wristband to remind
me why I do this. A discreet tattoo might do the same, if thats your thing.

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Habit is even better: get used to observing, say, the rst three thoughts you have upon
waking every day were they functional, workaday, banal; or were they judgmental,
apprehensive, punishing? Some people like to use motifs thoughts as a torrent of
trac, cars driving past, and you dont have to get in the passenger seat. And that same
recurring, corrosive notion can be an ugly polluting SUV that comes, stays and moves on
again, without really aecting you. Or else thoughts are a busy stream, chattering away
in front of you, often pulling you under. But each time you are submerged, eventually
you notice and pull yourself out and sit undisturbed, again and again until it starts to
become habit to notice the thought rather than believe it.

Happily, some schools are starting to teach this important element of psychological
exibility. It should be compulsory in secondary schools.The myriad apps that teach the
practice of being present in the now are another entry point, helping us cultivate our
observing selves, rather than our thinking selves.

Instead of obsessing, fuming, curdling about things we dont have, we need to accept
and celebrate what we do. Instead of worrying about things we cant control peoples
opinion of us, for example we need to direct our attentions to things we can inuence,
and leave the rest be. Instead of judging each other, and worse ourselves, let us
simply take as we nd. Instead of ruining our short time alive by setting expectations of
how we think everything should be, from our jobs to our love lives, our children to our
prospects, let us accept that some things will not always go as we wish.

Youre not who you think you are. Youre so much more than that.

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