By Dina Aldabbagh

Overthinking is stifling you. You have a lot of goals? You can’t think about them all. You just have to decide, then do it. Do all the thinking while you’re in the deciding phase and commit to yourself that you won’t think about it when the time comes to do it, you’ll just do it — Nike was onto something. Dwelling on how hard something is going to be is much worse than the thing itself. In the morning when I’m in bed and the room is freezing, but I need to get up, my worst days are when I lay there for 10 minutes, just trying to motivate myself, all whilst thinking about how cold I will be once I get out of my sheets. It’s excruciating. I’ll be covered neck to toe, with just my face exposed, and I’ll feel the chill on my face; that little exposure will have me paralyzed for long minutes. Then, I finally get out of bed, go straight to put on some sweats, and weirdly enough I’m just fine. Then I have these other days where I open my eyes and just get straight out of bed — I’m always fine. The bad experience is not the one minute of being cold before I arm myself in cloth, the bad experience is the anticipation of the bad experience. 

Pre-emptive worry can’t do much for us. It can’t do anything actually. We either put ourselves through mental anguish before doing the thing or we are deterred from the thing altogether. The self-imposed mental anguish doesn’t help lessen the blow of whatever hard thing we’re going to do, it just makes it worse. I can spend all the time in the world overthinking the daunting task in front of me, but that time doesn’t get tacked back on and it doesn’t make the actual experience better, so then why do it? We all experience dread in the daily commitments we have, but it’s something you must catch and release very quickly. Otherwise you open the way for a pattern of anxiety and a lack of follow through to take place. If you overthink every single action before you do the action, you’ve created this association between doing things and anxiety. The natural response when your feedback loop to something is always negative is that you will want to stop doing that thing. Of course, we live in a society, and you can’t stop altogether unless you’re ready to just call it in completely, so you have to do certain things, but then you end up doing the bare minimum, the absolute necessities to just get by. That’s not a life. That’s allowing yourself to never see what even a little bit of your potential could amount to. The only way you get much out of life is by putting a great deal into it; if you’re always doing the bare minimum to just get by so that you avoid all the mental anguish of doing hard things, you will live a very hard life. And moreover, you will waste a lot of your life as well — never knowing what could’ve been if you had performed at your personal best.

Imagine that. Sit for a moment and allow yourself to create two different future realities in your head: one where you do the absolute most you can with what you were given, and the other where you continue to perpetuate the exact life you’re living now, and then get to the end of your life and have no more chances to make something happen. If you allow yourself to think about every single thing before you do it, you’ll deter yourself from doing things — because they’re hard. It’s hard to always get yourself to go workout, it’s hard to always want to work on your side business, it’s hard to always get yourself to respond back to people and make commitments; it’s hard to, more than anything, just get yourself up to do it. The actual thing is never so bad. The thought that I have to do another 30 minutes on the treadmill is much worse than doing the 30 minutes. I noticed this as I walked the treadmill one day. I got hungry as soon as I started and was ready to hop off immediately, but I had at least 30 minutes in front of me. I spent five minutes walking and thinking about how I can’t possibly stay another 30. In an attempt to combat this, I decided to distract myself by changing the thought I was entertaining — I put on a video, started reflecting on what was being said in the video, paused the video, and walked to music as I thought about it. Once I was ready to start the video back up, I realized I had walked an entire hour. I didn’t even think about my hunger once during that time, nor how bad the walk was. It was like all the effort I had just put in didn’t exist because I wasn’t thinking about it, and it happened mindlessly. It’s not the actual things that we do that bring us anguish, it’s the way we think about it.

I’m not saying go through life mindlessly. However, I am saying that thinking so deeply about how much effort you have to exert in a given action — that you already thought about and decided was beneficial for you — does not help you. It’s not always going to feel hard, but if it does this time, stop thinking about it. Just do the thing you already committed to doing so that you can be the kind of person you want to be and don’t make it deeper than that. 

It’s funny how someone can wake up at 4 am everyday for a job with a lot of physical labor, and come home and not complain about it, while someone else can have a few emails to send and it’s weighing on them all day. The difference is, the person who had to work at 4 am didn’t think about every single step along the way. They knew, ‘This is the end goal: I need money. This is the job I have, this is the time it requires me to be there, this is the time I need to wake up in order to have breakfast and get there on time, this is what I need to do in order to do my job so that I can have the outcome I want.’ And it’s all subconscious. They’re probably not walking themselves through these steps everyday, they just know that if they want to have a home and food, they need money, so they need a job, and these are the things that job requires. Apply that mindset to your goals. 

This is what I want.

This is who I have to be to have that.

This is the time I need to wake up.

This is the time I need to sleep.

This is what I need to eat.

These are the habits I need to have to make that
thing I want come into fruition.

It is so simple, but it can be hard — if you allow yourself to dwell on how much you actually need to do. Don’t think about it too much. Decide, and then just go forward with it. That’s why slow growth is often the way to achieving what you want — before adding on more, the habits we’re working on accumulating right now need to become automated. Doing all the things you need to do to have what you want is a lot to mentally take on if you’re so far from being that person. However, like a boat going through a canal, you can do it if you adjust yourself bit by bit. When a boat is making its way through a canal, a gate is opened to allow the boat into a defined area, with another gate on the opposing side. Then, water is added or taken out to raise or lower the water level so that the boat can meet the level of the next gate. This happens as many times as needed until the boat is able to come out the other side. You are the boat, every habit you develop that gets you closer to your goals is adding water so that you are rising up for the next gate. You have to automate habit by habit in your mind, and then add on the next thing. Everything gets you closer, but it starts with just pushing through and not thinking about it so hard. Don’t overthink the steps you need to take to become who you want to be, just do it. 

Everyone knows the saying, “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” but have you actually thought about what that means? My interpretation is this: so some milk spilled, that’s a bad thing, but then you cry over it, and now two bad things have happened. You’re going to have to clean up that milk anyways, instead of sitting there and being upset about what just happened, accept that the milk spilled and don’t think much about it, just clean it up. You also no longer have that milk available to consume, go from there with whatever adjustments you need to make to your post-spilled milk life. Afterall, maybe you wanted to eat a bowl of cereal and that was the last of the milk — that means you don’t get cereal unless you find another way to get milk, surely there are many, but even if there are not, move on. If you take the time to think about what this now spilled milk means for your life — i.e. must clean it up, don’t get to eat cereal — you’re putting yourself through extra suffering. You’re putting yourself through it. The milk is just milk. It doesn’t have a vendetta against you and neither does the universe. The milk is neutral, you decide how this situation is experienced in your body. 

When you have something to do, don’t put yourself through any extra suffering. Cut out the ‘thinking about what is about to happen’ aspect and just do it. You’ll get farther and feel better in the process.