Stop Overthinking
Stop overthinking, stop giving validation to your thoughts. There is a Roman Stoic philosopher named Seneca. He has a very good quote: "We suffer more in our imagination than in reality." And this is the problem with every single person today, with me and with all of us. We are so lost in our thoughts that whatever pain we experience, we experience it in those thoughts alone, and those thoughts are just in our mind. It’s possible that they may not even happen in reality, and even if they do, they are things of the future. But the pain we might face in the future, we experience it today itself, and its effect falls on our brain, on our mind, which leads us to stress. We slip into depression. We start getting anxiety. And I think there’s only one solution to this: thoughts come and go. Some are good, some are bad. But they are just thoughts. Giving them so much validation, holding onto them, paying so much attention to them—because when a thought comes, there are a hundred thoughts behind it. A bad thought comes, a good thought comes. If we latch onto that thought, if we overthink that thought, we go so far with it. And behind that one thought, there’s an entire train, and we dig so deep into that thought that it causes us so much pain. But in reality, that thought has no significance. That thought comes and goes. Just like we’re standing on a road, and cars are passing by. We’re looking on both sides. To our left and right, cars are coming and going. Some are of different colors. Some are of different models. But the cars keep coming and going, and thoughts are just like that—they come and go. And we’re standing there, watching them come and go, saying, “It’s okay, nothing will happen.” And there’s one thought, one car that comes, and we notice it, we latch onto it in our thoughts. That car was like this, its color was like that, it was of this model, and by latching onto that thought, we make such a big mistake that all the train compartments behind that thought—we open them all, waste our time, and get stressed. And that’s how you work too.