The 5 Types of Overthinking and How to Turn Each One Off | Emiliya Zhivotovskaya [Best of]
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So have you ever had a thought, especially a negative one that just kind of tortures you, you know, one that keeps spinning in your head and you keep trying to just stop thinking about it. You try and reason your way out of it or distract yourself and nothing really works. You're just kind of trapped in a spin cycle of overthinking. It happens to nearly everyone and it has nothing to do with how smart or accomplished or confident you are. There's something else going on. According to my guest today, the founder of the Flourishing Center and a dear friend, Emilio Zivitovskaya, the reason you can't stop a thought by just telling yourself to stop is that the thought is actually trying to get your attention because it has a job.
And it will keep trying to do that job until you actually respond to it in the right way. And most of us, we've never been taught how. What I didn't know going into this conversation is that overthinking, it isn't actually just one thing. It's five distinct types of chatter, each with a different source, a different voice pattern, and a different specific response that actually quiets it. Using the wrong response on the wrong type of chatter is kind of like trying to fix a leaky pipe with a hammer. The tools really do matter. And Amelia has spent decades inside the science and practice of mental well-being, training thousands of coaches worldwide through her certification in applied positive psychology.
And she came to this work through really her own years of being consumed by thoughts that she really didn't know that she could change. She did change them and has since taught so many others how to do it. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The overarching theme for this conversation is this thing that we kind of generally call overthinking. But I know overthinking is a word that a lot of us just use every day to describe what's happening when we're experiencing it. But there's actually a lot of science underneath this. There's a lot of structure underneath it. There are different names when you get into actually what's happening. And there are different strategies that we can embrace to help really deal with this and maybe even
Turn that thing that causes so much suffering in us into a bit of a superpower. So we're going to dive into this. And I have a dear friend, longtime collaborator, To dive into this with. So, Amelia, you have been living in this world where, you know, like when we first met a million years ago, you were actually in school doing your master's in applied positive psychology at UPenn, spent a chunk of years coaching and consulting and for many years now have literally been training the next generation of people to go out there. and really help others in the world and industry individually. How often does this phenomenon that we're talking about come up in the work that you've done, in the client work that you've done in the past, and what you hear coming back to you from the people who you have trained to go and help so many people?
Thank you, Jonathan. I can literally say in just about every single session, some aspect of learning to control your thoughts and redirect the stories that you're telling yourself or have mastery over your mind can apply to just about every conversation. There isn't a trigger that we work through that doesn't have some aspect of what's going through your mind in the heat of the moment. There isn't a project that you're trying to build or an idea that you want to build to fruition that you're not going to encounter in your brain stories that it creates around it and as stress levels go up a lot of the stress that people feel so whether we're trying to navigate our day-to-day stressors and trying to fall asleep at night and then not being able to because your mind is just going going going going
Especially in our world that is constantly changing, and there's so many things that people are making decisions about, and there's a space to constantly be overthinking your decisions.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:02
2
What are the five distinct types of overthinking?
6:02–15:20
3
How does worry chatter impact decision-making?
15:20–31:30
4
What techniques can help manage motivation chatter?
31:30–40:27
5
How can mindset chatter be reframed for growth?
40:27–56:25
6
What strategies can help with judgment chatter?
56:25–1:00:08
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Good Life Project
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