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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you love this podcast, you'll probably love the live event that I'm doing later on this year.
If you want to join the waitlist to be the first to learn about it and to get massive discounts for my in-person event in Austin, Texas later on this year, go to freedom.com. Today, I'm going to be explaining why some people are addicted to overthinking and imagining fake scenarios in their mind.
And if you don't understand this, you will probably continue creating anxiety and worry, even though nothing is currently wrong in your life. And what you will end up doing is sabotaging your peace. And most people listening to this might think like, I might be addicted to overthinking. I'm overthinking all of the time. I want you to realize you're not.
What people tend to get quote unquote addicted to is the emotional state that overthinking creates inside of us. Think about it. Why would someone spend hours imagining fake arguments that never actually happened? Why would someone replay conversations from three months ago?
Why would someone create worst case scenarios while they're just laying in their bed at night, completely safe and warm under their covers? If it feels terrible, why would we keep doing it? The answer is because your mind is not just producing thoughts. Your thoughts are producing chemistry and chemicals inside of your body.
Every thought that you think creates some sort of corresponding emotional and physiological response inside of your body. It doesn't just stay in your head. So imagining an argument with your spouse, and you have that imagination, if I say this, she's gonna say this, and this will happen, and that'll happen. Your body will actually start to change as you imagine this.
Your heart rate will start to change. Your muscles might tense up in some sort of way. Stress hormones might be released in your body. And your body begins preparing for a threat that doesn't even exist, but your mind is just vividly imagining. And so from your nervous system's perspective, the threat is actually real.
And neuroscience often talk about this and how the body becomes conditioned to emotional states through repetition. And so the core principle of it is this, repeated thoughts strengthen neural pathways.
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Chapter 2: What is the main reason people are addicted to overthinking?
making certain emotional responses more automatic over time. And so the phrase that's often used in neuroscience, which you probably heard me say a hundred times, is neurons that fire together wire together. So the more frequently that you think a certain way, the easier it becomes for your brain to continue thinking that way.
And over time, anxiety that you have inside of your body becomes normal. Anxiety feels like home. It also depends on your childhood too. Like if you grew up in a household that was unpredictable and had a lot of chaos in it, your brain and body might have learned to associate like close relationships or love with anxiety.
And so going back to the example I gave just a minute ago with like the fake scenario of you and your spouse getting into an argument, that actually puts your body into a familiar state with someone that you love.
And so if your parents were like that and you felt like, oh my gosh, there was chaos inside of the house, it feels natural for you to create chaos in your relationship, even if there's no reason to have chaos in the relationship. Another example is like, I hear a lot of people that I coach and work with are in just so much fear.
And it's like, they could be a very successful person, super successful CEO, but they still, their life is run by fear. A lot of people who are very successful are run by fear. And they usually get it from their parents. So if like one of your parents was full of fear, and the way that they like, quote unquote, controlled you was through fear, which... A lot of parents do.
Instead of explaining, hey, this is why you don't want to do this. This is actually what you should do instead. A lot of parents just take the easy way out and they just scare the shit out of their kids so that they don't have to explain to them. And it's just easier to scare the kid than it is to explain to them over and over again why they shouldn't do it.
And so they scare them so that they do what they want. right? I see it all of the time. And if that's the case and you were raised that way, or your parents are really full of fear and still to this day, you're still full of fear and your mom texts you all of these fearful things.
If your childhood had fear, it will make you create thoughts and false futures right now that are fearful so that you feel the same feelings. You kind of almost get addicted to those feelings, those chemicals in your body, the same way that like A drug addict or an alcoholic would be addicted to a chemical that is then put into their body. And once again, it might not be what you want.
You might not want to feel fear. You might not want to feel anxiety, but it's what feels normal to you. And so a lot of times it's not like necessarily your fault. A lot of times it's our conditioning and we just repeat patterns and we go back to what feels normal. It's not our fault, but it is our responsibility to change it if it's not what we want.
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Chapter 3: How do our thoughts create emotional and physiological responses?
Dude, that is unfamiliar. And the brain generally prefers familiar over unfamiliar, even if that familiar is painful or chaotic or anxious or full of fear. And so, you know, as you know from this podcast, neuroscience proves that your brain is constantly trying to predict what happens next.
So it's a protection mechanism, you know, and in neuroscience, this is called predictive processing model, right? The brain isn't simply reacting to reality. It is constantly generating models of reality. It's asking, like, what's most likely to happen? How can I prepare myself? What patterns have I seen before?
And so for someone who's been expecting criticism or rejection or harassment or like failure or conditional love or abandonment for years, if that's what you've been used to, the brain becomes extremely tuned to those and extremely efficient at generating predictions around that as a protection mechanism. which is why some people don't just imagine scenarios. They compulsively simulate them.
And the brain is basically attempting to gain certainty about the future, which is always going to be uncertain. And so the problem is that certainty never arrives, so the simulation just continues. And I've said this before on the podcast, but one of my favorite quotes around this is that your mind can make heaven out of hell or hell out of heaven.
And so many people are living in like a pretty good life and it's kind of peaceful and it's kind of great. And many people in this world would want that life, but they're making hell out of heaven. Like so many people have nothing wrong and they're sitting in the present moment and everything is just pretty okay. And they just can't feel content with that.
So they freak out because content feels foreign and foreign feels wrong. Anxiety, that feels normal. Fear, that feels normal. So they make up these fake scenarios when nothing is wrong because that's what they're used to. They're basically addicted to the chaos. They're addicted to the overthinking.
They're addicted to those feelings of fear and worry and anxiety, the chemicals that those come up in your body when you think that way. Many listeners will recognize this. You could be in the shower or driving your car or lying in bed, and suddenly you're having a conversation with someone who isn't even there in your head.
You're explaining yourself or you're defending yourself or trying to win an argument or preparing for confrontation. Psychologists refer to this as anticipatory processing. Your brain believes... that it can rehearse all of the possible outcomes. And if it can do that, then it can prevent pain. That's what our brain thinks it's doing.
But research has shown consistently that the opposite is actually what's happening. The more people mentally rehearsed all of these feared or anxious situations, the more that their anxiety increases. So instead of preventing the pain, it creates anxiety. And once again, Nothing is wrong. Like, do you get that? Nothing's wrong.
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Chapter 4: Why do childhood experiences influence our tendency to overthink?
Your body is basically the portal back to this present moment and out of your head. Notice what's happening around you. And then ask yourself the question, once you're present, what problem do I have in this exact moment? most of the time you'll realize that the problem is not right now. People are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but Rob, you don't understand.
I'm stressing out because I have to pay my bills next week. Okay, is that today? No. So you're ruining this moment with thoughts of next week. And I'm not saying like, don't pay attention to paying your bills. I'm saying this, when you feel better and you can bring yourself back to the present moment and calm yourself down, you can then think better.
And when you think better, you can take better action. And when you don't feel like shit, it's easier to take action. When you feel like crap, it's harder to take action.
Like it makes you, if you do bring yourself back to the present moment and start seeing more clearly and get yourself out of worry and get yourself out of fear and get yourself out of anxiety, you're more likely to figure out how to make the money to pay your bills, right? So that's number three. The fourth step is teach your nervous system that peace is safe.
This is where most people struggle, right? Because when you've been anxious for years, when you've overthinked for years, when you're taught to fear, calm feels weird. It feels unfamiliar. It feels wrong. Calm for a lot of people, believe it or not, is fucking terrifying. Like they're terrified of calm. They're terrified of peace, of content.
And so a lot of people like want to unconsciously create a problem because it's like, that's not what they're used to. So when that happens, don't run from the calm. When you notice it, just sit with it for a second. You sitting for the next 10 minutes is not going to make your entire world crumble. Let yourself feel the calm. Remind yourself, nothing is wrong right now.
This is what peace feels like. I want to be more okay with peace. This is what safety feels like. I might not have felt safety in my childhood. I want to train myself to be okay with moments of calm and quiet and peace and content. And the more time that you spend there, the more familiar it becomes and makes it less weird to sit there, right? Let's be honest though.
No matter what you're worried about or feared or any of those types of things, if we're being honest, every difficult thing that you've ever faced in your life, you've already gotten through. Like you figured it out somehow. You adapted and you survived, right? You'll do the same with whatever comes next. You don't need to overthink every possible future.
You only need to trust yourself enough to handle reality when it arrives. Because the goal is to not stop thinking. You'll never do that. The goal is to stop suffering thinking. And the way that you stop suffering is stop making yourself suffer with your thoughts of things that aren't even happening right now.
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