🧠 How to Stop Overthinking

 

🧠 How to Stop Overthinking / Part I: Understanding the Root of Mental Noise 🌿

Overthinking is not a character flaw or a personal failure. It is a learned coping strategy.

The mind tries to protect us by anticipating scenarios, replaying mistakes, and imagining possible futures.

The problem begins when this strategy becomes constant and stops being helpful.

Louise Hay taught that every repetitive thought has an emotional root, and very often that root is fear: fear of making mistakes, of losing something, of not being enough, or of losing control.

The mind is not broken; it is scared.

The body is usually the first to send signals:

• tension,
• insomnia,
• unexplained fatigue,
• irritability.
• For Louise Hay, the body is a faithful mirror of what the mind has not yet acknowledged.

Becoming aware of excessive worry is the first act of self-love. It is not about fighting thoughts, but about observing them.

When you notice that a thought repeats itself without leading to any solution, something shifts: you are no longer inside the thought — you are watching it.

That small shift in perspective is powerful. Louise Hay believed that awareness opens the door to new choices. As long as a thought is automatic, it has control. Once you observe it, it begins to lose its power.

Another key step is learning to distinguish between what you can control and what you cannot.

The mind becomes overwhelmed when it tries to manage everything: other people’s decisions, uncertain timelines, outcomes that do not yet exist.

Returning to what you can actually do today restores direction to your mental energy.

Mindfulness helps precisely with this: returning to the present moment. Not as an obligation, but as a form of rest.

Being present calms the nervous system because it reminds the body that right now, you are safe.

For Louise Hay, listening to the body and inhabiting the present moment were profound paths to healing.