Overcome Your Overthinking

Get a foundational overview of what makes a thinker become an overthinker. Heidi introduces you to the most common forms of overthinking and to a new way of working with your thoughts when they interfere with your life. This lesson includes a short, seated exercise.

Heidi helps you take a long, hard look at what you can and cannot control in your life—while demonstrating that spending time thinking about the things you cannot control leads to unproductive thoughts. This lesson introduces “name it, to tame it”, a short exercise meant to interrupt the habits of the mind.

By looking at how our physiology and psychology intertwine, Heidi shows you how easy it is to spin into a spiral of unproductive thoughts—and why it can be physically impossible to calm yourself down once you start. This lesson introduces you to the mindfulness practice referred to as vedanā.

See how unlike taking a run or going to the gym, practicing yoga is not a distraction or an avoidance, it’s a way to approach and address part of the emotional cascade. Heidi demonstrates how yoga soothes your system by changing your breath and connects your physical and mental state. This lesson introduces you to basic and accessible yoga poses and practices.

Move on to some more sophisticated techniques that can help demonstrate the power of yoga as Heidi introduces movements that challenge and work the core muscles that are associated with breathing. She’ll also provide alternative techniques, stretches, poses, and breathing exercises that can be done any at any time.

Heidi builds upon the concept of soothing your system by deliberately changing the pattern of your attention through mindfulness meditation, and introduces different approaches to meditation. She also provides insight into how to practice both concentration and mindfulness. This lesson introduces you to some seated meditation techniques.

Combine the soothing elements of compassion practice with the physiological calm created by yoga, in a more passive form of yoga called yin yoga. Heidi demonstrates how this practice involves holding your body in a position for anywhere between three to five minutes, and then you settle, or relax your muscles, with gravity, toward the floor.

Circle back to the importance of emotions as Heidi reminds you that recognizing our emotions sounds easy enough, but most of us have made a habit of avoiding emotions, out of fear that they’ll be unpleasant. Revisit why moving toward thoughts and emotions, instead of away, is how you change your habit of overthinking.

Shift your perspective to look at the importance of practicing gratitude in your life. Heidi shows how your brain can’t focus on positive and negative information at the same time. So, by consciously practicing gratitude, you can train the brain to be selectively focusing on positive emotions and thoughts, which reduces feelings of anxiety and depression.

Heidi introduces the technique from cognitive therapy called cognitive restructuring. This is a deliberate reappraisal of your thoughts, or simply changing your thoughts by thinking about them differently. It’s not easy, but Heidi provides some helpful tips and techniques, including words to be aware of and questions to ask yourself before you go down a rabbit-hole of assumptions.

Many people believe that by overthinking about an issue, they are working on solving their problem. Heidi spends this lecture showing that overthinking is the opposite. It keeps you stuck in the problem, likely making it worse. She provides some tools that can help you change your thoughts to effective problem-solving, such as goal setting and writing out your situation.

Backed up by scientific research, Heidi demonstrates how deliberately broadening your attention changes the content of your thoughts for the better. The more claustrophobically we view our situation, the more we obsess about how to control or fix it. She provides a final set of tools that can help you widen your attention and perspective and shift you into an upward spiral.