What if I told you that overthinking?
You know that constant metal chatter you trust to guide most of your decisions.
What if I told you that is actually the biggest saboteur of your success?
What if your brain, the organ you rely on for everything is out there
running outdated software that's keeping you stuck, keeping you
stressed, and keeping you spinning your wheels through endless rumination?
And what if 99.5% of the people out there are walking around completely?
Are that their mental operating system is working against them every single day.
Are you one of them?
Your success?
DNA podcast, your success?
Is in your DNA, what is up?
What is up?
What the hell is up?
My fellow success seekers, welcome back to another episode of Your success,
DNA, the podcast for my aspiring entrepreneurs, nine to five biscuit.
Heck, for all those folks out there that are looking for mindset shifts and habit
upgrades, and maybe even a little dose of rebellion, all designed to help you
break free of convention and build a life.
Aligned with your version of success, and if you know someone who dreams of getting
better always makes time for a little self-help and personal development, go
ahead and forward this episode to them.
Can you, okay, so we're gonna be talking about why your brain is
sabotaging your success and how you can fire it as your life coach.
Yeah, that little hidden mental malware that's.
Costing you a little bit of everything you want in life.
So here are the three things I wanna make sure you come away with today.
One, I'm gonna reveal the shocking research from Yale and Stanford
that show how your brain's overthinking patterns are literally.
Capping your creative potential while convincing you it's
helping you at the same times.
Right?
Stick around.
Okay.
You'll discover why the very mental process you think makes you thorough and
responsible is actually the most expensive and the least productive pattern to.
You will ever engage in.
Second, we're going to expose the cruel evolutionary joke that's
been played on your nervous system.
Your amygdala and prefrontal cortex are doing exactly what they've
evolved to do, but they're doing in the world it was never designed for.
I'm gonna show you why your ancient survival software is sabotaging your
modern day success and keeping you trapped in rumination loops that solve nothing.
Third, which is a jam packed one, isn't it?
We're gonna learn the exact framework that neuroscientists use
to reprogram their mental malware.
This isn't meditation.
It's not mindfulness bandaids.
Oh no.
We may get woo woo around here, but this is not one of those times.
This is how to literally.
Fire your brain as your life coach and take back control of your mental operating
system through proven rumination focused cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.
Man, that was a mouthful.
Okay, so.
Here's the truth, and once again, I think it's gonna sting
like a good slap in the face.
Your brain, my friends.
Yeah.
It's not your friend when it comes to success and striving for it.
I know that might sound a little harsh, but hey, you didn't come
here to get your ego stroke, right?
That's 'cause you know, that's not how I roll.
Right?
So we've been taught to trust our thoughts, to think things through,
to be analytical and to be careful.
What if I told you that your brain is running on software that's
about 200,000 years out of date?
And what if the very overthinking processes that you think is making
you smarter is actually making you weaker, making you less creative?
Leaving you even more paralyzed than before.
Lemme tell you about Jen.
Jen was a, a brilliant marketing director that I worked with.
She had everything going for her.
She had a great husband, the MBA from a top school, six figure salary,
the respect of her peers, amazing family, kids, the whole nine yards.
But she came to me completely burned out.
And frustrated, Tracy, you said I spend more time overthinking
my work than actually doing it.
I will analyze a simple email for, I don't know, 20 minutes before sending it.
I'll replay conversations from weeks ago wondering if maybe I said something wrong.
I have a presentation that I'm doing next week, and I've already imagined
like 47 different ways it could go wrong.
Does this sound familiar to anybody?
I can hear some of you in my magic headphones here nodding yes.
Your brains are rattling around.
I don't mind Rattler.
Anyway, you get me.
Jen's brain had convinced her that all that mental activity that she
was doing was being productive.
That overthinking was thoroughness, that analyzing every possible outcome
was just responsible planning.
Here's what it really was.
Here's what was really happening inside her head.
Her ancient brain designed to keep her alive on the African Savannah
or the plains of the wild, wild West was treating every modern challenge
like a life or death situation.
Her amygdala was triggering.
That fight or flight response for just about every single email or
project that she was working on.
Every presentation became a predator to escape through rumination.
So really, if you think about it, based on that, her brain was doing a really good
job and it was doing it perfectly, but.
What's the real problem here, Tracy?
Okay.
The problem, well, it's doing the right job, but it's doing
it in the wrong century.
When I showed Jen the research I was that I'm about to share with you,
everything kind of clicked with it was like, oh, you can almost see
the light bulb go off over her head.
She realized she wasn't broken, she wasn't weak, and she
certainly was not inadequate.
Nope.
She was just running outdated mental software.
Yeah, her brain just needed a firmware update, you might say.
So.
Here's what the science reveals about your Brain's sabotage system.
Let's start with the Cornell Food Decision Research that was done.
Dr. Brian Wansink's, Cornell Research revealed that we make about 226 decisions
about food alone every single day.
Most of this happens unconsciously, but here's the kicker.
When you add overthinking to any decision process, you're
not improving those choices.
No.
Instead, you are creating what psychologists call decision paralysis.
Forget paralysis by analysis.
Now you're just got decision paralysis.
Do, oh my God, Stanford Research prove this.
I scans, they hooked people up to a brain imaging machine and had
them draw while they were thinking about increasingly complex problems.
The result, the harder that they had to think about that problem, the
less creative their artwork became.
So let's simplify that for my overthinkers out there.
Overthinking literally caps your creative potential by
overwhelming your prefrontal cortex.
Yeah, all those creative juices just get siphoned off and flushed
down the drain by your overthinking.
Now this leads to the cortisol sabotage cycle.
When you overthink, your body produces cortisol.
That my friends is a stress hormone.
This chronic rumination essentially hijacks your default mode network.
That my friends, in case you don't know, is your brain system that is
responsible for creative insight and your problem solving skills.
Hold on, stick with me here.
It gets worse.
Excessive cortisol will actually impair your hippocampus.
And I'm not talking about the big creature out there at the zoo.
No.
You know what I'm talking about.
This is the part of your brain that is responsible for forming memories
and regulating your emotions.
Some of you're a little unregulated out there.
Uh, I've been there.
So let's wrap all this together.
Overthinking makes you worse at the very cognitive functions that you need
in order to solve the damn problems you wanna solve effectively and efficiently.
So.
Let's talk about the response styles theory.
There are two types of mental sabotage.
Yale professor, Dr. Susan Nolan.
Sima developed the response styles theory.
Her theory identified two types of mental sabotage that your brain uses.
My brain and your brain.
They are rumination and worry.
First, let's talk about rumination.
This is your brain replaying past events like a broken record, like a broken
record, like a broken record, right back and over and over and over again.
We, for those of us.
Growing up in, in my era, we used to have vinyl records and you'd get that
scratch on there and you'd hear the same thing over and over and over again.
It's like trying to solve problems that have already happened.
This, my friends, is past focused, repetitive thinking.
Then.
Then comes number two, worry.
This is when your brain catastrophizes about future scenarios.
Yeah, it's out there and it's creating the worst possible case scenarios in your
mind and displaying them in full living color and all sensory surround sound in
your mind's eye, most of which we know and eventually experience never occur.
This is.
Future focused, repetitive thinking.
Both of these are your nervous systems attempt to gain control through what
psychologists call metacognition.
Right.
We're not talking about the company here.
You're talking about your brain, your own software.
Yeah.
Basically this is use thinking about thinking.
Today in modern life, you are presented with far more uncertainty
than our brain, I think was really designed to handle all at one time.
Uncertainty about this.
Uncertainty about that, right?
And then you got people out there pushing uncertainty at you.
But that's a whole nother podcast.
This leads to the ironic process trap.
Because this here is where things I think really get cruel.
The harder you try to stop overthinking, the more you overthink.
Let that sink in for a second.
Yeah.
This is called the ironic process theory discovered by Daniel Wegner.
So you spin out telling yourself to not think about the pink elephant.
All that really does is, yeah, it makes you think about the pink elephants.
Yeah.
This is why most advice about overthinking completely falls flat
on its face because they essentially tell you just stop thinking so much.
That's like telling someone to just stop thinking about being hungry.
It doesn't work because it fights against how your brain actually operates.
Damn.
Now I'm, I'm a little hungry.
Anyway, so let's get to the firing process.
I mentioned earlier how to demote your brain.
There is a theory that I heard of while I worked in corporate America
that people are being promoted to their level of incompetence, right?
You get promoted.
You do a good job.
You get promoted, you do a good job, you get promoted.
You don't do a good job.
You start getting promoted because you're incompetent at this current level.
Your success, DNA podcast, your success.
Is in your DNA.
So in a way, your brain has reached its level of incompetence until we train it
or demote it to an appropriate position.
So instead of fighting your brain, you need to change its job description.
And here's the framework based on rumination focused
cognitive behavioral therapy.
Like I said, that's a mouthful and it actually works.
It's five simple steps, step one.
First, you gotta recognize the sabotage you.
You gotta step back and go, oh, there's shit going on here.
When you catch yourself in this overthinking loop, don't fight it.
Simply observe it and say, my brain is doing its old job.
Again, this creates a little bit of distance between you and your
thoughts through that metacognitive awareness I just told you about.
Step two, you're gonna shift from abstract.
Concrete.
Edward Watkins at the University of Exeter discovered that rumination
happens when you are in abstract mode.
Instead of asking, why me?
Uh, or what does this mean?
Stop and ask, what specifically can I do about this right now?
So you go from abstract to concrete.
Here, here's a quick example.
Abstract thinking.
Why did this happen to me?
Yeah.
We've all asked that one concrete thinking, what one
small action can I take today?
Both of these get you completely different answers and stir up
completely different emotions.
Right.
Okay.
So that moves you to step three.
Schedule your.
Give your brain a specific time to do its overthinking job.
Say 10 minutes, you're gonna give it at 7:00 PM Or for some of you,
you might wanna say, you know what?
I need to let my over brain thinking happen right now, but I'm only
gonna let it do it for 10 minutes.
When the anxious thoughts arise during the day, tell your brain thank you.
Thank you for the input.
We'll discuss that later.
At seven, or for those of you who have to do it now, let's discuss
this for 10 minutes and that's it.
Then we have to move on.
This breaks that compulsive nature of rumination at that time that you set.
Sit with your overthinking and just let it roll out.
Perhaps even let it roll out on a journal channel, all that energy through your
hand, into a pen, onto a piece of paper.
There may be some patterns that are worth noticing.
Step four.
Let's do the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Reset, right?
Lean into me here.
Whatever you're doing, I want you to pay a little bit more attention to me.
If you're driving, obviously pay enough attention to the road too.
Not to danger yourself, but this is an important one.
When you feel your mind starting to race or in the middle of racing,
immediately engage all of your senses.
What you wanna do is you're gonna wanna pay attention to five
things that you see around you.
Four things that you can touch around you, three things that
you can hear at this very moment.
Two things that you can smell and one thing.
That you can taste, but you wanna do one at a time.
What this does is this focuses your brain to engage with present moment data.
Instead of all the abstract scenarios that may be whizzing around into your brain,
effectively redirecting your pre-frontal cortex back into the here and now.
At minimum, it pauses that potential spin out that you were about to take.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that brings you to step five.
Replace the soundtrack.
Your brain runs on mental soundtracks, maybe even video soundtracks, but for
some of us it's mental soundtracks.
Instead of just retiring those negative ones and leaving a
vacuum for a new negative one to step in and take its place.
Nope.
What you going on do is totally replace them instead.
So I always mess things up is a mental soundtrack that you need to replace
with something like I'm learning.
Improving from each experience.
Okay, so before we go a little deeper, I want you to know that everything
I'm sharing today, the research, the frameworks, the mindset shifts, this is
exactly the kind of content I dive into every week in the Unleash Your Success.
DNA newsletter is designed for people like you who refuse to accept the default life.
They think a little differently.
Those who want mindset shifts and habit upgrades and doses of rebellion
to help you break free from convention so that you can build a life designed
with your version of success.
Not everyone else is out there.
You wanna be you.
If you're tired of your brain running the show and, and you are ready to take
back control, go ahead and head on over to your success d.com and subscribe.
Each issue delivers the kind of truth telling, status quo challenging insights.
That help you rewire your brain from the inside out.
Okay, go ahead.
Your success d.com get started.
You'll see the little sign up there on the side, but let's get back to why this
really matters on an even bigger scale.
I think we're living through what I'm going to call the overthinking epidemic.
I might have to do a future episode on the emotional overload epidemic
that's going on, but let's talk about the overthinking epidemic.
The research shows that 73% of people age 25 to 35 are chronic.
Overthinkers compared to folks in my age range, you know, 65 to 75.
I'm not quite there yet, but you feel me?
We're only overthinking things 20% of the time.
Think about that.
People that are in their most productive, most creative, and most ambitious
years are almost the most mentally paralyzed by their own rumination.
Meanwhile, older generations like myself, we've learned through experience that
most worries never really materialized.
And most rumination, it doesn't change shit.
So effectively we're kind of free, at least 80% free.
Okay?
The other 20% we still do it.
This is a generational crisis.
All about mental energy being wasted on problems that really don't exist.
Meanwhile, real world once in a lifetime, opportunities are
slipping right past folks unnoticed.
The cruel irony is that we torture ourselves nearly to mental exhaustion
with imaginary problems, while the real issues and the real opportunities
around us simply go unsolved.
Or untapped your brain has has evolved to keep you safe and to keep you alive.
Its default mode is not always set correctly.
All the little option buttons aren't set to the right point to make you successful.
That my friends is because survival and success require two
completely mental operating systems.
When you understand this, you stop.
Taking your thoughts so seriously and start treating them like suggestions.
You know, like the ones you get from the overprotective friend who means,
well when you tell them about this new opportunity, but doesn't quite understand
the modern world you currently live in.
The bigger paradigm shift here is moving from being a victim of your thoughts
to being the CEO of your mental office experience, because you need to remember.
Your brain works for you, not the other way around.
So that said, here's your risk of wisdom for this week.
Your brain is an employee.
It is not your boss.
For far too long, you've been letting an outdated mental operating system run your
life just like you wouldn't be letting a 1990s computer run your business today.
You don't wanna let some stone Age or even wild, wild West software
run your success of your life today.
So your specific action for this week, every time you catch
yourself overthinking, say out loud, thanks brain, I got this.
And then ask yourself one concrete question, what one small action
can I take right this very minute?
Don't try and stop your thoughts, right?
That's okay.
You want your brain to keep giving you good ideas, you just need to channel it.
Don't fight the mental chatter.
Simply acknowledge it.
Thank you for trying to help and redirect that energy towards
action that you can take.
Remember, the goal isn't to stop thinking.
No, no, no.
It is to start choosing which thoughts deserve your attention.
Which ones deserve to be politely ignored, or maybe even directed
to sit over in the corner?
I, I know.
I know.
No one puts baby in the corner, but you get me on this one.
Right?
Okay, good.
Listen, 89.5% of people struggle with overthinking.
You don't have to be trapped by or in that statistic.
You now understand that your brain, it's not broken.
It's just running the wrong software for the life that you are trying to build.
And you have the tools to fire your brain as a life coach and hire
it back as a helpful consultant.
You know the difference, routine, productive analysis
and paralytic overthinking.
You understand your thoughts or suggestions and that they are not.
Commands for your life.
The research is clear.
Rumination isn't making you more prepared, nor is it making you more responsible.
Instead, it's stealing your creativity, robbing your decisiveness, and
crippling your ability to enjoy your life that you're working so
damn hard to build your future self.
Counting on you to make this shift today.
It's counting you to stop letting fear disguised as productivity, run the damn
show, and it's waiting on you to take back control of your mental operating system
and start using that damn incredible brain of yours for what it was meant
to do, to create, to solve, and to build the life that you actually want.
And with that, I'm gonna leave you as I always do, think
successfully and take action.
Your success, DNA podcast, your success is in your DNA.