Calm for When You Can't Switch Off (Why Overthinking Isn't the Answer)

There is a very human belief that thinking hard about something is connected to love, connected to caring, connected to being responsible.

I know I have thought that. I always thought I was being responsible by thinking about things a lot, and I was being caring by thinking about things a lot. I probably associated overthinking with love at some point.

But what if we've got that wrong?

Calm Is Not Something You Go and Find

When people come to read a blog called calm for when you can't switch off, I think they expect a tool or a technique. A meditation. Something to do when you want to switch off.

I'm not going to give you that.

I don't want you looking for calm anywhere other than within yourself. The calm that is sustainable, the calm that is available all the time, is the calm of who we truly are. We truly are calm, clarity and ease. Overthinking just hides that from us. It's there all the time.

You are calm. You might be reading this thinking, you don't know how I feel right now, Clare. My mind won't shut up and I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning.

Being calm doesn't mean your mind goes quiet and stays that way. I woke up at four o'clock one morning recently and wrote two social media posts. I tend to find that when there's a full moon lurking, four in the morning is when my brain does the thing. That's okay. It's not all the time, and it doesn't mean the calm underneath has gone anywhere.

What We're Actually Trying to Switch Off From

Let's be clear about what we're actually trying to switch off from. We're trying to stop thinking.

I can confess to being somebody who has thought, if I can just get my head to shut up, please can it just shut up.

I remember the run up to burnout in early 2015, when my head literally never shut up. It had a short spell of quiet from about nine o'clock until midnight, maybe one or two in the morning, and that was only because I was asleep. Then it would boot up again and I would be fighting to get back to sleep.

Most of the time now, when I wake in the night, my head might start on something, usually business related. That's okay. But these days, if my mind even starts, I know enough about where that's going in me. I know what I tend to be like. When I notice it starting, I say to myself, not out loud, poor Bruce doesn't need to be hearing that, "stop it." Or more gently, "not now."

The thing I was thinking about in the early hours of the morning never comes back as a thing to think about later in the day. Something that seems so important at three in the morning is completely forgotten by nine and doesn't matter at all.

I am telling you this because I want it to offer you hope. If I can go from a massive insomniac, someone whose head literally never shut up, to mostly sleeping well, then so can you.

A Ridiculous Story About an Airbnb

Feeling unsettled can be a real source of overthinking. It stops us switching off, because we get a feeling of unsettledness, uneasiness, agitation, and we start asking what's wrong. There must be something wrong. I best think about this a bit more. I've got to find the reason why I'm feeling this way.

You might sense there is something in your life causing that feeling. But in actual fact, all of our feelings are just love letters from our system, letting us know that we're thinking too much about something. That we're not switching off.

We were staying in an Airbnb recently, and because my fiancé had booked the accommodation through a work portal, he had only listed himself as one person staying. We'd messaged the property owner about an extra night, and at some point in the conversation he asked if he could come and collect some washing the cleaner had left by the door. My fiancé replied and used the word "we." The owner messaged back saying he thought the booking was only for one person.

My head went into overdrive. He's going to chuck us out. He's going to come and collect the washing and have a go. The story was ridiculous, and I went round and round, unable to switch off from it.

The difference this time was that I knew I was doing it. Because I noticed I was getting wound up, there was more of a window to stop. I went in and out of the spiral rather than staying stuck in it, though I was still planning to leave the flat and work from a coffee shop just to avoid speaking to this man. I was going to disrupt my entire morning to avoid a conversation about nothing.

Then I walked my fiancé to work. I'd forgotten my headphones, so I was just present, noticing the countryside. By the time I got back I thought, this is ridiculous, I'm just going to stay here and get on with my work. I could see exactly what I had been doing to myself.

I say that with massive compassion, because it is a normal thing to do. Sometimes when we can't switch off, it's because there's a layering process at work. A layer of overthinking, then some overthinking about the overthinking, and so on, until we've created a problem where there wasn't one to begin with.

Your System Is Built to Guide You Away From Overthinking

The essence of you, the undercurrent of who you are which is not your thinking or your feeling, has a very clever mechanism built in. It's built to guide you away from overthinking.

It might not look like that when you're caught up in it and feeling overwhelmed. For me it can feel like a big brown bear sat on my chest. For you it might be angry butterflies in your stomach, jelly knees, tension around your shoulders, or that same unsettled, agitated feeling. It's all a gift. It's your very clever system, your wisdom, letting you know you're winding yourself up and inviting you into a space where you don't do that anymore.

Awareness Is the Magical Junction

I can remember a moment recently where I paused because I could feel myself getting wound up. A bit of breathlessness, a busy feeling, a fizzy tightness in my chest. I wasn't breathing into my belly, I was breathing shallow and talking fast. Noticing that is the whole point.

We can do the same with our thinking. It's a microscopic step backwards into just noticing. I can notice that my thinking has got very fast. I can notice there's some winding up happening. I can notice I feel unsettled. I can notice the thoughts, and I can notice the associated feelings in my body.

What that does, quite magically, is drop us back into the present moment. Back into calm. It allows us to access clarity, so that if there is something to do, it can come from clarity rather than from the same old thinking pattern.

When Talking It Through Makes It Worse

I was chatting with a business owner recently who had fallen into a trap that a lot of business owners get into: following what everybody else tells them to do. One person says do this, another says do that, a third says do something else entirely, and none of it is actually them. That makes a mind very busy indeed. He had lost trust in himself and lost track of what he actually wanted to do, his own way, in his own business.

That is why, when you can't switch off, the last thing you often want to do is talk to somebody else about it, and lots of other people's thoughts in the mix does not help with that. Unless it's somebody who is going to help you see where your thinking is taking you away from calm. The only thing that stops you feeling calm is that you can't switch off and adding lots of other people's thinking to the mix will not help with that.

The Messages I Never Read

I had a beautiful experience in Spain last year. Someone close to us has a habit of sending very long messages, usually on a Sunday night, as part of a challenging relationship that had been going on for a few years. Ordinarily I would get straight into thinking about them, going round in circles about what the reply should be, and losing a lot of sleep over it.

We were away at an event, and I had been immersed in Three Principles conversation for over a week. My fiancé came out of the bathroom with his phone in his hand and said she'd sent six messages. I said, "I don't want to read them."

That wasn't because I thought the messages could make me feel something. It was the same noticing. I recognised that I had a habit of reading those messages and getting caught up. I wasn't willing to sacrifice my calm, my peace of mind, my stability in that moment for anything to do with those messages.

So I didn't read them, and I forgot about them. Later that day we were out for a walk and I said to him, do you know something funny, I still don't want to read those messages. He looked at me and said, who is this woman, and where's Clare gone. I never did read them.

There's a part of this I have to share. I'd had a patch of eczema on my big toe for a while, which I had come to understand was thought related, stress related. It would be fine while I was thinking and stirred up during the day, but I'd wake in the night scratching it. That patch of eczema disappeared overnight. All the inflammation, all the angriness, completely gone. As if I'd finally listened to the wisdom of my body, which had been saying, just stop.

There Is No Answer in Your Thinking

Overthinking is sometimes said to have a ninety percent failure rate at finding an answer. I'd challenge that and say it's a hundred percent. There is no answer to be found in being switched on all the time.

Think about when you have your best ideas. It's never when you're going round and round the same thing. My Viva co-creator, Sheela, and I are currently putting together the programme for The Viva Event, and we kept getting stuck on a particular title. When we leave it and come back to it later, the answer lands.

It reminds me of doing a family quiz, the kind where you get to a question you can't quite answer, so you write the question down and move on. A few questions later, the answer just pops in. Sit there trying to force it, racking your brains, and you almost certainly won't find it, because you've stopped thinking about it. Thinking is what gets in the way of calm and clarity. That's why we can take our attention away from something and then suddenly hear the answer. It is about hearing, not forcing.

Why the Mind Can't Solve a Problem That Doesn't Exist Yet

The vast majority of overthinking is to do with the past or the future, more often the future for most people. Your imagination cannot be concrete. There is nothing concrete in your imagination. When we overthink, we are usually doing two things. First, we make up a problem. Second, we make up a rather inept version of ourselves in that imagined future who cannot handle what's happening. Then we try to pin down every possible scenario until we find the right one. But you can't solve a problem that doesn't exist yet, and your mind knows that really, which is why it keeps going round and round.

It's like trying to eat tomorrow's lunch today. I can only pick up my knife and fork when the food is actually in front of me.

Trying to find something concrete in your thinking is a bit like trying to hold onto slime, or cornflour and water. You pick it up, it goes solid, you think you've got it, and then it turns back to liquid and slips through your fingers.

This insight landed for me on a walk, while I was going round and round about how to reply to one of those unpleasant messages. A voice said, you know the answer's never in your thinking, don't you. I was still hedging my bets at the time, telling myself this Three Principles thing made sense in general, but this situation was different, that if I just kept going with this one I'd find the answer. But what if it's never there? What if you drew a line in the sand and decided the answer is never in your overthinking?

Play with that for a day or two. Go a whole day without overthinking and see what happens. Busyness is many people's drug of choice, including mine, and being busy in our heads can feel purposeful and useful and solution focused, right up until we notice that it isn't.

The Wrong Tool for the Job

Just because you have a hammer, it doesn't mean you have to use it, especially if you're trying to paint a wall. Using our thinking that much is like trying to paint a wall with a hammer. It makes a mess, and it makes life harder, because now somebody has to deal with the damage.

Isn't our job to create an easier life? A more peaceful, calmer life? Quite often we think overthinking is going to get us there, that if we just find the right solution we can finally exhale. But we never really get there, because thinking is the only thing blocking our route to calm.

The Recovery Time Gets Faster

I'm not saying we don't need solutions, or that difficult things stop happening, or that I never get stirred up by anything anymore, because I do. What has changed is the recovery time. I get back to calm so much faster than I used to.

If we can't switch off, it's often worth asking whether we simply need rest. So much of the time, what's actually wrong is that we haven't slept enough or rested enough. Rest doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes it's a walk. Sometimes it's a cup of tea. Sometimes it's lying on the sofa and watching a bit of telly. It's all fine.

The invitation in all of this is to listen to the wisdom of your own body, when it's telling you to just stop.

Try This

What if the answer really is never in your overthinking? What if not being able to switch off is just your mind getting busy, nothing more? How much time would you get back if that were true?

Sydney Banks, who first articulated the Three Principles, said that if the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world. There is often a lot of fear wrapped up in not being able to switch off: the fear that it's never going to stop, that we won't be able to sleep, that we need to find a solution before we're allowed to rest. But fear itself is just more thinking.

Calm for when you can't switch off doesn't begin with a technique. It begins with understanding what calm actually is, and noticing what's happening when we can't get there. From that place of noticing, calm starts to emerge on its own.

You are calm. You always were.