The Price of Our Overthinking

Addictions, imbalances, and constant distractions seem to be a norm today.

Whether it be our impulse to numb ourselves with food, alcohol, shopping, excessive work, spending hours on Facebook, or blocking the world out through sleeping, we humans will find coping mechanisms.

Do you feel like you are bombarded with new information on a daily basis? 

Is your inbox flooded with emails? Are you exposed to the news, new procedures at work, the latest “how to” manuals, taking yet another training session to help you move to the next level of your career development?

We are sometimes like massive shredding machines constantly breaking down chunks of information and depositing it into our knowledge reservoir.

While our hunger for information can be beneficial, ironically quite often the most informed people struggle the most in life. Why? Because they become trapped in the prison of their mind, focusing on an intellectual understanding of the world instead of experiencing life through their senses, and conscious attention to their bodies and emotions. It’s like their minds are in one place and their physical bodies are in another.

Have you ever gone for a walk trying to give yourself a break and realized that you didn’t even notice what you saw through most of your walk because you were thinking?

If you ever experienced racing thoughts and felt tension in your shoulders, neck, or churning in your abdomen, you likely have some experience with overthinking. It’s like floating in the air and not feeling the ground.

And remember the pain when you worried about someone you deeply cared about? Have you tasted the constriction of your fear or anger? And how about that vivid dream a while ago that may have woken you up with drops of sweat on your forehead?

If you recall from this series of Wholeness blog posts, our thoughts are like air and our emotions are like water. Unless we allow space for the airy quality of our thoughts without getting trapped in the fog of endless thinking, and let the watery quality of our emotions flow with conscious attention, we end up suffering.

Now let’s look at our body. When something aches in your body, do you look at your physical symptoms as something annoying and useless? Yet, physical sensations are the only way our body can communicate with us. Imagine the gas tank indicator in your car. It will communicate when your car has almost no fuel. Would you feel frustrated at your gas gauge?

I invite you to open up to viewing your body as the earth element. The earth is so abundant and powerful! It touches the air, it lets water flow through it, and it can also hold the heat from fire.

Do you feel the fire of your spirit, imagination, and dreams? Your spiritual essence is, I believe, your most potent fuel. Your why, your bigger picture, your dream is part of your spirit and it is your biggest drive when unleashed. Yet, so many people lose their inner fire, and wonder if they have a larger meaning and purpose in their life. Your inner fire is begging you to ignite it.

Every part of our being is equally important. We just tend to forget them in the midst of our most favourite activity: thinking.

In the next week’s blog post, I will elaborate a little further on one of the other pain inflicting steps so many of us are guilty of: suppressing our emotions.

Click here to read last week's blog post "The Elements of Our Wholeness."