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Mindfulness
Play the Mind Game “Notice & Name” To Stop Overthinking
And anchor yourself back into the present moment.
“Notice & Name” is the name of the game. This is a powerful mindfulness practice that can quickly tame a wild mind. Plus, you don’t need to be experienced with meditation to get started. It’s highly accessible and you can use it whenever you need it.
For this article I’ll explain how to use this method to stop overthinking.
What’s your mind up to?
The energy of overthinking is chaotic. It makes a complete mess of things and puts the body under enormous stress.
You can treat this with the calming energy of mindfulness. There are a lot of other energies cooked into mindfulness too, but for the sake of treating overthinking, calmness is medicine enough.
So when you notice yourself stressing because of thoughts. Stop for a moment and just name what you see. When I see my mind ruminating like that, I look at my mind and name it “thinking”. This disrupts the rumination’s pattern long enough for me to inspect it and say, “Oh, my mind is just thinking again.”
But you can take this further.