A lot of times, it’s not really the situation that causes us to have anxiety from overthinking. It’s actually the way we overthink and overanalyse all the possible outcomes that could result from a situation that we’re currently in.

Endless “what if?” questions… such as, “ What if I fail”, “What will be people’s reactions if I fail?”, “What if I get fat?”, “What if I’m just eating too much?”, “What if it doesn’t work?” and many others are the root cause of the negative things such as anxiety that we experience from overthinking.

We always tend to try to imagine all the possible outcomes that we end up getting anxious over things that haven’t even happened yet. A lot of times, we give ourselves a headache worrying over situations that are actually very unlikely to happen. We worry about steps 99 to 100 when we haven’t even taken steps one and two yet.

This tendency to overanalyse and overthink often stems from our need to have certainty. We have developed as a species to seek comfort, food, and refuge which all offer certainty for survival. The same is true in our modern world. Our brains don’t like unpredictable things to happen to us so our fight-or-flight instincts tend to kick in and prepare us for any kind of danger that we might face.

As you may have realised, this is not necessarily a bad system for ourselves as it got our ancestors through tougher times after all by constantly analysing their surroundings and protecting themselves from future harm. However, in our modern society, it becomes a problem when we’re too reliant on it and when it has us paralysed from ever taking action towards the things that matter to us.

The way most things actually work nowadays is that you can only minimize the risk you’re about to take in every opportunity or every step of the way in life. We cannot totally eliminate mistakes or setbacks constantly in our lives. There will always be times when things don’t go the way we expected them to, but the way we handle it allows us to rise above the shackles of overthinking and anxiety.

How should we handle it? Accept the things mentioned above. Accept that things won’t always go smoothly and that some things are bound to go wrong one way or another. It’s life after all and we can’t control every single thing that goes on in our world.

We can meticulously plan every tiny detail in our plans and have a backup plan from plan B to plan Z, but things will not always be smooth sailing no matter how hard we try. So why waste time being paralyzed and stuck in the same starting position? watching opportunities pass us by while we try to control every single factor?

Now don’t get me wrong, we all love strategic planning. But there’s a huge difference between effective planning and analysing. Then we effective planning you know the direction and you know what your priorities are right now.

With analysing you’re looking for a crystal ball and guarantees that bad things can’t happen, won’t happen, and will never happen!

Now try to think of the people you admire the most. Did they not face any setbacks along the way? The most likely answer is that they did and they would even proudly tell you how great of a setback it was, how hopeless the situation was, and how they overcame it!

What they would also most likely tell you is that you simply need to believe in yourself first. Believe that you are capable enough to handle anything that comes your way. Believe that you are deserving of any opportunity that you have and believe that anything is possible!

In this way, we might be able to stop overthinking and just head on straight to objective analysis of any situation. This will enable us to become even more successful as it would allow us to take action instead of waiting by the sidelines and analysing things that aren’t likely to happen over an opportunity we’re letting slip by. So believe in yourself and have faith that just as anything could go wrong, anything could be fixed as well and even turned into an opportunity!

This is also one of the essential ingredients to being coachable. I will get you there! I will take you from 0-100. But before I can get you to steps 97, 98, 99, and 100, I first have to teach you to step 1.

Don’t analyse doing the work, just do the work! 😊

Louise x

A little reminder of some fabulous ways that you can work with me…