One of my favorite things I’ve learned from one of my favorite authors, Jon Acuff, is about overthinking and how detrimental it can be to our lives and our goals. He actually has a whole book about overthinking, Soundtracks, and this book is on my annual reread list. I’ve read it three times already, and I’ll be reading it over and over again.
Here’s the thing about overthinking:
- It’s all those repetitive thoughts that can get stuck in our heads.
- It’s negative thinking, and it can affect our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves.
- It gets in the way of what we want to accomplish and who we want to become.
- It creates problems that actually don’t exist.
- 99.5% of us struggle with overthinking. Jon did a study about this with a Ph.D, and I was part of that study. And yes, I am an overthinker. I even have a shirt!
Side note: The “Hold on” part of this shirt really got me. How often do I put my life on hold to waste precious time overthinking? Way too often, I’ve discovered.
But here’s the deal: We can’t stop overthinking. It’s not possible. And since it’s our thoughts always lead to our actions, which always lead to accomplishing our goals, and ultimately, who we become, why would we want to turn off that most powerful resource?! So the key is to find a way to use overthinking to our advantage. To turn it from a negative into a positive.
Jon calls our repetitive thoughts Soundtracks, and I think this is genius because musical soundtracks often get stuck in our head, just like our repetitive thoughts. If these Soundtracks are positive, they can be super helpful.
But if we have negative Soundtracks, which he calls Broken Soundtracks, he suggests replacing any Broken Soundtrack with positive ones. I’ve been working on doing this, and I’m going to periodically share some of my favorite Soundtracks in the hopes that they might help someone else who might be listening to the same or similar Broken Soundtracks. Because I know this process has really helped me!
Some of the soundtracks I’ll be sharing are ones I’ve come up with on my own, and others are ones I’ve borrowed from others. Either way, I’ve learned that they can be so powerful! Here’s the first one I’ll be sharing, and I got it from—you guessed it—Jon Acuff. He shared it briefly somewhere (I can’t remember where!):
It’s just data.
I know I do this, and maybe someone else does it too, but when I look at a habit or something I’m struggling with, it’s easy to look at the struggles as a failure on my part. Missed days, inconsistencies, and so on seem to stare me in the face, telling me I’m not living up to my potential or that I’m just not doing well or that I’m failing. But…it’s just data.
Those missed check marks on my habit tracker say nothing about who I am, they are just data. They can help me figure out how to do better. How to be more successful. What changes I need to make to be more successful. Maybe they’re even telling me that this is not the right season for this habit or this goal, and that’s okay! After all, Einstein so wisely said…
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Viewing our progress as “just data” can help us stop the insanity, get us closer to accomplishing our goals, create new and sustainable habits, and ultimately help us become who we want to become.
So, the next time you (and I) look at what we’re not doing, or when we’re not doing as well as we’d like, remember that it’s just data. And without data, it’s difficult to make any needed changes.
This works with our successes too! It’s all just data.
Data has no emotions, it doesn’t say anything about our identity or anything else about us.
It’s. Just. Data.
Think about it…what Broken Soundtracks are you listening to? Which positive soundtracks could you replace them with?
And if you haven’t read Soundtracks yet, I’d highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Jon shares so much awesome advice and information about overthinking in this book, and it really was—and still is—life-changing for me!
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