By-Kavya
It’s been over a year since we have been stuck at home. We all know that there is no going back to the ‘normal’; life in Covid is the new normal. Everything being online now has detached us from reality and led to a lot of overthinking. It is natural of human mind to start overthinking when we are idle and have nothing to do. This leads to headaches, inability of concentrate, irritability, negative and nervous energy, etc.
Following are the activities we can engage in to prevent overthinking:
Exercise daily: the chemicals produced while exercising can be extremely beneficial in terms of enhancing the function of the immune system. Regular aerobic and under controlled circumstances.
Eating healthy: unhealthy eating often increases stress and over worrying.
Cut DOWN on caffeine: caffeine stimulates the nervous system, which can trigger adrenaline.
Learn to relax: knowing how to relax yourself while having stressful thoughts is a must, yoga and tai chi are few of the techniques which can be adopted in our everyday life. Listening to calming music is a great way to reduce stress and calm yourself down, with an instant boast of serotonin.
Meditate: it helps you move beyond negative thoughts and also helps your body relax. With meditation, you purposefully pay attention to what is happening at the present moment without thinking of the past or future.
My personal way of avoiding overthinking is by allotting yourself a time every day. For example, whenever your mind starts stressing or overthinking, you are going to tell yourself, ‘this isn’t the time. We’ll get back to this at 7pm.’ Whatever thing has led to those worrying thoughts, we’ll ponder about it at 7pm. Slowly, you’ll see when you reach your set time, that the issue you were stressing about was not that big and probably very insignificant.
Having a busy life is a perfect solution to stop overthinking and anxiety, rather than wasting your energy in creating negative thoughts which lead to stress, we can channel all of that energy in different tasks such as art, music, instruments, which reduce anxiety and help in calming.
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