It Took Me Three Years to Beat Overthinking

years ago, I was on a first date with this woman in the LAX airport. Met this woman online, and we were messaging back and forth. And uh I said, you know, I have a three-hour layover in LAX if you want to meet me there for a date. I threw it out there as sort of a corny thing. And actually, she did. She drove into LAX to go on a date with me, which was very romantic. When she showed up, she was far more attractive than I saw in her pictures, which almost never happens in the real world. And so I was sort of a little starruck and a little stammered by her because I was so attracted to her. As she was talking, I was getting incredibly in my head. I was just on an airplane a few hours. Do I smell? Do I look disheveled? On and on. My head was just going going overthinking. And I think for a lot of us, overthinking is a normal part of life. We go to the career job interview and the person, the interviewer we're talking to says these questions and we kind of sort of stammer and we answer it inappropriately or not very smoothly and calmly and then we overanalyze the next day or the next week. Overthinking for many of us can be the thing that ruins your life. But in this video, I'm going to share four or five steps that have made a dramatic difference. Hey guys, I'm Alex Hine, author of the book Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s or 30s or 40s. Let's jump in. Number one is you have a very overly critical parent. You see this psychologically a lot. You have a kid who has a very tough high-powered parent, the mother or father who is very tough on the child. And basically the child is only praised or rewarded when they do it right. When they achieve, when they do what the mother or father says, when they reach the A+ instead of the A minus. And so what happens is when you have a hyperritical parent who's always picking at the child's self-esteem, the child learns to second guessess themselves a lot. Because you're thinking, I have to walk on eggshells to please this parent, so I should check plan A, B, C, D, E, F. And so your brain is doing that all the time because subconsciously, even as an adult, even if you're not with your parent, even if your parents dead, you have that programming. If I don't do it right, well, if I don't do it exceptionally, therefore I'm going to get scolded. The reason why I share this is that understanding the roots of these behaviors are more important than tactics and strategies. Now, part two, overthinking typically comes from perfectionism. Now, you might be thinking, well, I want to write a book. I want to start a YouTube channel. I want to move into my next career, and I'm trying to cover all the bases, do all the things, have a whole 50-step process and road map to make sure I get it just right. But what you're not realizing is the reason why your teeth have to be perfect, why your office notebooks have to be aligned perfectly, why your emails have to be perfect grammar. This kind of OCD behavior is again a kind of perfectionism. Now, what's interesting is that when you're a perfectionist, you also apply that lens to other people. So, the roots of overthinking for many of us are am I going to make the wrong decision? and then you catastrophize what happens if I make the wrong decision which is not reality or it's a perfectionistic lens right where you had to be perfect or a certain way for a parent and so you've internalized a highly critical and highly fragile sense of self doesn't encourage failure doesn't encourage taking risks but instead is just extremely afraid of stepping out of the box and experimenting. Now, there's a third kind of overthinking here that people don't often think about. But a lot of the time, we overthink because we don't have the right level of self-esteem. And dating is a great area where this tends to show up. You go on a date, you meet this great girl, this great guy, they're charming, they're smart, they're attractive, and you're like, "Wo, this person really stands out. " And then rather than being excited cuz you found a rare human that would be a great partner, instead you become hyperritical of yourself because you're like, "Am I good enough for this person? " So often when we have low self-esteem or lower self-esteem than the other person, we create all these stories as psychological defense. I could have been like, "Yeah, she's super hot, but does she even have a job? Or is she actually intelligent? Does she have social skills? " Those insults are just projections. And so for many of us, we're overthinking, especially in dating. And then especially once that lens is projected outward, well, they probably have this, they probably have that, they probably have that. That's just insecurity projected outward as criticism. So lots of us overthink because we don't have high self-esteem and we have all these kinds of psychological defenses in dating, in finance, in our career because it's easier than facing the truth and working on ourselves. Now the final one that people don't talk about is that overthinking is often we feel a surrogate for action. So for example, you see this a lot with people who are addicted to like watching YouTube videos, doing journaling exercises, and then nothing else. Sure, you go through one of my books, you do a journaling exercise, that's great. But when the rubber meets the road, the thing that's going to make the biggest difference in your life is if you actually do the daily rituals and do the daily habits on a daily basis that result in that amazing life. Sometimes naval gazing, thinking, journaling, reading, we convince ourselves that we're like overthinking or we're like doing work, but we really aren't because the actual work is the doing of the thing. So, a

lot of the time you see this with people who are like the beginning stages of personal growth. They start reading, they start doing affirmations, they start meditating, they start working on themselves, but then inevitably after a year they haven't achieved any meaningful progress because they still aren't going to the gym. They still aren't asking out more women or asking out more men. They still aren't picking up new hobbies to make friends. And they aren't dedicating 90 minutes a day to reinventing their career or changing their life in some way. What you frame as overthinking is really just you have a bias towards laziness and not taking action. And if you actually turn that into some kind of action step, it will make a dramatic difference in your day-to-day life. Now, if you're someone who is in a quarter or midlife crisis, you're lost. You're unsure what to do. you're sort of thinking like, is this honestly all there is? If that's you, make sure you download my 12step road map to reinvent your life. It's linked below the video, and we go through my process for getting unlost, designing your dream life going forward, getting out of that quarter or midlife crisis, and really designing your next chapter of life. But that worksheet will help you get started to know what stage are you in and what do you have to do? And ultimately, the root of overthinking is fear. A lot of it is fear that I said the right thing, fear that I made the right decision, fear of being on the wrong path. And so, if you're scared of the future, I've actually shot an entire video on what to do when you're scared, and it's right up here.