The other day on the Mindset Mentor podcast I listen to regularly, host Rob Dial discussed how folks tend to overthink, and he suggested a constructive way of looking at it: we are not our thoughts. That tends to conflict with the commonly held view that people's learning, experiences and accomplishments define them. For me, I've long had this notion of separating the "I" as a separate identity from how I mentally process my ideas and experiences...unfortunately, whenever I bring this up in conversation with others I get nowhere. I even wrote about it many years ago on this blog and got an angry response from an old high school buddy of mind who got the idea somehow that because he was good in mathematics then that made him an expert in everything else...that's like some I know who are under the impression that, because they have money and/or worldly status, this makes them somehow more spiritual than me. Both cases are examples of people who confuse who they are with external manifestations of their lives...and that includes their thoughts. Dial encourages us to do what I believe is called "mindfulness" at various points of our day: whatever we're doing, wherever we are, stop and get notice of what is around us, even to the point of noticing things we'd discard as irrelevant to our functioning. This, he maintains, will help to turn our often-wayward thinking back to our control instead of it controlling us as it often does. The particular show I listened to also brought to mind how I can often over-analyze situations and scenarios to the point where I'm too discouraged to even engage in them...enough is enough with that...
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