The price we pay for overthinking

Have you ever noticed yourself starting to get emotional and then move straight into your head to prevent yourself from feeling?

It could look something like…

You’re in the middle of a discussion, you disagree with the other person and begin to feel angry, then the other person notices you are upset and you act like it is no big deal, talk really fast to end the conversation, and move on about your day without actually stopping to feel what came up and question why it happened.

I recently conducted a Somatic Intelligence Assessment on a super successful woman who is in marketing, and throughout the session she was constantly moving from feeling into my question to thinking about it, analyzing it, and even justifying it. Nothing was opening up for her because it wasn’t landing in her body.

She was so in her narrative, in her mind, that she couldn’t process the emotions that needed to come to the surface to be healed.

Eventually, something so profound unfolded that she said to me afterward, “Thank you for the beautiful gift you gave me,” because she's been wanting to make a greater impact but something's been holding her back and she didn’t know how to let go and tap into this part of herself.

This isn’t unusual.

We all tend to overthink because we have a hard time being with our feelings.

Emotions are uncomfortable because we’ve never really been shown how to handle them, so we avoid the pain, fear, sadness, and shame by numbing out or busying ourselves with something else.

By pushing ahead instead of stopping to recognize what we feel, our body takes on the disconnect and shuts down. It begins to feel like anxiety or fear or isolation.

The price we pay for not honouring our emotions is that we are not present. We are disconnected, absent, unavailable.

When someone is running away from themselves, how can they be present with somebody else?

If you’re running away from your own pain, how can you be with someone else's pain?

How safe can others feel if we cannot land into our most vulnerable layers and learn to be with them? How can we expect other people to hold that space for us when we can’t do that for them (or ourselves)?

The price we pay for overthinking is that we forget how to process emotions in a healthy way, and that isn’t healthy for our mental health.

It’s not for nothing that all of this has surfaced during a world pandemic - because as the world and business slowed down, we were forced to meet ourselves and our feelings. Something that many were not ready to do.

And all of this definitely isn’t helpful when we are here to have a phenomenal impact in the world.