A crowded mind leaves no space for a peaceful heart. These wise words from Christine Evangelou start us off today on an episode all about overthinking and creative ways to get out of it.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman, where we explore the power of creativity through neuro aesthetics, art therapy and innovative thinking. I'm Dr. Amy Backos, your hostess and creativity expert, bringing you the art and science of creativity through our conversations and creative insights. I'll provide simple tricks and practices that demystify the creative process so you can live a more authentic and expressive life. Let's get started.
Welcome in Modern Creative Woman. Thank you so much for joining me on this creativity audio journey. I am thinking a lot about those of you who have decided to become a sponsor of this show, and I want to say a special thank you to one of our new sponsors tonight. And when you make a monthly contribution, what it does is offset my bill so it lowers the bill to some of the providers and platforms that I'm paying to house and edit the podcast, and I really appreciate it. What are you doing this fall? The modern creative woman will be in Paris on an extraordinary retreat, and I would love if you would join me. Did you ever see that movie Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn? She goes away to Paris and comes back completely transformed. She becomes the woman she always wanted to be. That's what we're going for. I'm partnering again with Girlboss in Paris and Aurora. Duvall is also an experienced coach and expert in what she does around transforming women from the inside out. So she's also focusing on style and this retreat will give you full access to all of your senses and the sensual experience of being your authentic self. So I've got some information that you can have a look at if you are curious, and I've got a little special going. So if you message me I can give you a discount code and maybe I will see you in Paris.
Let's jump into the topic of overthinking. So many of the women that I work with and the students that I've worked with and my friends and myself. Suffer from overthinking. I think it must be a modern day common problem. Now one of my favorite books. I read it when I was in college by Dostoyevsky is Notes from the Underground, and he says to think too much is a disease. I tend to agree. We make ourselves suffer the more we think, and when we live in our heads, we're missing all the feelings, all the experiences, and all the other sensations. That we have available to us. It's over. Relying on this one aspect of experience, our brain to the exclusion of all the other rich, cool and amazing ways that we can live our life. Being in the present moment with awareness means noticing what's happening inside and out, and it's paying attention to the here and now. It's also this quality of present moment awareness that allows us to observe ourself. And we can notice without distortion, without attachment to the outcome, without judgment.
The Center for Greater Good at University of California, Berkeley describes mindfulness this way maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surroundings and environment through a gentle, nurturing lens. You'll notice they didn't say mindfulness is just focusing on what kind of chatter your mind is producing. Mindfulness is paying attention to all of your sensations, all of your senses, what's happening inside and outside. It really is about noticing what you see, and you hear what you taste, what you touch, what you smell, how it feels to be in the room or the environment where you are and what it's like to be next to the people around you. None of that can really be experienced just through the mind. And in fact, the mind takes us very far away from where we want to be.
Let's talk about how to use our mind in reflection. Now, I used to mull things over in my head. I'd say, oh, why did I say that? That was so dumb of me, or I might. Replay a scenario where it came out better. I might think I could have done something different or better, or why did I forget that section in a presentation? Why was I not smiling when I said hello to my neighbor? I could think and think and think, and all of that was keeping me from experiencing what was happening in the moment. But so I want to give you some creative, helpful ways to use reflection. And reflection really is helpful. I need to reflect before I write. I need to reflect on how my day went. These are ways of being in the world that I want to have with me at night. I like to review what I'm grateful for. That's a really helpful kind of thinking about the past.
Science shows it helps us feel better, be more in the moment, and live a happier life. When we focus on remembering what we're grateful for. And we know the difference between that kind of reflection and the kind that does not serve us. Where we're caught up in our head. Reflection is serious thought or consideration. If you imagine a beautiful mountain reflected in a clear lake, the mountain is clearly reflected. You've seen those photographs, or you've been in nature where the water is so still and it accurately depicts the nature behind it. Now, if that lake is moving, if there's ripples and waves, it distorts the image, and it's no longer a true reflection of the mountain behind it. I want to encourage you to, when you are reflecting to still the pond, let there be no ripples so that you can reflect with a degree of clarity and without distortion. When we're able to engage in honest reflection without distortion, it gives mental rest. It helps us avoid overthinking when we're able to see things for what they are, not for what we think they are.
Being in the present moment, while we reflect, can reduce our self-criticism and our anxiety, and it also helps us take a more accurate perspective and ultimately lead to more effective action when we're honest with ourselves. We're not just making up stories or imagining the worst. When we're truly honest with ourselves about what's happening, it gives us ease. It's inauthentic to kind of fantasize about how terrible we spoke or what awful thing we did. There's so much more to every negative story in our head, and unless we can hold the whole big picture, we're being dishonest. So dishonest reflection includes things like distorted thoughts. In psychology, we call them cognitive distortions, where we focus on only one tiny piece of information, or we focus exclusively on a way of rationalizing a defense to understand our thoughts, and it distorts it in such a way that it's so far from the truth everyone can see it. But as dishonest reflection also centers on the self instead of the whole picture, we get kind of wrapped up in our ego, and we think that we hold the whole picture and everything is kind of revolving around us. It's also rooted in negative past beliefs, a dishonest reflection that we think of over and over and over again. Ruminating on something becomes more and more distorted.
Some examples of dishonest reflection are mulling over imposter thoughts. I'm not good enough. I'm not ready. They're gonna find out. I don't know what I'm doing. It also includes self judgments, and it's really rooted in blaming ourselves and a lack of acceptance. It's. Failing to accept what is what's happened that that's in the past and we're living in the present, ruminating on the past. One of the best things you can do when you need to reflect and think about what's been going on, is to consider time. And I mean, don't do it all the time. If you need to reflect on a relationship, your job, a situation, you want to do it when you have sufficient time to go through it once and not just keep mulling it over, thinking about it over and over again. You need some quiet space, perhaps some nature and reflection. It is best done with intention and on purpose. If we allow our mind to get the best of us, we end up thinking about the same subject over and over and over again with no resolution. Another really important best practice for reflection is balance. Just imagine a teeter totter and it goes up and down. Our brain will naturally focus on the negative, and it will keep one end of the teeter totter down as if it doesn't balance anymore. Your brain naturally goes to the negative. It's sort of a survival aspect of the brain to look out for. Worst case scenario to what we need is to balance out three positives for each negative, so that teeter totter needs three positive thoughts to balance out each negative thought.
Another part of balancing your thoughts is to be in the present moment, and consciously choose when you want to look forward, or when you want to look backwards, but to always stay in the present moment. Another best practice for your reflection is structure. Setting clear goals for yourself around your thinking.
You can ask yourself a few structured or semi-structured questions. You can track your progress by using art, doing some writing. Having that structure is really important. If you're a person who finds themselves quite worried about a situation, maybe you're chronically worried about a loved one, or finances, or your work. One way to structure that kind of worry and anxiety is to set aside time for it to say, well, I'm going to structure my worry. Time for noon from noon to 1230. And it will give your mind some ease. Anytime the worries come up during other times of the day, you can say, oh wait just a little longer brain, we will have time to worry about this at lunchtime. I encourage you to avoid thinking about it at night. Set your worry time for some time during the day, not right before bed.
And my final best practice for reflection is to use questions. And you can do this through art or writing. Asking yourself what went well? How did I contribute? How does the situation relate to my values? How can I be kinder and easier on myself? What's most important to me? What do I most value? If you're struggling at work, you can kind of get there quickly to ask yourself what is valuable here? And what's valuable might be having a paycheck. What's valuable might be making a contribution to your team. It might be having flexibility. So you can pick up the kids after school. Noticing what's important helps both give balance structure and reminds you to focus on why you're there, and why it matters that you resolve whatever's on your mind. An agitated mind will take neutral situations as well as negative situations, and mull them over and find them to be pretty terrible. If someone gives you a compliment like what a great dinner last night, your brain might come up with an answer like, well, I didn't do anything, I didn't cook, I just set the table. It wasn't me and blow off the compliment, which isn't very nice to the person giving you a compliment. You could also say, oh, how did I contribute? Oh, I put the ingredients together and I set the table. I did the grocery shopping while my partner cooked, and I really enjoyed having you over for dinner. That's balanced, that's truthful. The other example is kind of navel gazing, where you deflect a compliment. You're only thinking of yourself in the negative.
Another question you can ask is how might I be kinder and easier on myself because nobody becomes a better person by beating themselves up. If, for example, you made a mistake and you sent out the wrong information in an email, our brains might come up with something like, people are going to think I'm really dumb, why do I always do such stupid things? But a balanced answer says I reported the information I had without double checking it. I think people will accept my apology. I know everyone makes mistakes in the emails from time to time. When you think about your value and what do you most value about work tasks or home tasks, your brain might say, oh, there's so much to do. I have everything to get done today on this list it seems impossible. I just want to get through the day. Some more balanced thoughts would be I have some work to do. My current task is really important, and I'm going to prioritize what I'm doing right now, and I can wait on those other things. I know I mentioned earlier about avoiding doing, worrying, and ruminating before bed. I want to give you some other times to avoid ruminating.
When you're just thinking, you're just allowing your mind to wander about something from the past. I would avoid doing deep reflection when you're really tired or sad. When I'm feeling self-critical, I might start calling up other times that I've made mistakes or done something I felt embarrassed about. And in fact, research shows when you're angry, you can pull up more angry memories than you could when you're not angry, so your mood informs what your brain is capable of recalling. And we also want to avoid ongoing reflection that becomes criticism. And this is where the art is so helpful. We can put our feelings onto the paper and deal with the artwork in a more productive, healthy way. It bypasses our defenses. It allows us to be expressive without having to do so much thinking. A piece of great advice I got was to really focus on high quality questions, and you'll get high quality answers. I think about a research question needs to be really clear and needs to cover all the areas of the research subject. The same goes for us. If I want to ask myself some questions to reflect on, I would want to ask something neutral or positive. I might say, how do I think I did on that presentation? And then I would ask questions like, what went well? What might I change for next time? And I would avoid questions like, that was a mess. Why am I so dumb? Because your brain will think of wire so dumb. Instead. It's about honest reflection. Remember, you're the calm, clear lake reflecting the mountain behind it, not a rippled, wavy lake. I'd like to share an affirmation that I think really drives this point home. I observe my thoughts with curiosity and without judgment. I observe my thoughts with curiosity and without judgment. In this idea comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, where we work on diffusing from our thoughts. We see thoughts as a biological process rather than the truth of the matter.
Thoughts are like your heart beating. Thoughts are just your brain thinking. It's a biological process. You can think of a polar bear, and still there's no polar bear in the room next to you. It's just a thought, not a fact. And when we can hold our judging thoughts, our personal thoughts in that same way, these are thoughts that are going through my head. I have choices about if I believe them and how I react to them, if I keep thinking them, or if I shift gears and really focus on my life instead of my thinking. I'd like to leave you with a quote from Elizabeth Gaskell. Thinking has many a time made me sad, darling. But doing things never did in all my life. My precept is do something my sister. Do good if you can. But at any rate, do something. Have a wonderful rest of your week.
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