why you need to get a life, respectfully

I've wasted 23 years of my own life before I realized thinking about my life was keeping me from living it. I'm currently in Barcelona, and something I've been thinking about is the difference between reflection and rumination. What makes someone an overthinker? How do you deal with it? Is there even a cure? So I want to share my thoughts. Here is Thought Daughter Travels. Overthinking in Barcelona. Act 1. Reflection vs. Rumination. They look identical from the outside. Both feel like thinking hard about your life. But reflection ends. You think about the thing, you get somewhere, then you stop thinking about it. But rumination doesn't stop. It's the same three thoughts on a loop. And the loop convinces you you're doing something productive because it's about something important. There's a psychologist. Her name is Susan. And she spent her career on this. Her research found that rumination feels like insight while making people worse at solving problems and more depressed. I think this is like the perfect definition of overthinking. Because honestly, every single time I overthink about something, I always feel 10 times worse than how I felt initially. And I never arrive with better solutions. I never arrive with a clearer answer. I just arrive feeling 10 times more stressed, anxious, and unhappy. Today I'm going to have myself a good old shopping day. I heard the vintage shops in Barcelona are amazing. And right now I'm actually in front of Paloma Wool. I want to just experience everything that Barcelona has to offer retail-y. So let's go. I went to Paloma Wool earlier and they had no power. So it was super dark. I didn't find anything. But now I'm at Guimaguas and we'll see what we can find there. Barcelona is actually so beautiful, guys. I feel like the architecture here is just so dreamy. I know it's gothic-style architecture, but it feels whimsical gothic. When I think of gothic architecture, I think of Transylvania, really dark, depressing. But this gothic is just so beautiful. It's so pastel sometimes. And there's also so many trees in Barcelona. So the nature with the architecture is just chef's kiss. Act two, what makes an overthinker an overthinker? I think I've genuinely just been an anxious overthinker my whole life. And I've always wondered, what makes me this way? Why am I like this? I have friends that when something happens to them, they can think about it for a little bit, move on, make a decision, and just not think about it again. But for some reason, I feel stuck. I feel like trapped in my own thoughts in this horrendous loop that just happens. And it feels like I have no control of it. So I actually looked it up. And there's more research from our dear friend, Susan. She finds that women tend to ruminate more than men. She says this is because of socialization. Girls get trained to monitor feelings and boys get trained to distract. But beyond gender stereotypes, the biggest reason is belief. Overthinkers think that overthinking works. Adrian Wells' research on metacognition found that ruminators hold sincere convictions like analyzing this will help me understand myself. And if I keep thinking, I'll find the answer. And personally, I think one of the biggest causes is people who don't handle uncertainty well, aka moi. I think overthinking is really an attempt to gain control over uncertain situations in your life, whether it's job interviews, whether it's relationships and honestly, just life in general. There's so many things that you just have no control over that really impact you. And that can be really, really scary to not have control over things. So by overthinking something, by really ruminating it, by thinking about all the possible scenarios, all the possible solutions, you feel like you have this control over where your life is going to go when in reality you don't. Act three. What do I overthink about? I overthink a lot about relationships, actually. I think relationships are the type of thing where you truly don't have full control over it because there's another person involved, another person with their own perspectives, their own thoughts, their own opinions on how to live life. I think it's easy to want control over how you want your relationships to play out, your friendships, romantic, your family relationships. I think everyone has, you know, like a conception in their head of how they want to be treated, how they want other people to feel about them. You can't control your perception in the world. You can't control how other people perceive you. Yes, I am. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. One of my favorite lines from a YouTube video I made is from the video, The Fear of Being Perceived. And I said something like to be human is to be misperceived. To be human is to exist as a multiplicity, an ever shifting reflection in the eyes of others. And yeah, I think that like as you get older, you just need to deal with the fact that you can't control what people's perceptions of you. I've always wished that I could compartmentalize my feelings better. I feel like when something is on my mind, I literally just can't do anything. Like I can't focus. I can't concentrate. I often like can't eat. I look at people, especially like my guy friends, and it feels like when something really big is in their lives and they have to go to work, they'll just work or they're hanging out with friends. So just hang out with friends and they'll think about that issue later and compartmentalize that to a very specific time of their life. For me, it just like bleeds into my entire life, my entire being. And it feels like these thoughts like literally flood every aspect. I feel like these days I've been struggling a little bit with work. As you guys know, I make like these video essays and everyone always asks how I come up with ideas for my videos. And honestly, it's just what I'm experiencing in life at that point or what article, substack I found to be interesting. But I have been feeling not as inspired these days. So that's why my uploads haven't been as consistent. I'm hoping that being outside of New York and a new setting, you know, inspiration will just come to me. Act four, why you need to get a life respectfully. Rumination has a requirement. Empty time. The loop needs quiet hours to run. Thoughts expand to fill whatever time that you give it, which is why I usually don't spiral when you're hanging out with friends and usually spiral when it's like one a.m. You're on your phone alone at night sleeping. Thinking can't generate new information. It only reprocesses what's already in your head. Action is the only thing that truly adds new cards to the deck. You apply, you ask, you go somewhere and the world hands information. You never could have thought your way through. So I think the cure to overthinking is to get a life, build a life that demands more of your attention than your anxiety does. What inspired this video is actually the substack article I read, The Art of Being Unreachable by Alexis McElroy. Here's the first line. There is something intoxicating about a person who is deeply occupied with something you cannot access. There is a quiet alert to someone who is absorbed in their own interests. They feel layered, self-contained and slightly undiscovered. And she goes on to explain the importance of hobbies. Hobbies are not frivolous. They are sanctuaries. Hobbies are where desire goes when it no longer needs approval. Spaces you create that belong entirely to you, where you manipulate reality, build worlds, master skills. There is power in that. And here's one of my favorite paragraphs. A rich inner life quiets the need for outside attention. The fuller your attention is on your own becoming, the quieter the hunger for external interest grows. A rich inner life does not just make you more interesting. It makes you immune to the games, the breadcrumbs, the intermittent reinforcement that keeps so many people trapped in cycles of longing. So this article is actually about why being unreachable, having a rich inner life makes you less interested in dating or like less desperate in dating. But I feel like it really applied to like overthinking and just like being stuck in your own head in general. I'm not saying that you should distract yourself from every difficult emotion. I think reflection asks you to sit with your life, but rumination like asks you to stop living it essentially. Like this video is truly just for people like me, people who overthink so much, who are really anxious about a lot of things and are paralyzed by this like death loop of anxiety thoughts. And I truly think the answer is to just get a life, go do things, go outside, hang out with friends. These loops needs to be stopped because at the end of the day, they really don't benefit anyone, especially you. I think for so long, I've let thoughts kind of dictate my life, let my like anxiety stop me from doing a lot of things. And honestly, **** that, guys. Final act, what does a rich inner life mean? That is the ultimate question, isn't it? Honestly, I think it can be anything from trapeze classes to watching Chinese dramas with your friends at 7 p.m. every Friday night. But I think for me at this point in my life, it is traveling. Like Anthony Bourdain says, if I'm an advocate for anything, it is to move. Look, I've I've spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about my life. If you add it up, probably years. And did it amount to anything? No, nothing except more anxiety. Nobody ever ruminated their way to a good life story. Nobody ever sat alone at 1 a.m. rereading a text 15 times and came out the other side wiser. And meanwhile, every single thing that I know about people, about myself, about what I want, I learned by showing up somewhere. And we've talked about self-awareness a lot on this channel on the trap of it. You know, I think people can say that they're self-aware by overprocessing things. But honestly, it's stalling. The world is out there completely indifferent to your analysis of it. And it's full of information that you can't get anyway until you walk into it and let life happen to you. So, no, I unfortunately don't have a five step morning routine for you to overcome overthinking. I'm sure there's so many better videos out there for you. But I think the cure is much simpler and much harder than that. Book the thing, ask the question, leave the apartment. Your thoughts will be waiting for you when you get back. They're very loyal that way. But you'll be slightly different. And I think that's the only thing that's ever worked. So go get a life. Respectfully.