A Word Of Warning To Overthinkers

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By Gay Hendricks

Do you suffer from a common and painful affliction known as overthinking?

You’ve analyzed your “issues” to death…

You know exactly where they come from: you can trace your abandonment fears back to the dad who was not around. And you know that your overspending (or frugality) comes as a result of the way your mother approached money.

You’re really good at diagnosing other people’s problems, too. You’ve read a lot of self-help books, and you think you can pick out when someone’s being narcissistic, codependent, borderline personality disorder, or all of the above.

If there’s a conflict with your mate or with someone at work, you put on your thinking cap and try to think through why you’re feeling the way you do – and you’ll rehearse endless conversations with the other person in your head.

You are a worrier. You plan for every conceivable setback and make decisions based on all the possible ramifications.

I’m not trying to be flippant about overthinking…

I can make fun of it, because before I learned to love myself, I was a chronic – and often pedantic – overthinker.

The Trap Of Trying To Figure Things Out

Let me put all the facts on the table.

I had just gotten my psychology PhD from Stanford, an achievement I’d worked hard for and that I thought would make my life so much better. After all, I had learned as much as I could about the workings of the mind, and I was about to train graduate students how to be therapists.

You’d have thought I had everything figured out. That’s what I had hoped for, too, yet that degree opened up a whole other can of worms for me, because I realized that even though I “knew” so much – theory, statistics, practicum – I didn’t know some fundamentally important stuff. Specifically, I didn’t have what I was really searching for:

How to create real, lasting change and find true happiness.

Notice I said “lasting happiness.” I knew quick fixes didn’t work – that one could feel “better” for a bit, but then return to a state of dissatisfaction.

This frustrated me to no end. Intellectually I knew a lot, but experientially, I didn’t. I wanted to crack the code for happiness. I wanted this more than anything else, and so I was trying really hard to figure it out.

And that was exactly the problem.

How Your Mind Can Make You Fail

After all my years at Stanford, and all the letters after my name, I had to admit that trying to think my way to happiness hadn’t worked. In fact, I’d failed miserably.

Yet this realization changed everything for me. In that moment, I realized that my brain wasn’t getting me anywhere.

For all my thinking, I had ignored a fundamental issue – I had been ignoring my internal state all the while.

I had been trying to reason and talk myself out of my feelings – from anger to sadness to longing to regret. It didn’t work. Because the more you resist and avoid your feelings, the more you are resisting and avoiding your very self. And you can never be truly happy this way.

True happiness comes from embracing the very parts of you you’d love to be rid of – the parts of you that you want to shove under a rug and forget about. The parts of you that you hate.

And for a bookworm like me, intellectualizing and analyzing my issues was the perfect cop out for actually feeling my feelings and loving myself despite them.

Where Has Overthinking Gotten You?

Analyzing a problem may make you feel like you’re solving it. You’re spending a lot of time and energy on the problem – by turning it over in your mind, talking about it with friends, maybe even doing spreadsheets and flowcharts (some overthinkers have been known to do this)!

All of this busywork can make it seem like you’re making progress – much like rearranging the furniture in a room. But all the stuff you’re working with isn’t going anywhere.

Instead, overthinking is actually a convenient and very clever distraction from getting you to do the real work – the only thing that will make the problem go away. And that is to stop running away from the feelings you’re resisting.

You see, when your mind is cranking, it’s a temporary escape from whatever pain is gnawing at you. It’s the same kind of temporary hit you get when you go on Facebook, buy yourself something, or eat a dessert you really shouldn’t.

These temporary “remedies” are only putting a bandaid on the problem and not getting to the true issue: that you haven’t learned to love yourself.

Think about it (but not too much): has overthinking helped you?

Or has it just created more angst and caused you to waste precious time? Do you feel any better – for more than a few hours, days, or weeks?

If the problems you’ve been analyzing keep repeating, or if they’ve hung around for years, you know you need a different approach.

And as a once seasoned overthinker, I want to save you a lot of time and trouble – by helping you master the one skill that has served me better than any other: learning to love yourself.

Once I learned to love myself, life became a lot happier and a lot less stressful. I was finally able to make peace with myself and with all my feelings, and I no longer had a headache from all the “figuring out” I was trying to do.

That was over 30 years ago. Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to learning the most powerful ways to love myself – and to teaching thousands of people around the world to do the same. I used to only teach these techniques in person, but now you can do the complete process right at home with my newsletters and programs.

I struggled so much, and experienced such a transformation in my life that made me very passionate about helping other people experience the same. It’s like I found a secret and hidden well of love and happiness, and I just want to share it with everybody I meet. That’s why I started writing books, creating online programs and writing my Love Advice Newsletters.

The best way for you to start is by reading my newsletters—they’re free, and you can start reading them within minutes.

In them, you’ll learn everything you need to know to transform every area of your life with just one critical tool – learning to love yourself. You’ll be able to:

• Stop your chronic worry and overthinking so that you can be free to be happy
• Release regret and guilt so you can move forward and create more bliss in your life
• How to be at peace even when people criticize you or think negatively of you
• 5 proven, healing moves to quiet your fears so they do not control you
• How to eliminate destructive relationship patterns and find harmony with your partner

Human beings are always in a state of either contracting or expanding. When you’re overthinking, you’re in a contracted state – you’ve “reduced” the entirety of your experience to what’s going on in your mind, which is a very limited perspective. Once you open up to your heart and love everything in it, you expand – and your problems dissolve.

It’s like a domino effect: you fix the learning-to-love-yourself problems, and other problems clear up. For me, I ended up losing all my excess weight and finding a better path in my career – one that has led me to help thousands of other people (like you), and not just other therapists.

Learning to love yourself gets you out of your head. In my case, I was able to channel all that wasted overthinking effort into thinking up bestselling books and creating seminars for people all over the world. Can you imagine what you can accomplish if you’re no longer wasting precious time trying to solve problems the wrong way?

The Learning to Love Yourself Advanced Program gets you out of the fruitless habit of overthinking so you can get out of the underlying pain and step into the expansive future that awaits you.

The Only Way Out Of The Pain

Being stuck in overthinking and worry is a sure sign that you are resisting the very thing you need to do: learn to love yourself. Once you do this, the problems you are working so hard to figure out will magically clear up all on their own.

Because beneath almost every problem is a learning-to-love-yourself problem.

With love,