My husband drives while sucking on lozenges or hard candies. Somedays, I will think about this and anxiety will just consume me. What if he chokes on a lozenge while driving our kids and gets in a huge accident?

I might spend 15 minutes fixating on the lozenges. I want to call him and ask him, “please don’t suck on lozenges while you’re driving,” but I don’t. I can’t talk to anyone except my therapist about the lozenges because they will think I am crazy. It doesn’t take a clinical professional to understand that I have a textbook anxiety disorder.

But for many people, anxiety shows up in ways that are far from textbook. 

Meredith Arthur calls herself “a recovering overthinker.” She was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) at age 40, in the middle of a very intense slew of jobs at startups, none of which fit. Meredith had migraines. She was always in pain. But worry felt like a stranger to her. Meredith describes herself as “a spinning head of thoughts floating up in a body of pain.” 

Meredith never thought of herself as an anxious person. “The word ‘worry‘ never meant anything to me. I was a problem solver. Give me a problem no matter how large - like climate change- and I will attempt to solve it. I thought any system could be improved by working hard enough to find an answer; do enough research and you could find a way. I would proudly describe myself as an overthinker on social media. Was it because I thought it made me smart? I don't know. I just know that I spent a lot of time thinking about things and rehashing. I did not have boundaries. I did not understand how to do things less than a hundred percent. And I didn't even realize that overthinking was something that could negatively impact me.” 

Meredith went to see a neurologist, because she had severe migraines and was on a drug that made her feel flat and woozy.The neurologist told Meredith she had anxiety, and also that her migraines were connected to the anxiety. Meredith says the news “just lifted me off the earth. Turned me around and put me back down again. The world felt the same, but I'm perceiving it so differently. This sudden door inside of myself opened and there was a whole new wealth of information. Anxiety has always been with me, but I didn't know it.” 

“Now that I have that information, I'm able to interrupt some of those patterns earlier on. I just have been reteaching myself for seven years how to avoid those cul-de-sacs and those whirlpools of thought.”

If your overthinking makes you feel like your brain can never shut off, here are Meredith Arthur’s top 3 tips:

1. Practice gratitude: When approaching something scary (like surgery—which I just had a few days ago!), I lean hard into gratitude. Instead of fearing what could go wrong, I fill myself with gratitude for the support and skills of the people who are helping me. I tell the woman putting in my IV, “thank you so much for helping me”. And I think of how grateful and lucky I am to be getting medical help. It completely shifts my perspective from me to we. 

2. “No thank you”: When I hear about something with upsetting potential out of my control  — like a negative societal trend that I can’t take action on — I tend to say “no thank you” in my mind, or even out loud, to the universe. It’s a way of creating a boundary between me and that negative line of thought. “No thank you to that news about high school kids vaping more” for example.  

3. Change the temperature – literally: A long time favorite trick to stopping overthinking is changing my body temperature. If I start to ruminate, I pull off a layer. Take a cold shower. Take a hot shower. Stand outside in the sun. Etc etc. Anything to transform my body temperature. This actually works. 

And, you can always tell a thought: “Get out of my head!”

Morra

PS: I love Meredith’s illustrated, compact and helpful book, Get Out of My Head: Inspiration for Overthinkers in an Anxious World