Lachlan Brown
I’m an overthinker by nature. Always have been. As a kid I’d lie in bed running conversations again in my head, working out what I should have said. As an adult, running a business with my brothers, I can spin a small problem into a long mental film before breakfast.
For years I treated this as a personality fixed point. Just how I was wired. Some people are calm. I think too much. End of story.
What changed wasn’t me, exactly. It was three small habits I started doing without really planning to. Each of them sounds too simple to make a difference. That’s part of why they work.
I started noticing the loop before I joined it
The first thing that helped was learning to recognise the feeling of overthinking before I was deep inside it.
Overthinking has a particular texture. It’s not real thinking. Real thinking moves forward. It reaches conclusions and stops. Overthinking circles. Same question, same imagined conversation, same worst-case branch, and fifteen minutes later you’re somewhere else and the loop is still running underneath.
I used to mistake the loop for productive thought. I’d tell myself I was working something out. Most of the time I was just rehearsing.
Now, when I feel that particular pull, the one where my mind starts replaying or planning a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, I try to catch it early. Sometimes I say to myself, quietly, this is the loop. Not as a command to stop. Just a label. The label is often enough to break the spell. Once you see it, the loop loses its disguise. It’s no longer thinking. It’s a habit your brain runs when it doesn’t know what else to do.
A lot of overthinking continues because we don’t notice it’s happening. Naming it, even silently, puts a small gap between you and the spinning.
I move before I let the thinking get a head start
This one is the most ordinary of the three, and the one I rely on most.
I run most mornings. Not far, not fast. Just enough to be tired in a clean way. When I started doing this consistently, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. The mornings I ran, my overthinking was quieter for the rest of the day. The mornings I didn’t, my mind would find something to chew on by mid-afternoon.
I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism is. I just know it’s real.
The body and the mind are tied together more closely than most of us treat them. A still body trying to outrun a busy mind is a losing battle. Move the body first, and the mind tends to follow.
When I can’t run, I walk. When I can’t walk, I stand up from the desk and do anything physical for a few minutes. Tidy the kitchen. Carry my daughter around the apartment. Stretch on the floor.
The trick is to move before the mind has fully gripped onto whatever it wants to grip onto. Once it’s locked in, movement still helps, but it’s much harder to start. You can lie in bed at 6am knowing a run would help and still spend forty minutes overthinking instead. I know because I’ve done it more times than I can count.
The smaller the gap between waking up and moving, the easier the whole day becomes.
I write the thought down so I can stop carrying it
The third habit is the slowest to take seriously but the one that has changed the most over time.
If a thought keeps coming back, I write it down. Not in a journal, not as part of any practice. Just on whatever’s nearby. The back of a receipt, a sticky note, the notes app on my phone.
The writing isn’t for any audience, including me. I rarely read these notes again. The point is the act of putting the thought somewhere that isn’t my head.
Holding a thought in your head is like holding a heavy bag while trying to do anything else. You can do it, but everything is more tiring. The thought keeps pulling on you, demanding attention, returning every time you put it down. Once it’s written, your brain seems to accept that it has been dealt with, even if nothing has actually been solved. The thought stops circulating because it no longer needs to remind you of itself.
For decisions, I’ll sometimes write down the question and the two options and one line under each. Most decisions look smaller on paper than they did in my head. The catastrophic version that was running on loop turns out to be one of four reasonable scenarios, and not the most likely one.
For worries, just writing it down often makes me realise the worry is older than today. It’s been recurring for weeks. That’s useful information on its own.
What the three have in common
Looking at them together, the thing these habits share is that none of them are about thinking better. None of them are about replacing bad thoughts with good ones, or finding the right insight, or learning a new framework. They’re all about giving the thinking somewhere to go that isn’t the loop.
Notice the loop and name it. Move the body so the mind has less room to spin. Get the thought out of your head so it stops running on a track.
I still overthink. That hasn’t disappeared and I’m not sure it ever will. But the gap between the start of the loop and the moment I notice it has shrunk a lot. And the moments where I’m fully inside it, not knowing I’m there, are rarer now.
For someone who used to live in those moments, that’s been enough.
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