How do I stop overthinking and actually move?

"This comes to mind almost every day. I still haven't done anything about it."

For most of my life I never had to think about how I ate. Yoga, moving, being in shape, all of it came easy, and I never gave food a second thought. Then that changed. I was eating a little differently, working out a little differently, and the easy relationship I'd always had with my body wasn't there anymore. I could feel it. I knew exactly what I needed to shift.

I didn't shift it for a couple of years.

Here is what was going on in my head during that time. Listen to how sane it all sounds.

I'm not really eating that bad. Look how well I did today. I'm not going to starve myself. I want to eat food I actually love. I'm not that out of shape. My man is still attracted to me. I really love those chips.

Every one of those thoughts was reasonable. Several of them were flat out true. And together they held me exactly where I was, month after month, while I went right on knowing better.

And that's the small stuff. The bigger the decision, the more reasonable the stalling sounds.

It's easy to notice when it's about eating potato chips at 10 PM. The serious ones come dressed as wisdom, telling you it's best to keep thinking about it.

The thoughts that stop you don't come at you as lies. They come as the most reasonable thing in the room.

They're also aimed. I call this mental media, and here's what I mean. Your own thinking knows exactly what will hold your attention, because it was built out of your life, by you, for you. That's why it sounds like good sense instead of what it actually is.

Now let's bring this back to you.

You can't out-think overthinking. The mind is designed to think. It thinks all day long, sometimes beautifully, sometimes not, and either way it's doing its job.

Thinking about food was never my problem. My problem was that I was living inside the thinking, taking the little emotional rush that came with each thought as the truth about my life.

Yours won't be about chips. It might be the conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower. The call you don't make. The thing you've been meaning to change since last winter. Different subject, same spin.

So if you want to stop overthinking, you need somewhere else to be. Not a better thought. Somewhere else in you entirely.

Here's where I found it. I started tuning in to how I actually felt in my body after I ate. Not the next morning. Right then, in real time.

And my body told a completely different story than my mind had been telling me.

It never said "you were bad today." It never said "you did great." It said: this is how you feel when you do this. That was all. No shame in it, no praise in it, nothing to argue with. Straightforward feedback, always current, always available.

That's what broke the spell. Not another idea. I had plenty of ideas. What I needed was one place my thinking couldn't spin. That place is my body.

The tool came after, not before. I found an app I love and use every day, and I'd have had no use for it a year earlier, because I couldn't see through my own thoughts yet.

And this isn't just about food. It transfers to family, relationships, business. Real answers instead of thoughts looping and emotions going up and down. Same mechanism, whatever the subject.

Then there's the second half of moving, and this one is sneakier, because it looks like being thoughtful.

Once you can see the thoughts, you're still standing in front of a pile of good options. All of them alive. All of them open. And a mind with six live options will happily circle them forever and call it deciding.

Somewhere in all of that there's one real yes. Not the best of the six. The only one that's actually true for you right now. Find that one and the others collapse on their own, and then moving is nothing. Moving was never the hard part. Choosing one and letting the rest go is the hard part.

Try this: after the next thing you eat today, stop for thirty seconds and check in with your body.

Not to find out whether you were good or bad. Notice what you feel, and where. Heavy or light. Buzzy. Warm, tight, clear, or nothing much at all. Whatever is actually there, and no verdict on it.

Try it once this week. Once is enough to notice you have somewhere else to be.

If you want to do this with me live, that's the whole of the Mental Media workshop. Tuesday September 8, 11:00 AM Arizona, ninety minutes on Zoom, free. Your spot is at wendyfalcon.com/mentalmedia

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Sending love,
Wendy