How To Deal With Communication As An Over-Thinker

How It Feels To Overthink Communication 

When we hear communication, I think we instantly go to communicating with other people. Good communication is an inherently desired thing between people, but I think it’s poorly explained of what it actually is, and I also think there’s another step to “good communication” before we’re able to communicate properly with other people. I think that overlooked step is questioning the communication we have with ourselves first. 

When it comes to communicating with ourselves, especially as over-thinkers I think it’s easy to believe the communication we have with ourselves is the over-thinking itself. To communicate is a two way exchange of information. And to me, I think this communication is between our thoughts, our bodily responses to the thoughts, and the actions that come from all of this. 

When we are over-thinking and believing this is the way we exchange information within ourselves, I think it leads us to identify with anxiety, urgency, lack of clarity, and confusion. When we are thinking so excessively it doesn’t leave us the room to properly get on the other side of the exchange needed for the idea of communication to make any sense. Over-thinking communication is having a one sided-relationship with your mind only, and leaving out your body entirely. 

How Did I Use Communication To Keep Me Stuck 

Your body contains so much information about what we are truly feeling. If we really exist in our bodies, we can also see how much over-thinking negatively impacts the body. Hence, why over-thinking is a cycle, because if we are so trapped in our heads we don’t have time to feel how bad it feels in our body. 

My communication in over-thinking kept me stuck by disconnecting me from the important messages my body is able to tell me. Our bodies provide us with the emotions we need to understand what is going on. When something feels wrong, when something feels good, and when something feels off entirely..our bodies send us signs that are a vital component of the mind body connection. 

What Made Me Want To Change My View On Communication?

We regularly hear that communication is important. So as I began thinking about this, I was really focused on how I was talking to other people. Really, I was ignoring myself in this process entirely. I focused on how I sounded to other people, focused more on what I was going to say instead of really listening to the person on the other side of the conversation, and took it as a very outward approach when I would think about the idea of communication. 

This made sense because as I was communicating and still complying with my over-thinking mindset, it made it difficult for me to hear, even in communication with others, when something with another person felt off, when a situation wasn’t for me, or when something happened that did align with me. My body would begin to sound off in telling me what was going on, and I would immediately ignore the feeling and thing about the interaction instead. Because tapping into those big feelings after ignoring them, is a lot to experience and does not feel great. 

The disconnect to my mind and body was vast, and it was obvious as I felt like I just couldn’t hear myself properly. Just because you’re constantly thinking does not mean you can hear yourself, it just means what you really need to hear is drowned out by the distraction of random cyclical thoughts. And this was a form of consumption that perhaps kept me indecisive, confused, and small. 

How Can I View Communication In A Different Way? 

When one thing has dominated something for so long, the leveling out process is gradual. Over-thinking is loud and when something has been happening over and over for so long there’s a tie to a kind of control it has over you. But as I had a desire to move into designing my mind into a more grounded experience, I wanted an exchange instead of a dominating factor in my mind. 

And viewing it as an exchange alone, helped level out this process. My over-thinking is a part of me and I know this, and my way of matching it to hear my body came from using the feelings that came up when I had different experiences to toss it back to my mind. What used to be a mind only process, eventually became one where my body was involved too. 

A big hindrance I found early on was when the feelings in my body were not good. Something that I’d think about would give me a horrible pit in my stomach, create my heart to race, the feeling of actually being sick from different thoughts, a situation experienced in real time that just felt so off..all of these feelings made me want to resort to ignoring them and only crawling back up into my thoughts. 

But these feelings gave me new ways of thinking. These feelings started giving me parameters to think about. Things like what do I need to really understand and process about these past experiences that make me feel so terrible, maybe I shouldn’t put myself in a situation to be around certain people if I feel like this, or maybe there are ways I can learn to calm myself back down to a solid baseline if an anxious feeling does come up. It became a back and forth between my body and my mind. 

What I Choose To Do With What I Learned About Communication? 

At the beginning, I mentioned a third component to the communication process. I said that I think this communication is between our thoughts, our bodily responses to the thoughts, and the actions that come from all of this. When I learned to balance the exchange between the mind and the body, the action that comes from this is what I chose to do with this information. 

The action for me, was to recognize the delicacy of the balance between how we think and how we feel and to protect that balance entirely. Noticing the things that throw off that balance, that alter and manipulate that balance, and that mute and shut off that balance are impacting your communication with yourself and will therefore alter your communication to the world around you.

How I Carried Out What I Learned About Communication? 

To me, that balance I’ve mentioned is the key to know if something is throwing you off balance. The way that you speak to yourself is important for so many reasons. Self concept work, compassionate speaking, and speaking kindly to yourself are all important. But the way you communicate with yourself is even deeper and arguably more important as you interact with not only your mind but with your bodily responses as well. 

It all goes to show that there are so many modalities for communication that we can tap into. Communication is the core method for so many ways to create an exchange. The way we think is communication with ourselves, the way our facial expressions change is communication, the way we feel is communication, the energy in a room is communication. Understanding this leaves the foundation of communication to be the balance within yourself, so that all other forms of exchanges that happen outside of you can be ones that you can really, truly take in, process, decide, and see how it affects that balance that you’ve created within you.