How To Deal With Letting Go As An Over-Thinker

I recently went to Sedona, and if you’ve had the wholesome opportunity to visit you know what a special place it is. Before I left, I was planning every detail of my trip-filling up every second of my time with something to see since I was only there for 2 days. When I was about to board the plane a video about Sedona popped up, and it said that when you go on your trip there to let go of your plans and let Sedona show you what you need to see. So I did let go of all my plans, to see what letting go could do for me.

I know a lot of people can relate to having a strong tie to planning. For me, it was a control tactic. I couldn’t control my thoughts and overthinking so I really relied on my planning to know what was coming next in my world around me. On top of that, I filled up a lot of my time to try to combat my overthinking, trying to get rid of everything that was stressing me out instead of attempting something new and trying to work with it.

I think as over-thinkers we really grip on tightly to experiences, thought processes, cycles, and narratives that we tell ourselves. We play them over and over in our heads because it's comforting. We let these things hold us and wrap ourselves up in them as if to drown out any opportunity of newness infiltrating this grasp we have on what we know right now. 

In thinking about what we should let go, the over-thinking aspect plays a big role in reiterating those things we may desire to separate from at this point in time. Thought loops, affirming old ways of thinking, and harping on the same problems without any openness to new solutions only makes the connection to stagnancy and repetition deeper. 

I hear the term let go often, but taking the time to decide what it means gives the overthinking brain a new loop to hop into that’s not a reiteration of the past. To me, letting go is to make space for something new. Old energy is heavy, it is dense, and it takes up space. It breaks down anything new that comes into your way of thinking because it’s in such a different flow from what you already know. It is the deliberate act of holding on to the block of you stepping closer to who you are in a sense that feels natural and right to you, and further away from what you’ve been told and don’t resonate with. 

For me, some things I’ve chosen to let go of recently are any inclinations that I have to remain a small person. I have seen this idea weave its way into so many of my decisions and my indecision that make me shrink in terms of what I do, how I put myself out into the world, what I say, and how I act. I feel like I have to remain small in every capacity to match this narrative I’ve always believed. And in letting that go, I can now remind myself that there is room to have big dreams, big ideas, big thoughts, big emotions-anything but staying small. 

I’ve let go of behaviors and mindsets that I took on after a big trauma many years ago. I let go of anger, I let go of feeling trapped, I let go of believing my voice didn’t matter, I let go of situations that felt really stressful, and I let go of believing that everything was my fault. All things that were keeping me locked in that same mindset that I was in when my trauma happened. Letting go of these beliefs of who I was when I was processing created room to be calm, to have the autonomy to decide what I allowed into my mind and life, and to let what happened be beneath me as I allowed myself to become bigger than the event itself.

Letting go is forgiveness. It is forgiving yourself for all that you didn’t know, forgiving yourself for lessons you were learning, and forgiving yourself for not being or doing exactly what you would do now. That separation in what you’d do now and what happened in the past is the growth you’ve been looking for. In every hard time there is a gift of a lesson that is for you. Sitting in the gifts of your past creates room to let go, as you let go of the guilt, shame, and regret of what has happened and take the lessons and the time that’s moved forward and take that as the gift itself. 

Letting go is giving yourself ample time to actually let go. Going back to my Sedona trip, had I stayed in my typical routine of piling on too much on my plate, I probably would have never gotten to these realizations of what I needed to actually let go of for myself. It was in the silence, the still moments, the moments I took to not only connect with myself but nature itself. When I gave myself time to feel, to think, and to decide was when I was able to allow the release to begin. And there’s something liberating about deciding it is time to let go. Usually the things we need to let go of were not part of our decision, so choosing to make room for what we decide is really significant.

Letting go is as simple as a decision, and as complex as what comes up during the release. The decision to let go is to decide something is standing in your way, to decide that you want something to be different for yourself, or you see yourself doing the same thing over and over with no changes or expansion that you are ready to change. The complexities are all in the feelings. But I think this is when you can use that over-thinking aspect to help you. Letting go is unfamiliar and that’s when the natural way of over-thinking kicks in. Overthinking about why the new way is not better, it’s too hard, it’s not helping, you know the whole thing. 

But when you decide to let go of something and your brain starts going in on why we should hang on, there’s another decision to be made and that is to decide to reframe all the negating your mind will naturally do. Unfamiliarity is so powerful because anything can happen from the unfamiliar-things that are better than we can imagine, ways of thinking that bring us more peace than we have ever experienced, and room for personality traits that could build you into somebody that you love being. 

Your over-thinking can become less of affirming our mindsets of the past, and more about taking what we’ve always known and being open to something else. Over-thinking about new narratives, new ways to fill the space we have let go of, and relishing in the celebration that we get to tell our brains how we want to think instead of the other way around. Since it is a very conscious act to change a thought process, letting the natural course of your over-thinking be involved in aiding to change those thoughts and allow newness into your mind is when it takes this way of thinking from a pattern of the past to a tool to help in the letting go process.

And as this process occurs it will begin to feel less like overthinking and more like having a mindset that is for you instead of against you. We can begin to feel the lightness of the letting go because there is room now. Letting go is a clearing, it moves the past through you as it should have after it happened. It moves ideas out of your head and lets them float away from you instead of swirling inside of you. It lets you feel the room in your body to become fully yourself, and less of what you’ve blindly accepted. 

As I move forward, I will keep this space open of what I have let go. I will keep it open to let what comes into my mind encourage me to expand so there is always space for me to be all that I am. I will keep it open so my ideas can move freely through me. I will keep it open to not let what enters my mind shrink me down to a suffocating level. I will keep it open to let all versions of me cohabitate and continue to teach each other from past experiences. I will keep it open so I find comfort in this feeling, and I will let anything that steals this feeling pass through my life. I will keep making room, and I will fill that room with what I decide.