Nobody likes a backseat driver barking directions and corrections. It’s annoying — and it steals the focus we need to drive safely. Most of us don’t realize we have an internal backseat driver demanding our attention a good deal of the time we’re awake.
The Hidden Cost of Overthinking
The backseat driver I’m referring to is your own mind, on overdrive. Just to be clear, overdrive — or overthinking — may be the state you often find yourself in, but it’s not your natural state. It’s a product of how we’ve been taught to use our minds, or more correctly, how we’ve been taught to misuse our minds.
Why Overthinking Never Brings the Best Answers
Overthinking has been called the generic mental illness. It affects everyone. We’ve been taught to use our minds as problem-solving machines, so we believe that the best way to solve a problem is to think hard about it. Then think harder. And harder still. Eventually, the answer may come. But when the answer does come in a flash of inspiration, if we’re still pummeling ourselves with overthinking, we won’t hear the perfect answer. We’re still too busy trying to “figure it out” for ourselves.
We love to believe it was our hard work and hard thinking that delivered the answer — that our thinking mind created it. That’s never where the best answers come from.
Have you ever wrestled with a difficult issue until you finally gave up — and let your mind drift somewhere else? What often happens is this: your deliberative, thinking mind has taken a rest, which allows your knowing mind to hear the perfect answer. The best answers don’t come from you, they come through you. They’re a result of what you might call “background processing,” which engages the deeper part of our intelligence — not the thinking part, the knowing part.
This may come as a surprise, but when we allow our minds to slow down — which they’re ready to do the moment we take our foot off the gas pedal of our thinking — we tap into the full spectrum of our intelligence. We’re using our mind as it was designed to be used most effectively, incorporating both the thinking mind and the knowing mind.
Living with Less Overthinking
Our personal backseat driver may always be with us, but the need to pay attention to what it may be saying evaporates the instant we recognize it for what it is: background noise.
If you’d like to explore this further, you might enjoy my post Toggling from Calm to Crazy
