How I dealt with overthinking
“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.”
Sigmund Freud
Though all psychiatric tendencies lie along a continuum, almost all of us have been the victims of overthinking, at some point in life. During those sleepless nights or morose days, our mind, with its magnificent imagination runs amok. It conjures the wildest scenarios and deflates you. At such times one-liners such as “stay in the present” seem too idealistic at the best and irrational at the worst.
Personally, trying to shun my intellect from brooding hardly ever worked. The mental dialogue which went on in my mind was, “Well, overthinking does seem silly, but it helps me think about different “what-if” scenarios, which in turn prepare me for any eventuality.” Once your mind rationalizes your over-thinking, all the wisdom gets tossed out from the window.
To deal with this quirk, I did what I was good at. I started overthinking about overthinking. What ensued was intellect trying to beat intellect. My explorations led me to some obvious and some startling conclusions. Let me talk about the obvious and easier conclusion first.
How much control do we have over the external world? We exist on a remote speck of dust hurtling through space at 400 km/s. Our species did not exist 200,000 years ago, and everything might get wiped out a few hundred years into the future. And yet we pretend that we are in control. Our perception of reality is limited, and it is practically impossible to account for all the factors which are at play around you.
The “illusion of control” just allows one to create spurious causal connections and make the bizarre world around you more palatable. It gives us a false sense of security and control over our lives only to witness events such as the Covid pandemic upend our lives completely.
The second not so obvious conclusion was about free will. How many times have you heard the old adage that goes something along the lines, “You cannot control events around you, but you can control your response to them” Well, it turns out that this is not even remotely close to the truth. (Surprised?)
Even though the scientific world has not yet reached a consensus about the existence of free will, the more we are understanding human biology, the more we are forced to reach one particular conclusion. It seems that all our thoughts, actions and emotions are a response to some particular stimuli in the past. At the cost of sounding non-sensical, this chain of cause and effect might lead you back to the Big Bang that (is supposed to have) happened about 13.7 billion years ago. A simplified explanation for the same is shown in the diagram below.
“I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s words: Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.,’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.”
Albert Einstein
At first, this realisation was unnerving for me, and I could feel an existential dread creeping up on me. However, as time passed, I slowly made peace with the idea. And it felt liberating. Sure, it disallows you from taking credit for achievements in your life. But it also allows you to sit back and enjoy the ride without worrying about the outcomes of your efforts. And this, to a compulsive over-thinker, is an elixir of solace. The ethical implication of lack of free will is a complicated issue tormenting the intellectual world, and hence I will leave that out for now.
If this article is making your head spin, don’t worry. Clicking on the link was never in your control, and writing this article was not in mine. After contemplating over free will do we realise the true wisdom behind “staying in the present”. Maybe that is all we can do!
Originally published at http://meditationsofavoyager.wordpress.com on November 14, 2020.
