In my early twenties, I developed what rapidly became a life-choking checking disorder.
What started as a useful impulse — to "dot the i’s and cross the t’s" and ensure everything was in order — quickly ballooned into an obsessive over-checking of simple things, like whether the cooker was off or the house door was locked.
I’d check 10, 15, even 20 times. Why? Because maybe, in my checking, I had inadvertently unlocked or turned on the thing I was trying to secure. This loop was starting to become paralysing.
At some point, the realisation hit me: I had to choose between sanity and worry. I had to choose the acute discomfort of not knowing — of walking away and trusting — over the (temporary) relief of checking again, which would inevitably spiral into madness.
I had a taste of that particular slippery slope, and I decided I preferred to have my house burn down and yet stay sane.
What would you choose?
The Rational Lie
My encounter with madness showed me how careful I had to be with my own mind.
You see, any anxiety has at its heart a rational reason, a perfectly good reason, yet it is a reason taken way too far.
Life is inherently risky. It can throw everything at you, and there is only so much you can do to mitigate it.
At some point, you have to make peace with some level of inherent risk. You can lay down precautions, but ultimately, you can’t know, you can’t be everywhere, you can’t manage everything.
The endless cycle of overthinking is merely an attempt to avoid the simple discomfort of that central fact of life: we don’t know and we aren’t in control as much as we think or hope we are. Often, this denial is doubled: we do know this uncomfortable answer, but we don't like it — so we'll try and find one we prefer or die trying.
The Cost of Control
Yet, the more we try to know and try to control, the more fear you allow in, the more that fear shapes everything.
Worse, your body physically pays the price. Your mood affects how much energy your mitochondria cells produce in your brain — a wild bit of science.
Worry a lot, and you don’t have the physical energy to combat incoming challenges. Take a more relaxed approach, and your energy returns. Worry makes you physically less capable.
When we constantly choose to manage, mitigate, and control, we are sacrificing our present energy and our peace of mind for the illusion of certainty.
This brings us back to the stark choice: surrender over-thinking about what might happen (which causes stress and anxiety and still leaves you not truly knowing because there never is a satisfactory answer or solution — that’s precisely why the brain keeps going and searching) for the certainty of what is happening right now.
The mind will always present you with a story — a very compelling one — about the danger that lies ahead. If you want sanity and the energy to deal with the challenges of today, your job is to come back, ground yourself, and base yourself in what’s real. Again and again, until you simply live in what’s real.
Part of the freedom to be truly alive that we seek lies in the ability to get better at being okay with not knowing what we cannot truly know, and being content with knowing what we can: what is real, what is now.
Overthinking the Urgent
Then, there lies the challenge in what we do know will happen —
This job and that one. The school socks, and the presentation template, and the food, and drying your shoes for the weekend, and the dog vet visit, and … all the urgent little tasks that life involves.
The trouble magnifies when we think we’re the only ones that can do them. Everyone else never does them just right, do they? And so we think and over-think our to-do list, even when we’ve tried writing it down to get it out of our heads. Why? Because the fear is that we might forget.
Over-thinking in this regard is just as sanity-shaking as trying to know everything.
It just spins you around on high alert, all the time, making life so difficult because — again — you have no energy. You don’t appreciate the small joys, the good of life because life becomes your urgent small little tasks.
Find a way of putting them in perspective. Find a way of being okay with some falling through the cracks. Find a way of relating to your task list, not as “I must do this or I fail as a x/y/z human (put your preferred role in there)” — but as an intention list, a “it would be good if these things got done but I refuse to kill myself over them” list.
I’m surprised again and again how a looser grip on my to-do list doesn’t mean life descends into chaos like past me thought it would. Things still get done. I am reminded at surprisingly accurate and appropriate times. Things do get forgotten, but again, I now know what’s truly important to me, and I would rather hold to that than trying to hold the urgent all in my head and going insane with it.
The Single Choice
Ultimately, both forms of over-thinking — the paralysis over the unknowable future and the exhaustion over the urgent task list — stem from the same root: a desperate clinging to the illusion of total control.
But we have seen the price of that illusion: it is your sanity, your energy, and your ability to appreciate life. By attempting to manage every single detail, you rob the important things of their necessary bandwidth and allow the urgent, small tasks to gain an importance they don't deserve.
The way out is the same in both scenarios. It is the practice of mindfulness. It is the immediate choice to surrender the noise of the what if and the must do for the stable, undeniable certainty of the here and now.
This is how you find true stability: not in knowing everything, but in knowing the present moment. This choice is the key to reclaiming your energy, prioritising what genuinely matters, and finally being truly alive.
I hope this helps jog some positive action and change in the way you think and relate to your life.
As always, if I can help, please let me know.
Go well,
Arjuna
PS.
I credit my Ascension meditation practice as saving my sanity in this regard. It has saved my bacon/tofu so deeply in terms of overthinking and controlling.
If you’d like more, there are two options for the last part of the year —
Join me for the final Ascension course of 2025: 21-23 November (starts 7 pm Friday)
Always free to repeat, please get in touch for details on learning or resitting.
And/or:
Get some dedicated guidance with personalised mentoring/coaching:
I also have some one-on-one mentoring/coaching slots available. Whether it's a single powerful session or a longer-term relationship, a little personal guidance goes an incredibly long way.
If you’d like to know more about what that could look like, please get in touch. We can chat about your goals and how I can help first.
Talk soon!