The simple shower hack that could finally stop your brain from spiralling

Name it. Say to yourself, “I’m overthinking.” “Neuroscience shows that naming an emotion lessens its intensity: you’re asserting control,” says Ali Walker, behavioural scientist and author of Get Conscious: How to Stop Overthinking and Come Alive. Walker is herself an erstwhile overthinker, a state she describes as “not being able to switch off or relax. You can’t get your brain into neutral; you feel stuck in a loop of persistent, insistent, unhelpful thoughts.”

Train it. Most overthinking comes with a self-soothing behaviour attached, which becomes associated with the ­overthinking and makes it worse. “I used to call someone and spend three hours in a total overanalysis conversational ­spiral,” says Walker.

Other unhelpful behaviours include doom-scrolling, watching hours of TV or attacking a bottle of wine. Try to replace these habits with more positive ones. Do something physical: take a walk, have a lie-down, go for a run. Things ­connected to water – swimming, having a bath, ­taking a shower – are also effective ­because “you literally can’t experience a change in ­temperature and keep overthinking”. Even washing your hands or splashing your face with unusually hot or cold water can help. So can listening to music.

A daily mindfulness practice can encourage your brain into more peaceful, ­productive pathways. Spend five minutes keying into your senses with the question: “What can I see, hear, feel, smell?” Then progress to a body scan, deliberately ­moving each part as you focus on it, from your head to your toes. Getting phones out of bedrooms and practising good tech­nology hygiene also gives you a chance to remember what alpha brain waves feel like. These are the neurological opposite of overthinking: alpha waves are produced when our minds are coasting along in neutral; they help promote relaxation, creativity and sleep.

Above all, be kind to yourself. Remember, we’re living in a world that promotes a level of “infobesity” unprecedented in human history. “We’re now bombarded with as much information in a single day as a person 600 years ago would be ­exposed to in an entire lifetime,” says Walker. “It’s incredibly tough – I just want to give everyone who’s dealing with this a hug! But it’s important to know, amid so much that we can’t control, that we can take control of our thoughts. We can choose how to think, feel, act.”

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