Ep 15: From Overthinking to Self-Trust: Learning to Quiet the Noise

What if the fastest way out of your head isn’t more thinking—but less noise? We explore how to quiet the constant digital pull, hear your own signals, and turn tiny steps into real momentum. This is a practical, no-fluff guide for anyone who plans endlessly, crowdsources every decision, and still feels stuck.

Links for Greyscale Mode:

Iphone: https://youtu.be/KfS9EKanAp8?si=Y_wpgZmXNYuxVPly

Android: https://youtu.be/eYERphDfJ8U?si=0pzyIiwjYPKoNIQN

Link for Focus Friends app: https://www.yourfocusfriend.com/

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Overthinking & Self-Trust
• 1:13 Hack Your Environment
• 3:40 Apps, Grayscale, And Focus Modes
• 6:16 Stop Outsourcing Your Intuition
• 9:10 Human Design And Inner Authority
• 12:55 Imperfect Action Beats Perfect Plans
• 17:03 Do The Thing, Start Now

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey everybody, welcome back to IM Me. I am your host, Liz Bachman, and today we are talking about something so precious and beautiful and wonderful. And I relate to it heavily because I am a A student when it comes to overthinking. So today, yes, I wanted to talk about overthinking and learning to trust yourself. Today's episode is just all things overthinkers, because I have done a lot of work around overthinking, of course, as always figuring this out, but there's things that I do that help me because if you're an overthinker, you know when you're overthinking, when you're in that noggin, you're not getting anything done. Of course, as always, if you like the show, enjoy the show, then like, follow, comment, subscribe, all the things because you know I'm a small creator and it helps your girl out. So let's dive into this. I'm not gonna say I never overthink, but there are things that I've learned that help alleviate this overthinking so that I can get back to the task at hand. And I just want to share with you today the stuff that I have done and am doing that helps me not only stop overthinking, but just trust myself in this whole entire process. So let's dive into it, shall we? What I wanted to like kick this off with was hacking your environment. I think a lot of times I'm spinning out, I don't know what to do. And what it really is is I'm just so overstimulated and distracted by the bajillion distractions that we have in this digital age that we're in. And our brains are not meant to take that much in. But the really beautiful thing about that is you can hack your environment to help you. I know you have heard the saying that your phone has an off switch. Sometimes that is not probable for people. Sometimes people don't want to do that. I get it. I rarely turn my phone off. I don't even really turn it off at night. I do put it on sleep mode. Anyway, we're getting off topic here. But the things that I do, one is grayscale mode. I have an iPhone, it's pretty simple. I'll I'll try and find a couple links to put in the description on how to get an Android and an iPhone into grayscale mode. But what that essentially is, is it turns your phone into like black and white. And when there's not as much colors, it's a lot easier to not be as interested or distracted by the notifications coming through. The muted tones mute your brain. You're not nearly as worried about it. Also, if you struggle with doom scrolling or wasting time online on social media, grayscale your phone because I can go ahead and tell you it is not nearly as enjoyable to watch content in black and white. Another one, get one of the widgets or the app that will keep you from hopping on these social media platforms. There's nothing wrong with that. These platforms want us to spend as much time as possible on them. So don't feel bad if you're constantly picking up your phone and going to whatever social media platform of your choosing. It's really easy to beat ourselves up over that. It's literally the point. There's so many people that have put time and energy and effort into making sure that we stay on the app as long as possible, whichever app you pick your poison. I don't care, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever it is. It's literally designed to work against us. So help yourself out, find an app that works for you. I'll link the one I use. It's really cute. Oh, Focus Friends, I think is what it's called. And it's cute. The little guy knits scarves and mittens while your apps are shut down. And if you want to get on your app, you have to go and stop him from knitting. But the issue is it makes him sad. So that one helps me. But if that's not your thing, find another one. There's so many out there that will keep you from getting on your social media. And the last thing I do with hacking my environment is the focus modes on your phone. I'm not sure how this translates to Android. I apologize, but I know there's gotta be some way it translates. I a lot of times won't even put my phone in do not disturb. I'll put my phone in sleep mode. I'm not sure exactly the difference in between the two, but it feels more intense for me than the DD. Yeah, silence your notifications. If you're worried that people are gonna contact you and you need to get back to them, let them know that you need a couple hours to work on the stuff that you want to work on. I cannot express enough how the distractions feed into the overthinking constantly. We are not meant to take this much information in, which ends up making us think about either things in the past or things in the future. It just triggers us over and over and over again. And we can't be in the present moment to actually get what we want to get done, done, which just feeds the overthinking loop all over again because then at the end of the day we go to bed and we are overthinking because we didn't do as much as we wanted to do that day because we wasted the day or whatever you want to call it. Help yourself out. Hack that environment, girl. The other thing that I was really important to me was stop outsourcing my intuition. What do I mean by that? I realized when I would start really overthinking something, I would almost always immediately reach out to a friend or my mom or my sister to get their input on it. And the issue with that is that I then am completely telling myself I don't trust myself. When you're constantly going to someone else for answers, whenever you start overthinking a situation, you are literally telling your brain that you do not trust it. You do not trust it to make the right choice. Our bodies know what we want. Deep down, we have an intuition. Every single one of us do. It is hardwired into our DNA. Yours might be a little dusty right now. We might need to clear that box off, you know, and start trusting that gut again. But you have that intuition and your body is going to tell you if something's a hell yes or a hell no. We start overthinking and spinning out, and then we just run and we want the answer for someone else. And sometimes we're not meant to have the answer in that moment. We're meant to sit with whatever it is for a little bit of time so that then we can come up with a solution on our own. If you are a human design girly like myself, this is where our authority comes in. Your authority is your unique way of making aligned decisions. It really does matter that your mind and your body are aligned. And if you're like, oh, that's bullshit, that's woo-woo, fine, whatever. But that stuff does matter. And a lot of times when we're asking other people's opinions, we haven't even given our body the moment to answer it for us, which is part of the issue and what puts us out of alignment with ourselves. And when it comes to human design and your authority, some people are sacral, and that is you're very gut-driven. Your gut knows if it's a yes or no. Other people are swenick and get these little whispery hints of instinct. Maybe it's not as much of a punch, but it's like a gentle whisper in the back of their head as to what they need to do. And some people are emotional authorities and they need to feel it out. But like I said, none of this can happen if you're always going to someone else first. Go to yourself first. I still think it's very much important to talk through things, but if you don't have any type of concrete idea of what you're feeling first, you're gonna go into that and just like a piece of paper in the ocean, get taught, I don't know why a piece of paper tossed around by everybody's opinions. And it's probably just gonna make you overthink more and feel more confused and have no idea what to do. The meditating, the deep breathing on whatever it is, the journaling, getting all that shit out of your head, do that first. And those are things for a reason because it helps us center ourselves so that then we have an idea of what direction we're leaning in and trust your body when it gives you the answer. It's really easy for us to get up in our head and our body's like, this is gonna be a nah for me, dog. And for whatever reason, most likely fear. But we decide to go against our body because we think that this solution we came up with in our head, even though it's against everything in us, like we're screaming, no, I don't want that. We go along with that decision and it ends up just breeding more misery because we end up overthinking more down the road to try and get out of the decision we made. I would just finish that up with saying, This is how you learn to trust yourself by going to your intuition first. It's not about you getting it right or being perfect, but trust that your intuition is gonna guide you. Maybe it doesn't work out, maybe in three months it doesn't work out, but you know at least at the end of the day, you trusted yourself. You will learn from that and keep moving forward. There isn't a right or wrong answer when it comes to learning to trust yourself. This one gets my clients, it gets me. Imperfect action will always trump a perfect plan because action is always going to be more important than planning. And overthinkers, man, we get stuck in the planning, don't we? We love to live there. You know why? Because it's safe. If we plan, if we cross every T and dot every I and never do anything, it's a way for us to feel like we're doing something without actually doing anything. And then we get really freaking frustrated because nothing is happening when in actuality, all that we've done is try to make a perfect plan. You gotta get off the bench, kid. You gotta get on the field. You gotta fail. You gotta mess up. I know it's scary. I'm not gonna say it's not. I get scared, but you taking small action steps consistently, even if they're the wrong action steps, air quotes, it's going to get you where you need to go. A perfect plan is never gonna get you where you need to go because there's no such thing as a perfect plan, and all you're doing is spending all your time on a plan that's never gonna come to fruition. If I've learned anything from creating content thus far, it's that it's messy. I mean, it's it's the same thing I've learned from acting. I prep for these videos, I write scripts for these videos, and then I get in here and it all goes out the window to an extent because I've done the prep work, but I also just want to be here with the people that I'm talking to, right? So I have to let my script go. And some people maybe verbatim need to read a script, and that works really freaking great for them. That's awesome. I don't want that to be this. I want to sit here and have a freaking conversation with you. Great example. This is my point and these imperfect actions. I tried to like film this video last week, and the filming equipment was just not freaking working for me. So I ended up just releasing it as a podcast episode instead of a podcast episode and a YouTube video. And while that was frustrating, this week I prepped and I have better filming going on, and hopefully I will learn from this week to next week. Also, like with my scripts and my ideas and the things that I want to talk about on my channel and on my platform and my podcast, whatever you're on getting this content. I want that stuff to be good. I put a lot more work into this week's script because I care about making sure that I'm giving people my best foot forward content and actually helping them when they walk away from this content. Some of these videos I want them to leave an impact and I want them to help because it's shit that I've been through. I don't know if it can help you anyway. Isn't that the whole point of this? Why would I spend 10 hours a week on a YouTube channel if it's not gonna help someone or connect with someone or resonate? Wow, I got way, way off on a tangent there. But my point in all that is saying take a step, jump off the deep end into the are these analogies or metaphors? I don't know, jump, jump into the swimming pool, sink or swim, do. I heard someone talk about this similarly 10 years ago, and I was so scared 10 years ago at me making a YouTube channel, even though it's something I'm like content creation is something I want to do. I've said that for years to my family, my friends. And it's like, dude, just fucking do the thing. Stop talking about it. Don't you dare get in your head if you start taking actions. It's really easy for us to start beating ourselves up because we're like, why didn't I do this five years ago? Why didn't I do this 10 years ago? Who the hell cares? Do it now. Do it now because time is gonna go by no matter what. Five years, if you really want to do content or if you have a business idea you want to start, or if you want to move somewhere, or whatever your thing is, if you don't start now taking those actions, five years from now, you will be in the same spot, making your plan, writing your list, doing the content calendar, watching the YouTube videos. Take a step. My dad always says to me, you can only eat the elephant one bite at a time. And I know he didn't come up with that, but he says it to me because I get so far in my head sometimes. My mom will be like, I can see the smoke coming out of your ears. When in actuality, I can't do anything more than what I can do right now. Stop waiting for the answer because it is impossible for you to know it. It is impossible for you to know what will happen with whatever it is that you want in your life. I have no idea how my YouTube channel and my podcast is gonna play out. All I know is what I can control. And the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing about actually taking an action step, getting out of the freaking learning phase is momentum builds clarity. It is impossible not to. The more you try, the more you will realize the stuff that you like and the stuff that you don't like. Do you know how many people started creating content and then their channels have morphed into comp something completely different than from what it was 10 years ago? You are going to change, you are going to evolve. It will morph into something different. So stop looking for the answer and just do something. That was tough. I say it to myself as much as I say it to you, but I feel like you needed a little bit of the tough love, you know? Segueing beautifully from that, because I wrote a kick-ass script for today's video. Reward yourself for taking the action. Sounds so simple, right? How many times do we not reward ourselves for taking the action? Whether it's pulling out the camera equipment, whether it's I'm using content creation. This seems to be the example I'm going with, but whatever your thing is. For me, let's use content creation because that's what I'm doing. That's what I'm sitting here doing. But how many times do we actually do something and then we don't give ourselves any type of reward or pat on the back or nothing, nothing to our brain for doing the thing that we want to do, and then we're just like, yeah, you do what you're supposed to do. Who wants to be treated like that? I mean, think about a kid on a sports team. If they like soccer, I grew up playing soccer. If they went and scored a goal and they were like, Yeah, so excited. They want their coach and their teammates to give them high fives and cheer them on and be happy for them. And they score the goal and they come back and everyone's like, yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. Why are you looking at us for some type of praise? That kid's probably not gonna work too damn hard to make another goal. I wouldn't. So actually reward yourself. It's what's gonna teach your brain that productivity is a good thing. We're gonna have a positive loop with it, versus productivity being a negative thing and having a negative loop with it. When you finish something, your brain literally gives you a hit of dopamine. The little neurotransmitter that goes, hmm, that felt nice. I felt really good about that. That is your body's built-in motivation. And what's crazy is this goes back to our ancestors. They had to go and hunt and gather and collect food to survive. The wild thing is that we've taken this beautiful ancient system of productivity and we've bastardized it into this hustle culture mentality that we have today. Now, when we hear productive or productivity or anything like that, I don't know how you feel, but it feels like work. Even the word work feels like shit, work? I don't want to work, I don't want to be lazy. And the thing is, humans are meant to be productive. The way, the same way we're meant to be social, we're meant to be productive. It is in our DNA to be productive. We are not meant to be sedentary and sit in a chair and rot. But that is what we have turned our system into this toxic grind culture, be productive, working 40 hours a week at a job that you hate, so you can afford your rent and your iced coffee and to have food to survive, because our body craves to have our needs met. And the switch up is that productivity in and of itself is not bad. It just feels really bad when it's not in alignment with what you want to be productive at. When you're being productive at the thing that you want to do, whether it's working out, creating recipes, I don't know why that came up, creating content, whatever it is, creating music, art, creating, good God, we need to create more. I don't care if you say you're not an artist, you are an artist, humans are meant to create. That's a completely different video. But my God, create something, please. When you are creating, let's use creating instead of productivity. And when you are doing that, you are in alignment with yourself, which in turn comes in alignment with your biology. And if you want to get out of your freaking head, create something that you want to create just for the sake of creating it. Overthinkers, and I am talking about myself, we spend so much of our energy spinning the F out over what we cannot control. And it's exhausting. It will drain you. And the more we do that, the more we're just ruining our self-trust. And proof builds self-trust. And how we get that is by one, focusing on what you can control and two, making yourself consistent and accountable to it. And accountability can be something like something I told my client today is putting a sticky note on the wall for 30 days. Put a sticky note on the wall. And every day you do the thing, take the sticky note off. It's building small wins. Your brain needs the wins. Pick one thing to work on for the next 30 days. And whatever you just picked, half it, or maybe make it a fourth of that because what do overthinkers do? We are going to choose the biggest thing. Like, I'm gonna lose 30 pounds in the next 30 days. First of all, not healthy. Let's not do that. You know, it's something so extreme. And I'm saying this because I do this. That's what I that's what I want you to get. Like, I am talking to you about this because I relate to this. I'm gonna post every single day. Okay, why can't you say I'm gonna post half that? I'm gonna post 15 times in the next 30 days, or half it again. I'm gonna post eight times. It's twice per week. And I'm not talking long form content, I'm talking short form content. The small wins. And if all of those feel too damn big, one of the best ones I have ever heard, and this is just to build some self-trust for yourself, to be consistent and to prove that you can do something. Commit to drinking an eight-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning, the first thing you do every morning, and then you can go and check it off. That is your win for the day. That is it. Everything else is icing on top of that cake because you drank your water first thing in the morning. Your brain needs those wins because it's gonna build self-trust that you follow through on the things that you say you're gonna follow through on. I get this. Boy, oh boy, I have to constantly remind myself to come back to the present moment because when you're overthinking, you're not in the present moment. You are either in the future, worried about the future, or you are letting the past control your current state. It's just true. It's true, and it's what I do, and it's what so many other people do, and it keeps us from doing what we actually say we want. And I talked about this in the last video. I will talk about it again in the next one probably, but visualize. People visualize. Visualizing literally is rehearsal for your brain. There's a reason so many successful people do it because it is you showing your brain you're gonna do the thing before you even do the thing. Take a couple minutes, sit down and picture yourself doing whatever. If you have something that you say, I want to do this every day, and you don't do it, visualize yourself doing it. It works, it's been done for thousands of years, and there is a reason. I really hope this episode was helpful. The reason I'm so passionate about this is because I get this. I can really get in my head about stuff, and a lot of us can. When in actuality, if we could just come back to ourselves and trust our intuition and do our thing and actually take steps, we would be unstoppable. Truly, I believe that. So if you're an overthinker like me, or you struggle with overthinking, we got this. Anyway, I love you. Thank you for listening to this episode or watching this episode, however, you consumed it. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day, and I will see you all in the next one.