How to Stop Overthinking: 8 Tips From a Therapist

Pareto principle applies in the areas it applies, which I don't think is nearly as many areas as over-thinkers have attempted to shoehorn it into.

"often" is a huge weasel-word. how often is "often."

Sometimes the first 20% of my time in electronics design or writing software produces exactly nothing, the first attempt just sucks, scrap it all. I have a box half a foot deep at this point of scrapped circuits that were either dead ends or never went anywhere without significantly more effort than 20% more.

Sometimes the smartest move is to walk away early, sort of like dating in your 30s or 40s you learn about the sunk-cost fallacy and the principle of "the juice isn't worth the squeeze."

Think smarter not harder, or something.

What does he mean by Practice? Maybe only work the 20% that's productive? Everyone work an 8-hour week?

20% of therapists do some net good, and 80% are delusional hacks who do more harm than good, and charge a lot for that.

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John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

This woman, the Ms. 80/20 rule, is changing peoples' lives:

ort often produce eighty percent of the benefit from a given outcome; the r emaining eighty percent of our effort only yields an additional twenty perc ent of the benefit."

arism of Pareto's famous observation but without the genius.

epression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and borderline personality disord er."

who overthink, such as they are capable.

We're living in the era of pseudo-mathematicization which somehow garners i nstant respect, awe and admiration for ideas, people, places and things, an d apparently conjectures. In the 15th-18th centuries it was Latinization t hat did the trick. Just give something a Latin name and voila, you have the imprimatur of the gods of antiquity.

True fats, but another true fact is that a lot of clients don't understand what therapy is supposed to be about. Productive therapy is goal-oriented it's not primarily being a paid friend to listen to the sad story of one's past (which many people have.) Anyone going to a therapist's door thinking they can make them existentially happy or other not-well-defined goals, or resolve their trauma or PTSD or whatever just by talking at them is going to the wrong person.

"If all you ever do is all you've ever done then all you'll ever get is all you've ever got" is a decent summary of the "therapeutic process"

I have a friend from high school who's an OCD/anxiety-disorder therapist, business has been very good lately I think she just bought a second home.

Yes. Change the lives of frightened, anxious, neurotic people by relieving them of excess income.

Our great-granparents, if they had been told about the world of their descendents, would have marveled at how happy we must all be.

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John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

It's mostly about paying someone to listen to their whining, when their friends and family don't want to hear it any more.

The goal being long-term revenue.

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John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

Tends to be covered in large part by health insurance even in the US. People with severe OCD might wash their hands 30 or 50 times a day even prior to the pandemic, till they're raw and bloody. A crippling neuro-psychiatric disorder that they never asked for, that many would pay any price to cure, due to some error in brain biochemistry that responds poorly to medication but thankfully does seem to respond well to directed behavior-modification therapy.

Humans aren't Pavlov's dogs but some of the same principles apply, if you can train it to salivate when the bell rings you can also train it to not-salivate when the bell rings, through exercises to weaken those associations.

One of my great-grandfathers was lost at sea for a few days on a fishing trip until he was picked up by a Portuguese trawler. He was later one of the last captains of the pre-dreadnought Indiana-class battleship Massachusetts.

I like swimming but hate heights which, y'know. clearly proves Lamarckian inheritance is real

There are "therapists" who cater to that market. Better ones will cut a client short and remind them that sessions are about the client, not about what other people are up to, which mostly can't be controlled.

But telling Americans things they don't want to hear about themselves is rarely popular so there's an art to framing it in the right way, in large part this is what they go to therapist-school for.

They spot clients like John Larkin a mile away, on the rare occasions they show up in an office. "Are you even a real doctor..."

Or not so rare, perhaps. I'd probably be surprised just how many people walk into a therapist's office and proceed to give their opinion on "what therapy is" to someone with a degree in the field. Then again, I probably shouldn't be.

I was totally fearless about heights until I hit about the age of 40, and started getting intense vertigo near an edge, or even on a ladder. That gradually faded away and is now almost gone. Fortunately, somehow, it never affected my skiing.

Lack of snow does affect my skiing.

My best friend, now gone, was the chief of psyciatric residents at Mt Sinai. I expressed skepticism about the value of talk therapy. She mostly agreed, but noted that once in a while it really works.

Why do you always trash Americans? That calls for therapy, for sure.

Wrong. I don't need a therapist.

Don't see a lot of evidence of over-thinking going on out there . . . .

RL

Tut Tut... You THINK you do not need one.......

It was also considered to make one appear more erudite to write in Greek! I recall Carl Jung's Synchronicity had several whole paragraphs in Greek - with no translation in the notes!

Bit like shamen, then. Perhaps one in five can so the business but the majority are either out and out frauds or self-delusional.