— Valeria interviews Tim Grimes the author of The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness.
You don’t have to battle through things or constantly strive to improve yourself. We often try hard to do this—and it usually fails in working. The truth is most of us just need to become more relaxed because we aren’t that good at it. Thinking less and becoming more relaxed is, surprisingly, enough to positively change things.
In short, we usually don’t have to do anything—we just think we do.
This is very good news. Once we realize that most of our thinking doesn’t mean anything—and that we don’t need to be so logical and serious all the time—we begin treating things differently. We call into question some of the painful notions we hold dear. Like that being a very serious person is worthwhile (it usually isn’t) or that trying hard and being the hero will lead to success (it usually won’t). Not thinking allows us to flip many of these popular myths on their belly and expose them for what they are—falsehoods.
Again, to be blunt, if we can just learn to be less special and relax more into what we already are instead, good stuff will happen to us.
It doesn’t take an elite skill to drop the useless overthinking. Instead, we can begin doing it by occasionally acting the way we did when we were four years old. Being less serious is one of the easiest ways to relieve stress. In other words, it’s one of the more straightforward ways to eliminate your overthinking and a great starting point for doing so.
We should understand there’s nothing wrong with being serious when we feel like it, in the same way that there’s nothing wrong with thinking and being rational when we feel like it. If you genuinely like being serious at any given moment, that’s perfectly fine. If you’re serious and feel good, there’s no point in being less serious! But when you feel like crap, you’re going to find it incredibly helpful to say, “Screw it,” and drop the serious thinking as best you can.
So, what we’re really focusing on here is overthinking and being too serious. It can seem subtle, but when we feel worried or depressed, overthinking is the likely culprit. And even if we’re aware of this, we often go on autopilot when it comes to our difficult emotions. We generally lack the self-confidence needed to quickly make ourselves feel better. We assume the solution for feeling good is too far out at sea to possibly reach it—even though, in reality, it’s already with us right here on shore.
One of the main reasons for this is because of how stress is portrayed in our society. Most of us are unaware we can work with “negative” feelings—fear, anger, loneliness, anxiety, etc.—to minimize their lasting impact.
Unfortunately, stressful feelings like these are, in many ways, the accepted cultural norm. We’re essentially expected to feel crappy a lot of the time. Therefore, many of us become used to being overrun by tough emotions and assume that’s just the way it is. Looking at the world around us, it seemingly confirms why we constantly have these overwhelming feelings. We, in turn, communicate to each other about how bad we feel, directly or indirectly commiserating about how tough life is. It seems very, very hard. Yes, we’re depressed and scared! Why we wouldn’t we be? It seems crazy not to be scared.
But we can test all these assumptions by examining how we think—and what happens when we don’t — writes Tim.
Tim Grimes is a coach, speaker and writer of multiple bestselling guides on alternative stress management, including "The Joy of Not Thinking" and "Relax More, Try Less."
His focus is on simplifying the stress reduction process for anyone who is interested.
