Being a hyper-analytical person is way overrated.
When I started thinking less and relying on my intuition more, things really started changing in my life.
I experienced less stress, more confidence, and a greater sense of progress in my ordinary tasks. I attribute this to the fact that the more I ruminated on a topic, the less confident I felt—and the lower my odds were of taking action.
Living intuitively is far more fun anyway. Learning to go with the flow and embrace life’s unknown elements opens you to the joys of adventure and serendipity.
It doesn’t matter how old you are or what your goals are in life; there’s a good chance you could benefit from learning to go with your gut more often and snapping yourself out of the overthinking trap that our control-driven society tends toward.
Beyond my own experience, there’s also a systematic literature review from 2015 in the Social Science & Medicine Journal that laid out a host of symptoms that are associated with the problem of overthinking:
- Depression/anxiety
- Trouble sleeping
- Headaches
- Memory loss
- Bodily pain
Of course, not all cases of overthinking end up going so far, but sometimes it’s hard to stop the train once it’s left the station. For me, a moment of clarity came when I realized that I had been talking with my wife about the same struggles of indecision and uncertainty for half a decade and nothing had changed.
That’s when I realized I needed not a better system of tracking, nor another technique to apply, but a whole new way of approaching my days.
Below, I’ll share some practical, everyday ways that I’ve learned to embrace a greater spirit of intuition and gut-level decisions. Of course, analytical thinking still has a place, but for me, it’s clear that it needed to be much smaller than it was.
1. Reduce planning/researching to an absolute minimum.
In many areas of life, research yields steeply diminishing returns, and sometimes it only muddies the water and adds to your confusion. This applies to everything from planning a date night to purchasing an item on Amazon or deciding what’s for dinner. My advice is to decide on a single variable or two that matter most and then go with the first choice that seems like a fit. You don’t need to maximize every decision, and often the attempt to do so will only drive you crazy.
2. Take action the moment you feel even any inclination.
I used to wait to take action until I had everything sorted out, either in my mind or in the physical world. This was driven by a deep fear of making mistakes and looking dumb to others. I would wait and wait and wait some more until I was compelled by some deadline to finally take action. Who says we need to live by such high standards? Besides, in most areas of life, does such perfection even get us anywhere?
3. Embrace a “we’ll see” attitude to issues of uncertainty.
I recommend that instead of obsessively ruminating on areas of uncertainty in your life, like I was so prone to do, you come up with a catchphrase for how you’ll take these ideas and learn to put them away on a shelf in your brain. For me, if the answer to something isn’t immediately obvious or quickly discoverable, I just say “we’ll see,” and I allow the situation to unfold without further thought. Sometimes that means taking action with less-than-ideal information, and other times it means realizing that you don’t even need to decide yet. The key is realizing that you don’t have to keep thinking about it.
4. Cut back on the amount of info you consume, and listen to what your gut is telling you.
One trap that I fell into when I was worried about something, such as my health or my plans for the future or whatever it was, was thinking that I could fix it by reading everything I could find on the topic. This idea flowed out of believing that my problem was a lack of information rather than seeing it for what it really was: a complex situation with no obvious answers. The only rational action in these scenarios is to trust your gut and take immediate action. You’ll learn far more through the first few steps forward, and you’ll save yourself a ton of worry.
5. Aim to get into a state of flow as quickly as possible.
Once you start taking action in any area, don’t back out of it with intrusive thoughts about whether you’re doing it right or whether you should be working on something else. Trust yourself, and realize that you’ll be glad to make the progress either way, assuming you’re working on anything reasonable. I try to quickly get into a state of flow by focusing on the feeling of movement and the satisfaction of forward progress. Often, music with a good steady beat fits the mood perfectly.
6. Get in the habit of making rapid-fire decisions and seeing what happens.
One of the quickest ways to learn the joys and benefits of intuitive living is to just start making decisions as fast as possible. Experience will quickly show you how often this works out and how fun it feels to live without the constant weight of unmade decisions and choices. The reason this works so well is that most decisions are relatively inconsequential, and things will work out fine if you just take action and make a few small refinements as you go.
7. Know the person you want to be and the values you stand for.
I’ll end with this one because it’s essential to understanding the overall message I’m aiming to share. Thinking less and living more intuitively assumes that you know the core values you already stand for and the kind of person you want to be. For me, these are heavily shaped by my faith and the responsibilities of family life. So when I’m leaning into my intuition, I’m leaning into something that’s been shaped and molded in a direction I know is good. Make sure you have that foundation in place.