As someone who’s lived in her head her entire life, this essay is incredibly helpful. I will be digesting it for quite a while. Deeply grateful to you.
Woke up this morning wired and tired, like I’ve been in a room with a static-y TV blaring all night. This is what too much thinking & false urgency feels like in my body. I have many practices, but sometimes life knocks me off-course. Once you start to feel balance, any imbalance feels extra-bad (which is good news!). I was so glad to wake up to this… to have the path back to ease so beautifully and carefully distilled.
I think that wired yet tired feeling is something like the signature of our digital era. I also love that term false urgency, despite how stressful (and, at times, intoxicating) it feels. I hope your day is smooth and easy from here, maybe there's still cozy snow out there, which I've been jealous of.
This is fabulous, a message that I need to hear regularly. This modern world of endless tech, social media, doomscrolling and attention economy makes us extra susceptible to this tendency. And my personality is just such that I am prone to both overthinking and addiction.
I appreciate there is a section here on simply diving into one’s senses. A book on exactly this topic is really interesting to me, from a more scientific perspective, and concludes very much the same. “Better in Every Sense” based on cutting edge research shows how our brain has essentially two modes, thinking and sensing. So the means to turn off overthinking is to explicitly focus on sensing, and the authors describe how various known means to do so hit on this same thing. From meditation to psychedelic drugs to ‘forest bathing,’ these all are practices that turn off the brain’s self-referential ‘default mode network’ or what the authors refer to as “the house of habit.” And they do this by activating the senses.
The authors suggest that when one is stuck in thinking-mode, one is unlikely or unable to form new ideas, but rather remain trapped in existing conceptions and frameworks. It is only when new sensory information turns the brain’s wheels that truly new ideas can emerge.
Anyway, it’s worth a quick read if you are interested in these topics from a scientific perspective. Cheers!
I did not know that about the brains two modes - fascinating. But I don't doubt it, and agree completely that coming into the senses is the more sure-fire way to drop out of thinking. It's also the simplest and fastest, available to us at any moment.
Thank you so much for this, Ed, and for the book rec.
Worth saying - habits, practices, conceptions, frameworks, these are often useful! I'll check out the book, if I'm reading the double entendre of the title correctly I hope I'll enjoy the rest of what they have to say.
Beautiful. I know the addictive loop well... oh so terribly and beautifully well... and -- the unwinding of that main spring. The release into being. Walking slowly out the pier where my house sits, feeling the soft sea air on my cheeks, listening, no, felling the calls of the birds—cormorants, gulls, Canadian geese, smaller birds as they wheel over me, watching, no, feeling the light in the sky change from pink to yellow, the farther-away sounds of the traffic on the highway landing also on my ears.
Feeling my thoughts about addiction arrive and swirl around in my head and knowing that I'd lose some of those thoughts, and trying to hang on to them...and letting them go, along with and what I want to say about equanimity and joy and how it wasn't meditation that did it for me so much as reading—and just stopping. My partner and I had been planning a trip to Italy this spring, and, you know, I _love_ Italy, I've been there many times, I went to uni there, I still speak Italian more than passably. And yet, around the new year, I just felt like there was too much going on, too many rocks in the box, something was off, did we need to go? We decided not to. Not because I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but because, you know what, I'd be happy being right here, right now, for as long as I can possibly get. I'll take as many days here as I can. I've been most places, and I still want to go everywhere, and I am going to Europe later this year on a trekking trip with my friend Goulven, just the two of us in the mountains in Croatia—it's not that I'm not going anywhere... but I don't _need_ to go _anywhere_. Traveling, moving, leaving, going—all of those can be addictions too.
What a fucking relief not to need "things to be different from how they are." To enjoy how they _are_. How I am. How we are.
A thought occurred to me while I was out there on the dock this morning after reading your piece. I've written a lot about addiction myself, and I had this big idea a year or so ago about how addiction can be viewed as the opposite—or the mirror, or the shadow—of intuition.
No surprise, to me. that that word—intuition—appears several times in your analysis of "what engine is driving the meta-engine." Making, allowing, feeling the shift in myself from a life driven by thinking to a life led by intuition has been...becoming alive—and that has also been my journey in alchemizing addiction. I want to encourage anyone reading to imagine that not only is it possible to "live more intuitively" but to live intuitively, period. Not only does the "whole practice intuitively collapse into something simpler than words," the whole practice of life intuitively blooms and opens and offers something simpler than words... Not only can you "notice [more] intuitive pings in the body" but those pings become the path that you walk through the day and night and day—those pings are the path that unfolds. Those pings are the way—the "natural dharma: the intelligence that knows how to adjust your position..." is indeed "the same intuitive capacity you’re learning to trust to handle all of life."
Oh yes, that thought that occurred to me.... which is that this is why I stopped writing about intuition and addiction. The same reason I just poured my coffee out. As much as I love writing, I'd begun to feel that I was spending more than than I wanted to composing well-articulated arguments, spinning well- and evermore-connected webs of thought, drawing lines connecting this to that to this again—and hoping that someone, or one more someone would read and say "yes!" I had living to do. I had feeling and intuiting to do. I had to take the dog to the beach.
Hi. Felt moved to share. I’ve been a steadfast Buddhist practitioner for 12 years. I read this last night, and took the night and my morning practice to reflect upon it. It split me open, my friend. The insight was shattering, and my gratitude, overflowing.
This read felt life changing to me… as someone who has never experienced a quiet mind for a day in her life. It’s beyond exhausting. I’ve realized recently how uncomfortable I am with my own thoughts when I had to sit through a classical music concert. I was going crazy and couldn’t focus on the music because there were too many thoughts going on at once.
I now realize that I consume content in almost all of my waking hours just to quiet my thoughts but it is actually just replacing inner noise with outer noise…
Your piece also reminded me of The Power of Now which I read 10 years ago. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the author said you get so used to the noise you don’t realize its presence until you detach yourself from it. Like when you carry something in your backpack for a while and you are used to the weight but as soon as you take it off you get to experience how light it is supposed to feel.
The fact that you noticed the overthinking at the concert *is* the first shift. And you're spot on about our digital ecologies only exacerbating the problem, with constant stimuli and distraction. It's difficult to have a quiet mind while being very online, I find.
And yes, when you finally put down the compulsive thing, it does feel like dropping off suitcases you didn't know you'd been lugging around. God bless, Eckhart.
My biggest addiction ever. And accompanying unconscious tension, its bestest companion.
How well you noted that overthinking is encouraged. It's in the way we are brought up, it's in the language "Think for yourself", it's in the culture.
No one teaches you to feel into your body. You don't even know it's a thing until one day you break down and scramble for pieces to put yourself back together - learning that actually body needs to feel and let go, and about the constant e-motion spurring on the overthinking loop, spiralling into the darkness.
I wished we all could master the art of not thinking, or at least not overthinking. What would it feel like not to? What kind of world could that be? What would it feel like to be in it, just like the streaming ginger tea on your desk.
Thank you for sharing this essay. I enjoyed the full length of it. And I wrote that without overthinking. (Thanks to my Russian literature teacher, I got good at essays when I "felt" I had something to say!) Ha ha
No one teaches you to feel into your body. You don't even know it's a thing until one day you break down and scramble for pieces to put yourself back together - learning that actually body needs to feel and let go, and about the constant e-motion spurring on the overthinking loop, spiralling into the darkness.
Is pure gold. Along with the rest of your note. Thank you for writing that without thinking, and just letting it rip. I loved it.
I like how it reframes overanalysis not as failure but as a strategy that once protected us. The practical focus on the body makes the whole piece feel usable rather than abstract.
The move from substances to productivity to thinking itself as the underlying mechanism makes sense. The object changes, the tightening doesn’t. And the description of that tightening landing in the body is such an important bridge. It keeps this from becoming another abstract philosophy about “mind.”
How beautifully put. Thanks for this excellent food for... thought?
Reminds me of the late David Hawkins recommendation on letting go - ignore thoughts and their self-perpetuating loops, be aware instead of the feelings that drive and summarise these thoughts, and especially ask: what is the energy behind the feeling?
And yet our coherence-making narrative appear to be a basic part of our consciousness. I always suspected so, but now that we have LLMs which are just guessing the next word that's most coherent with what they've read before, and are surprised to see logical reasoning and intelligence emerge... I start to think coherence-making is a basic law of consciousness and the universe.
Perhaps the trap is seeking coherence in the details of thoughts before focussing on the deeper, stronger, but non-verbal coherence and alignment.
There's a rich element around this topic and LLMs - since they are essentially mimicking and regurgitating human thinking. I actually considered weaving that in here but decided to dial back some of the AI references.
And the inherent meaning-making is another rich topic that could deserve its own essay, one that I suspected some savvy folks would pick up on. I love your pointing to focus on the stronger, non-verbal energy behind them.
This really got under my skin, in a good way. The idea that thinking itself can become the addiction is so uncomfortably real, because it hides inside things we’re taught to call intelligence, responsibility, even maturity. Meanwhile half the time it’s just us rehearsing life instead of being in it. What I love here is the reminder that presence isn’t some blank, passive state. It’s intimate. It’s responsive. It’s the place where life is actually happening. And there’s something really tender in the idea that loosening our grip on thought isn’t losing control, it’s letting ourselves come back to the moment, and to ourselves, with a little more trust.
I loved this. It feels like a uniquely human problem too. Sometimes when I think I’m ‘being here now’ I’m still in my thinking state. Gazing at my cats who are gazing out the window, putting thoughts in their heads about the birds and the wind and the snow. Who am I kidding? They aren’t thinking! Their smooth little brains are letting life and existence flow right over them. And they are blissful every day because of it.
Agreed that conceptual proliferation (Buddhist papañca) is a genuine form of addiction. You explain it well and trace the mechanism clearly. Also, as you note, thinking can be good, and Daodejing 1 suggests both states are needed: "ever desireless, one observes the mystery; ever desiring, one observes its manifestations." The problem isn't conceptual thinking per se, but getting lost in it. I think the solution (which you also argue) is not the ability to stop thinking, but to acknowledge thinking and switch into experience. I've recently published an article which argues precisely this way of "oscillating," if you're interested... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06669-3
Hi Alex, how strange! You could also try https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06669-3 or the preprint we posted here https://bryankam.com/article Would love to hear your thoughts! The two “skills” we describe correspond to the two directions of dependent arising, but we weren’t able to get into them in great detail here
Reading this article provided me with the out I needed. Thank you. I have lived been living a head centered life for a long time. I knew that I needed something else. I didn't know how or what that was. Your article provided me with what I needed to let my body initiate. The change was immediate and welcome. I particularly appreciated the line referencing the heart being too close to the head. That has been my experience. I appreciate the writing of the article and connection created. Wanted you to know.
Shirley, this is beautiful to hear. The fact that something shifted immediately suggests your body was ready for it. And yeah, the heart-head proximity is sneaky. Thank you so much for this.
As someone who’s lived in her head her entire life, this essay is incredibly helpful. I will be digesting it for quite a while. Deeply grateful to you.
That means a lot, Kristin. So glad it's helpful.
Woke up this morning wired and tired, like I’ve been in a room with a static-y TV blaring all night. This is what too much thinking & false urgency feels like in my body. I have many practices, but sometimes life knocks me off-course. Once you start to feel balance, any imbalance feels extra-bad (which is good news!). I was so glad to wake up to this… to have the path back to ease so beautifully and carefully distilled.
I think that wired yet tired feeling is something like the signature of our digital era. I also love that term false urgency, despite how stressful (and, at times, intoxicating) it feels. I hope your day is smooth and easy from here, maybe there's still cozy snow out there, which I've been jealous of.
This is fabulous, a message that I need to hear regularly. This modern world of endless tech, social media, doomscrolling and attention economy makes us extra susceptible to this tendency. And my personality is just such that I am prone to both overthinking and addiction.
I appreciate there is a section here on simply diving into one’s senses. A book on exactly this topic is really interesting to me, from a more scientific perspective, and concludes very much the same. “Better in Every Sense” based on cutting edge research shows how our brain has essentially two modes, thinking and sensing. So the means to turn off overthinking is to explicitly focus on sensing, and the authors describe how various known means to do so hit on this same thing. From meditation to psychedelic drugs to ‘forest bathing,’ these all are practices that turn off the brain’s self-referential ‘default mode network’ or what the authors refer to as “the house of habit.” And they do this by activating the senses.
The authors suggest that when one is stuck in thinking-mode, one is unlikely or unable to form new ideas, but rather remain trapped in existing conceptions and frameworks. It is only when new sensory information turns the brain’s wheels that truly new ideas can emerge.
Anyway, it’s worth a quick read if you are interested in these topics from a scientific perspective. Cheers!
I did not know that about the brains two modes - fascinating. But I don't doubt it, and agree completely that coming into the senses is the more sure-fire way to drop out of thinking. It's also the simplest and fastest, available to us at any moment.
Thank you so much for this, Ed, and for the book rec.
Worth saying - habits, practices, conceptions, frameworks, these are often useful! I'll check out the book, if I'm reading the double entendre of the title correctly I hope I'll enjoy the rest of what they have to say.
Beautiful. I know the addictive loop well... oh so terribly and beautifully well... and -- the unwinding of that main spring. The release into being. Walking slowly out the pier where my house sits, feeling the soft sea air on my cheeks, listening, no, felling the calls of the birds—cormorants, gulls, Canadian geese, smaller birds as they wheel over me, watching, no, feeling the light in the sky change from pink to yellow, the farther-away sounds of the traffic on the highway landing also on my ears.
Feeling my thoughts about addiction arrive and swirl around in my head and knowing that I'd lose some of those thoughts, and trying to hang on to them...and letting them go, along with and what I want to say about equanimity and joy and how it wasn't meditation that did it for me so much as reading—and just stopping. My partner and I had been planning a trip to Italy this spring, and, you know, I _love_ Italy, I've been there many times, I went to uni there, I still speak Italian more than passably. And yet, around the new year, I just felt like there was too much going on, too many rocks in the box, something was off, did we need to go? We decided not to. Not because I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but because, you know what, I'd be happy being right here, right now, for as long as I can possibly get. I'll take as many days here as I can. I've been most places, and I still want to go everywhere, and I am going to Europe later this year on a trekking trip with my friend Goulven, just the two of us in the mountains in Croatia—it's not that I'm not going anywhere... but I don't _need_ to go _anywhere_. Traveling, moving, leaving, going—all of those can be addictions too.
What a fucking relief not to need "things to be different from how they are." To enjoy how they _are_. How I am. How we are.
A thought occurred to me while I was out there on the dock this morning after reading your piece. I've written a lot about addiction myself, and I had this big idea a year or so ago about how addiction can be viewed as the opposite—or the mirror, or the shadow—of intuition.
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/p/coming-to-the-intuitive-mirror
No surprise, to me. that that word—intuition—appears several times in your analysis of "what engine is driving the meta-engine." Making, allowing, feeling the shift in myself from a life driven by thinking to a life led by intuition has been...becoming alive—and that has also been my journey in alchemizing addiction. I want to encourage anyone reading to imagine that not only is it possible to "live more intuitively" but to live intuitively, period. Not only does the "whole practice intuitively collapse into something simpler than words," the whole practice of life intuitively blooms and opens and offers something simpler than words... Not only can you "notice [more] intuitive pings in the body" but those pings become the path that you walk through the day and night and day—those pings are the path that unfolds. Those pings are the way—the "natural dharma: the intelligence that knows how to adjust your position..." is indeed "the same intuitive capacity you’re learning to trust to handle all of life."
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/archive?sort=search&search=wayfinding
Oh yes, that thought that occurred to me.... which is that this is why I stopped writing about intuition and addiction. The same reason I just poured my coffee out. As much as I love writing, I'd begun to feel that I was spending more than than I wanted to composing well-articulated arguments, spinning well- and evermore-connected webs of thought, drawing lines connecting this to that to this again—and hoping that someone, or one more someone would read and say "yes!" I had living to do. I had feeling and intuiting to do. I had to take the dog to the beach.
thanks for your writing on this.
Hi. Felt moved to share. I’ve been a steadfast Buddhist practitioner for 12 years. I read this last night, and took the night and my morning practice to reflect upon it. It split me open, my friend. The insight was shattering, and my gratitude, overflowing.
Stephen, man, this note did a lot for me. Thank you. May it serve your practice well.
This read felt life changing to me… as someone who has never experienced a quiet mind for a day in her life. It’s beyond exhausting. I’ve realized recently how uncomfortable I am with my own thoughts when I had to sit through a classical music concert. I was going crazy and couldn’t focus on the music because there were too many thoughts going on at once.
I now realize that I consume content in almost all of my waking hours just to quiet my thoughts but it is actually just replacing inner noise with outer noise…
Your piece also reminded me of The Power of Now which I read 10 years ago. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the author said you get so used to the noise you don’t realize its presence until you detach yourself from it. Like when you carry something in your backpack for a while and you are used to the weight but as soon as you take it off you get to experience how light it is supposed to feel.
Thank you so much for writing this.
The fact that you noticed the overthinking at the concert *is* the first shift. And you're spot on about our digital ecologies only exacerbating the problem, with constant stimuli and distraction. It's difficult to have a quiet mind while being very online, I find.
And yes, when you finally put down the compulsive thing, it does feel like dropping off suitcases you didn't know you'd been lugging around. God bless, Eckhart.
Thank you for sharing this, Pam.
My biggest addiction ever. And accompanying unconscious tension, its bestest companion.
How well you noted that overthinking is encouraged. It's in the way we are brought up, it's in the language "Think for yourself", it's in the culture.
No one teaches you to feel into your body. You don't even know it's a thing until one day you break down and scramble for pieces to put yourself back together - learning that actually body needs to feel and let go, and about the constant e-motion spurring on the overthinking loop, spiralling into the darkness.
I wished we all could master the art of not thinking, or at least not overthinking. What would it feel like not to? What kind of world could that be? What would it feel like to be in it, just like the streaming ginger tea on your desk.
Thank you for sharing this essay. I enjoyed the full length of it. And I wrote that without overthinking. (Thanks to my Russian literature teacher, I got good at essays when I "felt" I had something to say!) Ha ha
Looking forward to your next piece.
Irina, this:
No one teaches you to feel into your body. You don't even know it's a thing until one day you break down and scramble for pieces to put yourself back together - learning that actually body needs to feel and let go, and about the constant e-motion spurring on the overthinking loop, spiralling into the darkness.
Is pure gold. Along with the rest of your note. Thank you for writing that without thinking, and just letting it rip. I loved it.
I like how it reframes overanalysis not as failure but as a strategy that once protected us. The practical focus on the body makes the whole piece feel usable rather than abstract.
That part is incredibly important, and frankly deserves its own essay.
“Breathe through your butthole!” Is one of the most amazing prompts I’ve ever been told.
Relax the butthole, breathe through the butthole! Bahaha, thank you, Lydia
The move from substances to productivity to thinking itself as the underlying mechanism makes sense. The object changes, the tightening doesn’t. And the description of that tightening landing in the body is such an important bridge. It keeps this from becoming another abstract philosophy about “mind.”
That part honestly deserves its own essay, but I'm glad it was clear enough for now. Thank you, April.
How beautifully put. Thanks for this excellent food for... thought?
Reminds me of the late David Hawkins recommendation on letting go - ignore thoughts and their self-perpetuating loops, be aware instead of the feelings that drive and summarise these thoughts, and especially ask: what is the energy behind the feeling?
And yet our coherence-making narrative appear to be a basic part of our consciousness. I always suspected so, but now that we have LLMs which are just guessing the next word that's most coherent with what they've read before, and are surprised to see logical reasoning and intelligence emerge... I start to think coherence-making is a basic law of consciousness and the universe.
Perhaps the trap is seeking coherence in the details of thoughts before focussing on the deeper, stronger, but non-verbal coherence and alignment.
There's a rich element around this topic and LLMs - since they are essentially mimicking and regurgitating human thinking. I actually considered weaving that in here but decided to dial back some of the AI references.
And the inherent meaning-making is another rich topic that could deserve its own essay, one that I suspected some savvy folks would pick up on. I love your pointing to focus on the stronger, non-verbal energy behind them.
So right back at you on beautifully put.
The tricky part is that compulsive thinking looks exactly like being a responsible adult.
This really got under my skin, in a good way. The idea that thinking itself can become the addiction is so uncomfortably real, because it hides inside things we’re taught to call intelligence, responsibility, even maturity. Meanwhile half the time it’s just us rehearsing life instead of being in it. What I love here is the reminder that presence isn’t some blank, passive state. It’s intimate. It’s responsive. It’s the place where life is actually happening. And there’s something really tender in the idea that loosening our grip on thought isn’t losing control, it’s letting ourselves come back to the moment, and to ourselves, with a little more trust.
Beautifully put.
I loved this. It feels like a uniquely human problem too. Sometimes when I think I’m ‘being here now’ I’m still in my thinking state. Gazing at my cats who are gazing out the window, putting thoughts in their heads about the birds and the wind and the snow. Who am I kidding? They aren’t thinking! Their smooth little brains are letting life and existence flow right over them. And they are blissful every day because of it.
Cats are my ultimate source of inspiration
Agreed that conceptual proliferation (Buddhist papañca) is a genuine form of addiction. You explain it well and trace the mechanism clearly. Also, as you note, thinking can be good, and Daodejing 1 suggests both states are needed: "ever desireless, one observes the mystery; ever desiring, one observes its manifestations." The problem isn't conceptual thinking per se, but getting lost in it. I think the solution (which you also argue) is not the ability to stop thinking, but to acknowledge thinking and switch into experience. I've recently published an article which argues precisely this way of "oscillating," if you're interested... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06669-3
Yes, this is the more sophisticated dharmic understanding.
The Nature link isn't working for me. But look forward to checking out your paper.
Hi Alex, how strange! You could also try https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06669-3 or the preprint we posted here https://bryankam.com/article Would love to hear your thoughts! The two “skills” we describe correspond to the two directions of dependent arising, but we weren’t able to get into them in great detail here
Reading this article provided me with the out I needed. Thank you. I have lived been living a head centered life for a long time. I knew that I needed something else. I didn't know how or what that was. Your article provided me with what I needed to let my body initiate. The change was immediate and welcome. I particularly appreciated the line referencing the heart being too close to the head. That has been my experience. I appreciate the writing of the article and connection created. Wanted you to know.
Shirley, this is beautiful to hear. The fact that something shifted immediately suggests your body was ready for it. And yeah, the heart-head proximity is sneaky. Thank you so much for this.