Why You’re Addicted to Thinking (And What to Do Instead) | Alex Olshonksy

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Episode Transcript:

Alex Olshonksy 00:00:00  I think in particular, our world is getting so fast paced. You know, there’s global wars. You know, we’ve now had almost two and a half decades of the smartphone era. There’s now the AI intelligence craze. And I think people are just like, this is a lot. And there’s got to be something else.

Chris Forbes 00:00:23  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:07  Alex Olshansky was building Twitter during the day and sneaking a few blocks into the tenderloin to score dope between meetings. That’s the double life he was living, and he describes it as a literal split in the psyche. Two wolves, one with a corporate badge and the other a junkie. He’s now been sober for ten and a half years, and the thing he’s most focused on isn’t substances. It’s something subtler, the addictive pull of compulsive thinking itself. His idea is simple: that overthinking is almost always under feeling. We spin up stories to avoid making contact with whatever is actually there. Alex writes the wonderful Deep Fix newsletter on Substack, and he’s a somatic teacher and coach. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Olshonksy 00:02:00  Eric. So good to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:01  I’m really excited to have you on. I have been following your Substack for a while now, and I think you’re an amazing writer, and I think our interests cross over a great deal. And so I’m really kind of looking forward to doing this, but we’ll start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two rules inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Alex Olshonksy 00:02:54  Well, first, Thanks. It’s great to be with you. I feel like you’re an addiction OG and it’s such a good parable. It really rings true. And I’ll talk about it one how it applies to my life personally, and then how it applies to my work today. And on a personal level, it is just painfully accurate because I spent the first half of my life really feeding that bad wolf.

Alex Olshonksy 00:03:18  And I think one thing that feels really salient about this is just how deceptive that can be. Like, you can really think that you’re feeding the good wolf, when in fact you’re just totally in self-deception. And so in my case, like as a child and teenager, I was always fascinated by fantasy and Jedi’s and magic and Harry Potter and Tolkien and this idea that, like a human, can have these magical abilities that sort of transcends the typical. And when I discovered drugs, it was like, there’s my gateway, there’s my magic. Yeah, there’s the magic. It literally, like, opened this portal to another world and. And so at the time, like, it didn’t seem like I was feeding the bad wolf. It was actually just. This is just enhancing my life. And then as things progressed, it became more about, like, performance enhancement and doing my best work and biohacking, like, I thought I was like a Hunter S Thompson and Silicon Valley and really, really like justifying and feeling like this made me a better person and unlocked like capabilities that I didn’t have without it.

Alex Olshonksy 00:04:24  And then, of course, when I finally hit my bottom and and entered recovery, I started to realize just how deluded I had been and how really it had been that that bad wolf. And I don’t love the term bad, but that one had been driving the show, and it was really just like I was living with just immense shame and insecurity and lack of worth in recovery. Like just sort of outside of my control. Just the good wolf took over and like, I just couldn’t help but become fascinated by healing and meditation and spirituality and awakening and all these different esoteric sort of practices and recovery itself. And that just became the thing that I was absolutely feeding it, but it started really feeding itself. And so the parable was like it could not be more accurate for me. And and then the other part is like how it applies to, to my work today. I think what comes up is now, like I wouldn’t describe it feeling as resonant around things, just being a binary within ourselves, like just a good and bad part, especially just with some of my training and background and the work.

Alex Olshonksy 00:05:32  What I do, I do with folks is helping them understand the many different sort of identities and sub personalities that dwell within, within the psyche. And all that said, I still find that the binary is accurate in a lot of the work that I’m doing today, which is really around helping people break free from overthinking, being lost in rumination, or simply just being distracted from the present moment. And when it comes to to that work. The most simple first step is cultivating what I call attentional agency. And it’s really it is binary. Like your attention, you’re either aware or you’re unaware. And when you’re unaware, it’s unconscious. You don’t know what you’re doing. And modern life has really just rigged the deck for us to be constantly distracted and numbing and avoiding. And in this, you know, a place where we actually don’t know what’s happening with our attention. And so the move towards shifting into presence the moment, whether that’s the senses or something like just love or the field of experience like that, that move itself, I feel like is is a binary move.

Alex Olshonksy 00:06:39  And the more that one does that, the more that one rests and trains their attention to rest on what’s here, and then eventually even sort of Inquiring and resting and like the source of attention itself, like that’s when you start entering kind of what traditions have called spiritual awakening. And it can really reorganize your life. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:00  Yeah, there’s a lot in what you said. I want to spend a couple minutes on your addiction and your story there a little bit, and then I want to really go deeper on this attentional agency idea, or the idea of being addicted to our thinking. I will say that you are an enormously functional drug addict. You got through Dartmouth, right? You you you had jobs in the tech field. I mean, you did well in that as a highly dysfunctional drug addict, I’m semi amazed by the length of time you managed to keep things together. But we end up in a very, very similar, similar place. And you know, our stories are similar and we both have opiates in our background is the stone that ultimately broke the camel’s back.

Alex Olshonksy 00:07:51  Yeah, yeah, look at that. Actually, that’s a great segue. Well, Eric, that’s something I actually reflect on quite a bit, was just like how functional I was and the madness that was involved in that, like literally the, the sort of the double life that I was living where on the one hand, I was building these at the time, you know, paradigm shifting companies like Twitter. And then on the other hand, like sneaking out a few blocks away into the tenderloin to score in between meetings and then living, you know, doing the same at night. And this sort of literally like there was a almost like, talk about the two wolves, like a legitimate split in the psyche. Yeah. And you know, the term like high functioning is interesting too, because like, really what that is signaling is like I was able to still fit into the machine and produce great capitalistic output. You know, like I was really able to do that well, when in fact, like the, the reality, I think of the body and the pain that I was living inside was just it was utter like shame and terror and madness and, that’s something that it took me a long time in recovery to really sort of like, grapple with is just what was driving me to still pursue both things simultaneously.

Alex Olshonksy 00:09:13  And I think just given my background and and upbringing and trying to like this, this real striver identity of like wanting to prove myself and in like become a random just boy from the suburbs who wanted to just make his claim and, and the the sort of insanity of propelling that towards immense like harm and ultimately ruin, you know. And so, it was it was dark.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:39  Yeah. I took the route of just, pretending to be, burgeoning rock star where all that just seemed like it was part of the path. The whole thing was a crazy dream, but it was a way of just sort of saying like, well, yeah, I mean, what I’m doing makes sense. You know, it was just all kind of out there in a totally different way. You have so many great lines about writing, but one of the things that cracked me up is I think you called the handicap stall, the drug addicts office. Yeah.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:10  Yeah, the junkies office. I think it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:11  You know, the junkies.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:13  We’re not, you know, we’re in the addiction space. You’re not supposed to use that term. But when I’m describing myself, you’re right.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:17  So you can use it for yourself. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that is just so true. I, I by the end, for me, it was it was all intravenous drug use. But it was, it was the same thing as, like as a handicapped stall open. Great. Why is he in the bathroom so often? You know what? What’s the matter? Does he have a digestive issue of some sort that we need to talk about? Yeah.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:36  Yeah. Why? He’s always rubbing his nose. And why was eyes look funny? It’s like you got. Oh, you’re you’re sinus infection that never goes away, Right. Yes. It’s like bad sinuses. That’s actually true in my case. But also, there was a lot of just. I was doing whatever I could to try to, you know, make it like I was not just a total, poly substance drug addict.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:58  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  Let’s talk a little bit about your your healing journey in brief, just so people can kind of see all the aspects of it. So I don’t want to dwell too much on what the bottom was like. And I mean, these stories are they’re all unique and interesting and all sort of the same at the same time. Right, right. Which is you just some part of you just is completely beaten, defeated, exhausted. And basically I refer to as like, I just had my ass handed to me. That’s where we end. Talk to me about sort of the arc of your healing journey. You wrote the essay I was reading when you were ten years. Where are you now?

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:35  Yeah, just about ten and a half. Oh, that was only six months or so ago. Six months ago.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:39  Okay.

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:40  Yeah, right. Yeah. And I. And I love what you. You said there I was just so thoroughly broken and humbled. And I think humbled is the key word for me that I had just been so embarrassed that I was just like, okay, I give I literally give up and had a quintessential moment.

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:54  And at that point, I was actually already in outpatient treatment because I was on opiates, amphetamines, benzos. So I had to have a medically supervised detox for a year. And so I basically recommitted to that treatment, which I had done in secret, because I was so petrified of the more moral failing of being a drug addict amidst having this career. And so I had failed out of that several times and never actually stuck. And I never actually stopped everything because I was always like, well, it’s really only the opiates and amphetamines. And so, you know, I’m gonna still smoke weed and drink, obviously. Right. Like, and at that point, being so broken, I just, I dove straight into that treatment and that’s when I also dove into AA and in particular the men’s groups. The Stags meetings was was really a tremendous force. And that led me then to I when I sort of felt like and I loved the 12 steps in that community. But like a lot of people felt like I had hit a, a cap at a certain point.

Alex Olshonksy 00:12:55  And that’s when I started diving really deep into Buddhist space recovery. And then when I was a year sober, I was doing really well, and I just made it through my my grueling year long taper off Suboxone. And I was now at the point where I was at a real crossroads, feeling like, what am I going to do next? And that’s when I decided to do ayahuasca for the first time, because I was also at that point considering drinking and smoking again, thinking like, okay, the the hard things are behind me. But yeah, yeah, that weekend was the back to back ceremonies altered the course of my life, and that then propelled me down a path of plant medicine study trips to the Amazon to study with the capybara and then other Colombian lineages more locally in California, and study the healing arts and yoga. And my meditation throughout had just been continued to blossom. And, you know, there’s a lot I could list, a lot of different modalities in there, but I really like the the spiritual path took over my life.

Alex Olshonksy 00:13:58  The dharma became the most important thing. And that was was also the most beautiful things. Even though it comes with its, its, you know, downsides. When you really let something like that, when something like that just takes over. So then I would say, you know, like meditation, dharma yoga and, somatic psychology in particular, really doing a long in-depth study with me. Somatic psychotherapy was tremendously healing for me to, like, really get into the places of my body and relive some of those memories in the tenderloin and other sort of crime ridden, trauma related escapades that I just wasn’t able to access in any other of my talk therapy or even 12 step work. And so it’s been it’s been a lot of work in a, in a long, long journey. Couldn’t have gone any other way. And I’m just so grateful for it. especially leading to me, I think, to where it most recently in the last like four years, led me more into the non-dual traditions of like, Tibetan Buddhism and Vita Vedanta.

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:02  And that’s been just tremendously life changing.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:06  So what has been the role of entheogens in your ongoing recovery?

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:12  In my ongoing recovery lately? It’s non-existent. And that’s something that I didn’t expect to happen because I had such a profound experience with ayahuasca. And at that time, as you know, it was quite controversial. Like, things have changed so much in the recovery scene. But when I, you know, I remember, You know, like people in AA were like, that’s a relapse. And, you know, that’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:38  What I would say. Yes.

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:39  Yeah. I had a lot of shame around it and had to keep it really secretive. And it was so impactful. And then I started doing like really dedicated work around intentional work. That part of my mission really became about helping people in recovery. Understand that, yes, you can intentionally, consciously engage with these sacraments from the Earth, particularly the entheogens, which which come from the Earth itself and have a lineage behind them, and even ended up co-founding Natura Cara, which is an addiction and entheogenic nonprofit that weaves contemplative practice, nature immersion and retreats.

Alex Olshonksy 00:16:15  And so it was a really central part of my work. But as time went on, the personal use diminished. and especially then when I had a major shift in meditation where there was sort of a before and after I no longer had the desire to to take psychedelics, because my experience was so psychedelic that I didn’t need anything else. And so it’s like I got sort of the ultimate recovery where it felt like I had. And not to say that there’s still a, you know, I still love that work. And occasionally, you know, I could see myself personally coming back to it, but in recent times I haven’t felt that call or need.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:13  It’s a wild thing that we are using drugs that can be taken recreationally as healings for addiction. I mean, I certainly experimented plenty with psychedelics in my active use phase. You know, I will say there was a flavor of transcendence to it. But we were partying, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a very different animal. And so as this whole thing is sort of really blown up over the last decade, you know, seeing the entheogens really come into, I mean, frankly, just the mainstream at this point, but be behind a lot of healing work I found myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:57  I don’t know how long ago it’s been now seven years, maybe six years, thinking, you know what, I want to see if a psychedelic treatment would help with my sort of semi trenchant, depression slash, low mood slash anhedonia. There’s plenty of studies that seem to show it’s helpful for that. So I did do a psychedelic experience. I did, I did psilocybin, and I remember I was so focused on making sure that, like, this is in a healing context, right? I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a little part of the inner. I like being high that woke up with the idea. It was like, Right. You know, like you’re going to get a faster way out of your head for a while. Okay, I’ll take that. You know, I noticed it wake up. And I just ended up doing it with, like, a therapist in a certain setting. I did it flanked by days and meditating. You know, all day Zen sitting like, I just, you know, nestled it as deeply in healing as I could.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:07  For me, it turned out to be sort of a not a big thing. But I have had a couple of. It sounds like you describe some awakening experiences that fundamentally shifted who I was. And, you know, I had done a lot of Zen practice. You know, me working through a hundred miscellaneous koans with teachers, and I just sort of saw kind of what I already knew, but in a darker light. I was getting the slightly scarier version of impermanence on this trip. You know, interesting. I know impermanence to be the nature of things. So I’m just sort of revealing my history with all that in service of, of the conversation as a whole. But I’m always curious about it since I’ve only played on the outside of it. I do see some people that seem to be like, I’m judging without knowing enough to judge, but I see a certain culture of concern, a very, very frequent use of these substances that looks to me more than the sacred healing ceremony. Totally.

Alex Olshonksy 00:20:16  Right. And that’s where I mean, it is the Wild West. And I think for those of us in recovery, we have to be really careful and honest with ourselves. We actually have to practice the principles of recovery as like, am I escaping here? Am I bypassing? Or is this something that actually is serving my evolution? And, you know, I’ll say for me, many people who kind of go through the sort of psychedelics to meditation, awakening pipeline, I don’t think I would have got there with without that, that experience like it really, it really altered the course of my life. And for me also doing like being exposed to in particular ayahuasca and these, these lineages that are really nature and reverence, reverence towards the natural world. Like I became a vegan and a Yogi and like fortunately, I self corrected on the vegan front, no offense to any any vegans out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:07  I was a vegan for a while. Yeah, I’ve been there.

Alex Olshonksy 00:21:09  Yeah yeah yeah. And like but it just really like I think it opened up a care for the natural world.

Alex Olshonksy 00:21:15  And for me this, this has been called the eco delic insight in this is particular to like the entheogens that come from the earth where it’s like you can have a sense of real connection to the natural world and Mother Nature. That I think for a guy who had my background, like, I didn’t really have that previously. And so it did a lot on that end for me. And, you know, working with Nature Care and the programs and the retreats that we do, you know, we’re seeing some some veterans who just are really in need of assistance. Sometimes people have been through, you know, every treatment possible and rehab, and they need, you know, another option. And then there’s other people like you who have maybe a decade or a few years of recovery under their belt, and it’s sort of like, what’s next? And so I think for certain people at the right time in recovery, it can really be a rocket, like something that sort of helps in ignite a second stage recovery.

Alex Olshonksy 00:22:10  Yeah. To your point, like, and in the culture we’re living, it requires discernment. And I think mentorship and accountability to ensure that you’re not feeding that bad wolf. Deceiving yourself? Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:23  Which we as addicts are enormously good at. Right. So I want to turn a little bit towards some writing you’ve done more recently on what you call an addiction to thinking. And so I’m just going to read a couple of things that you wrote, and then let us kind of go into it from there. So instead, if there’s been a through line in my work over the last decade, it’s an addiction gets subtler the further you follow it. First, I had to get sober from the obvious bad stuff, the narcotic chemicals. It nearly killed me. Then I had to reckon with the legal drugs like Twitter, Instagram, Pornhub, and yes, the New York Times politics section, which I used to read cover to cover as if it were oxygen. After that came other socially sanctioned drugs I had long mistaken for purely virtuous achievement, ideology, productivity, optimization, and having a sharp take on everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:19  So I love that idea that addiction gets subtler the further you. You go. And I think I’d like to circle back around and talk about whether calling these things addictions is useful or not. We’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to follow the thread here, because ultimately, for you, this all boils down to, I think you would say an addiction to thinking. Is that the way you would sort of say, if you follow this thread all the way down, that’s where it ends.

Alex Olshonksy 00:23:47  Yeah. That’s right. And, you know, it surprised me because it really first started with the external. And then it got more subtle and it didn’t really click for me until I had also had some meditative breakthroughs, which really and having studied numerous spiritual traditions from, you know, yoga to Hindu tantra to hatha yoga and then various flavors of Buddhism, like, you really see that this is what they’re pointing at. They’re pointing at that. We compulsively think. We believe our thoughts. We believe the voice inside our heads to be us.

Alex Olshonksy 00:24:22  We fundamentally mistake our identity to be that small self, that narrative self, and instead miss that we’re just something much vaster, more spacious, wild and free. And so once I was able to sort of connect the dots there, it really started to land that. Yeah, if we were to look at this kind of squarely in the face, I think I personally, in the way that I would replay conversations, try to win arguments in my head, obsess about something, you know, plot my career domination like it was functioning in a lot of ways, just like an addiction. And I think especially if we look at like the most simple understanding of, of addiction, which is that addiction has some impulsivity and consequences, negative consequences. And for me, both of those things were happening in when it comes to overthinking. And is that a provocative take? Sure. Absolutely. And let’s let’s have that conversation because I want to. But then, you know, also like some of my, my favorite, you know, spiritual teachers like Addie Ashanti, I also later came across talking about how like, we’re addicted to thinking, we’re addicted to the me and creating this self.

Alex Olshonksy 00:25:33  And that’s ultimately where the where the road led for me, and especially then weaving in sort of the third element of somatic psychology, which is that fundamentally we reach to overthink when we’re feeling discomfort in the body. And so overthinking is always under feeling. And when you look at it like that, and that also really tracks to many flavors of Buddhism and contemplative practice, which is that, you know, we have direct sensation and then there’s either craving or aversion to get away from that sensation, and then the mind spins ups its stories to do so. And so when I saw this, it just seemed pretty clear to me that like, oh, there’s a, there’s a through line throughout all these traditions and all the stuff that I’m interested in.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:15  Yeah. And I think what you just said there, and you say it in your article as you get further on, is at its root, it’s, you say, an addiction to wanting things to be different than they are. Right. And that’s the that’s the Buddhist idea of aversion, the root poisons, greed, hatred or aversion and grasping.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:33  But it is ultimately. All right. I don’t like this, whatever this is. So I’m going to I’m going to change it somehow. And I’ve said for years that it feels to me if I had to look back at addiction and I had to go, what was the fundamental skill I had to learn to get over it? Like to truly get on. And again, I don’t want to say I’m on the other side. As if relapse isn’t possible. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But it was that I could recognize I can have any experience, and I’m capable of handling it without having to immediately fix it. That was when I went, oh, I think I can really do this as long as I there was this like, well, but I can’t handle that or I couldn’t handle that or I couldn’t take that. And look, there is more suffering to come. I never want to be like, I never want to tempt suffering with being like, oh, bring it on.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:34  That is not what I what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that that was a fundamental thing to go, okay, I don’t have to necessarily immediately fix this moment.

Alex Olshonksy 00:27:46  And there are so many ways that we can fix the moment. Yes. A term that I’ve tried to coin, as is modern addiction, which is that like addiction, it’s not just the people huddled up on the street or in church basement or guys like us, like today, with digital technology in particular, not to mention gambling and everything else and porn, etc. our news cycle like we’re all subject to this. And I think that, you know, what you talk about, like having something in life that we’re feeling that is uncomfortable or hard and wanting just some way to get relief from it. It’s the most natural thing in the world. And, you know, now I think it’s like pretty commonly accepted that, you know, if you scroll TikTok like that’s going to distract you from whatever you’re feeling, right? If you’re going to binge Twitter and go down a Twitter rabbit hole, it’s gonna numb that grief that maybe you’ve been avoiding.

Alex Olshonksy 00:28:42  So it’s like that is pretty well understood. Now, even though we have, in my opinion, we’re still massively under reacting and not actually doing much around it. And so really, I’m just taking sort of the next step, which is that you have that let’s say that like, well, of grief that hasn’t really been contacted. And, you know, instead of actually giving you a chance to feel it, you will go into the rumination or like you send a text to a friend and like you feel you feel something after doing it, and instead of actually just feeling that feeling of vulnerability, it’s like, well, like they don’t. They’re never going to respond. And oh, I should have rewarded it differently. And, you know, like, oh, I don’t even like them anyways. And all these things that we do that actually are one move away from just being with the, the feeling itself, the other side here, Eric, is that like when we actually really deepen that capacity, that fundamental skill that you and I both had to learn in early recovery of, like just being with life on life’s terms, that’s when things get really good, right? Because you’re not fighting so much with the way things are, and it’s more of like a flow and surrender and opening and then like these other great qualities of sort of like ease and carefree and lightness and humor come through.

Alex Olshonksy 00:29:55  And so I know it’s a provocative thesis and angle, but the point and I think part of why it’s been so resonant for people is that there’s something else that’s possible. There’s another way to live. And I think in particular, our world is getting so fast paced. You know, there’s global wars. You know, we’ve now had almost two and a half decades of the smartphone era. There’s now the AI intelligence craze. And I think people are just like, this is a lot. And there’s got to be something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:22  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bytes of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:57  You also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed. That’s one you get. newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. With the idea of addiction, I mean, the other way I often think of addiction is just to to make it super simple as I just think of it as lack of control, right? I mean, that was the main problem, right? I could say I am not going to do X, Y, and Z, and then I would promptly do it over and over and over and over again. Right. I couldn’t make and keep any sort of promise to myself. And if, you know, thinking, if we say that we have no control over it, you could on one hand by that call an addiction. What is overthinking? You know, you said a second ago overthinking automatically means under feeling, which I want to maybe explore a little further because I need to think about how I feel about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:55  But let’s start by trying to say what is overthinking.

Alex Olshonksy 00:31:57  Yeah. I mean, overthinking is I sort of use these two terms interchangeably, which is that overthinking or compulsive thinking. And so that’s pointing to like the lack of control. And so I mean, the classic scenario of overthinking is like an example I described where you text, let’s say, you know, a friend that you, you really like, but there’s also maybe some charge there. And, you know, the moment you do that and there’s no response for let’s just say ten minutes like this can be a really relatable thing to be like, oh, like, man, Eric so busy. He just launched his book. Like, I shouldn’t be bothering him. Like, let me what did I write? Like, oh, that wasn’t that smart. Like, should I follow up or should I can I send it to you? That is overthinking in my book, right? And the thing is, and this is the thing is why it gets really subtle.

Alex Olshonksy 00:32:46  It happens without most people even realizing that it’s happening. This is just the default state of the thinking mind. But typically like overthinking, you know, I think to to be more clear for folks, it’s like it has that quality of rumination, obsession, second guessing and pain. Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:33:24  You’re good with words. So I want to ask you. I find this lost in thought idea such an odd thing because on one hand, I am completely taken over by it, and on the other hand, I have absolutely no idea it’s happening. It’s weird in that way. You got any word for that?

Alex Olshonksy 00:33:46  So say more. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about your experience when when you say that you’re so you’re so lost in it.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:52  Let’s take your scenario and let’s just turn the emotional stakes up on it to make it a little bit more fun. It’s somebody I’m early in a relationship with, and I text them and they’re not texting back. And I am just like you said, I’m ruminating.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:06  I’m spinning. What did I get? What if she doesn’t like me? What is she going, you know, you know, I got a diet and my old relationships are flashing into my mind. I’m feeling anxious. I get all this is happening and I am deeply immersed in it. But another part of me is not aware that that’s going on at all. And I guess it’s that my meta awareness or my my bigger awareness isn’t aware that it’s happening, but I just find it such a strange thing. It’s like being on a roller coaster and not knowing you’re on a roller coaster. It doesn’t. You’re like, well, hang on a second, I surely I would know I’m on a roller coaster, but not in this case.

Alex Olshonksy 00:34:43  That’s right. And that’s the subtlety. And this goes back to what I was talking about earlier with the two modes of attention, like either being aware or unaware, and unawareness happens like it is legitimately out of our control. We don’t control. That’s the nature of being unaware.

Alex Olshonksy 00:34:58  It’s like we don’t control when it happens. I’m really glad you mentioned the like thinking about courting love like that, and that I don’t even know if that’s a real life scenario, but that is the best. Of course. Overthinking when you’re left on red with someone that you, that you, that you love or you’re into. And so like, that’s the compulsive element that I think where I really see it as having that addictive quality is because we can’t recognize at times that it’s happening. However, there are always moments where, you know, you sort of like wake up and you’re like, oh man, I’m really losing it here. Yeah, can you stop? And then usually there’s more self-referential, negative thoughts about the overthinking itself. Yes. And so part of why I bring the recovery frame in the addiction frame into this is because one of the things that we’ve been gifted with Eric is like the ability to look something square in the eyes and to be really honest about what it’s doing in our lives.

Alex Olshonksy 00:35:51  And for me, knowing what my life is like now, there’s sort of an auto release, as I call it, towards the overthinking that came from a lot of the practices that I describe and try to try to share. It really is painful to be living in that other way. And I just noticed how how much struggle and suffering I was creating for myself. And once you remove all the other kind of substances and you’re not numbing yourself with drugs or screens, like really, you’re just left with relational experience, relationship with yourself, relationship with others. And it feels a lot better to me to not be sort of constantly second guessing myself and running a war in my own mind.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:32  Yeah, there’s a term that I got from acceptance and commitment therapy that I think about an awful lot, and it’s the idea of something being useful. And so when I think about like what constitutes ruminating versus thinking, that’s usually the line I draw. There’s a place where my thoughts, they’re doing something useful, I’m solving a problem.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:55  I’m brainstorming a thing. Something useful is happening, something generative is occurring. And then there’s a point at which it tips over and nothing new is coming. Nothing generative is coming. Nothing useful is happening. All that’s happening is I’m spinning in the same place, deeper and deeper, and it’s getting worse and worse, you know. And so that’s for me kind of how I try and think about that. Now that’s sometimes difficult to suss out, but I can tell there’s a feeling of rumination that I know now, I understand it now I feel it in a different way. I mean, almost all of it. And you’d be in a somatic practitioner, you know, this is a simplification. But for me, most everything that causes some part of my body to loosen and relax, I tend to think I’m on the right track and the parts of it that cause my body in whatever way is to start clenching up is a sign that like, I want to pay closer attention to like, okay, what’s happening here?

Alex Olshonksy 00:37:57  Right? Right.

Alex Olshonksy 00:37:58  And I’m glad you mentioned this because this points to an important distinction, which is what I would say is the difference between thoughts and compulsive thinking, which is what you’re really just sort of gesturing to. And because like the the point of what I’m trying to share here isn’t to make thinking a problem or go to war with the mind. It’s more about actually like helping people get into what, you know, people in psychology calls flow states, where you’re in the flow and thinking is happening on its own, and it’s generative, and you’re sort of out of your own way, such that thoughts can arise as these unbidden manifestations of inspiration or creativity or insight, whereas compulsive thinking is the thoughts about thoughts running in this unaware loop that often has this really negative flavor that go with it. And so the interesting thing is that, yeah, the more you sort of practice and the more that you, you also mentioned sort of like the meta awareness, because it does take some introspective awareness to like catch your thoughts happening and to, to notice, like when you’ve crossed over as in your words from sort of thinking to rumination.

Alex Olshonksy 00:39:10  One of the best gateways in there for me is always like, yeah, checking in with the body and trying to get a sense of like, oh, when it feels like I’m ruminating or overthinking, like, what am I actually feeling here? Can I slow this down and notice that and scan the body and then maybe even stay with some of those sensations? Because giving the body time to kind of complete these cycles of activation will allow the thinking to, to quiet on its own. And then the more that one can do that, the more that actually we get access to, to flow, which is where thoughts just happen. And like it’s actually thinking is way better and it’s way less effortful than the alternative.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:52  In this essay that you talk about, you keep going. But you ultimately say this ability to drop, how would you say out of thought? What’s the state when I disengage?

Alex Olshonksy 00:40:04  It is a relaxing move, right? So instead of the closed fist, it’s the open fist. So it’s this mode of just like letting go and softening such that thoughts.

Alex Olshonksy 00:40:13  The thoughts can still be happening and they can actually be pretty high voltage. But you’re not identified with them. You’re not taking them to mean a code red fire drill. You know, every time they arise. And so it is a releasing identification with the thoughts which like that’s the thing that is trainable. It’s not about stopping thoughts. And this is another, I think common misconception. And it’s like everyone’s like, oh, I want to have a totally zen quiet, you know, still mind and look that that can happen. That does happen. You know. But more I think what you know, more fundamental and more realistic is and actually more liberating is to understand that, like, the thoughts can totally still be happening, but you’re letting them happen and you’re something much, much bigger than the thoughts themselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:03  Yeah, you’re talking about that. This can be trained and you say the time and effort may vary, but you sort of make the point. I don’t have it cut into my notes here, but I think you made a point that you spent time practicing in a way that didn’t lead you here.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:18  Had you understood how to do this better, you might have made faster progress. What was the mistake you were making because you were in contemplative practice, I assume. So what was the what was the mistake you were trying to make? And what does it look like to correct it?

Alex Olshonksy 00:41:34  That’s such a great question. I was and I had was a fairly experienced meditator and Yogi. I mean, I think for someone who’s a non monastic, I was about as dedicated as one can be, you know, studying with many different teachers and going on retreats and treating it like a full time job outside of my my day job. And I think early, like I fell into sort of like the mindfulness trap, which is, you know, there’s a lot of schools of like Theravada Buddhism, which really are just about well, and I want to be careful here, but I think at the end of the day, I was there was a lot of just sort of following the breath or noting, noting practice.

Alex Olshonksy 00:42:15  And a noting practice is sort of when you’re just labeling, labeling what arises and different flavors of that. And that’s all great. Those are both phenomenal practices that like I recommend and endorse, but noting in particular when you’re sort of just like thought or sound or sight, it’s useful to a point to, especially at the beginning. But then after a certain point, you’re actually kind of still engaging the machinery of mind. It was something that I think, for me, actually aggravated a sense of just like this hyper analytical, left brain guy like, overly intellectual man who had trouble getting into his heart and his body. And then the other element was, I think when when I more later on my spiritual path discovered this, the non-dual traditions which have a fundamentally different premise than the progressive path. And so.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:07  Describe that for people who don’t understand what that means.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:10  The non-dual tradition.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:11  Yeah. And how it’s how it’s different.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:13  Yeah. Right. There’s considered to be like sort of two meditative paths.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:16  One is the progressive path where you’re you’re slowly building insight and honing the mind and developing concentration. And then there’s the, the direct path or the non-dual path and the non-dual path. The fundamental premise is that you are already awake and enlightened and free, and you simply just need to relax more and open to what’s here. And I had not been given that instruction until much later, like halfway through my my meditative training and for again, someone like me who had, you know, hustled his way into the Ivy League and had this real striver identity for someone to tell me like, oh, to, because I had I had, for better or worse, I had got the enlightenment bug and no one had ever just told me like, oh, you actually can just relax. And so that element of relaxing the body that is so fundamental to this process because again, coming back to the overthinking is is under feeling like compulsive thinking is a result of contraction in the body. And so the more that we can relax the body, the more that actually we can soften the mind and allow the allow it to just do its thing.

Alex Olshonksy 00:44:24  And so what I didn’t know was one that sort of direct path teaching, which I hadn’t been given that earlier, and then two, I hadn’t been given the somatic psychology understanding, which I think is really what I see as missing in this conversation in general, bridging the two, which is that we as humans in the modern world are kind of living in chronic activation, where our bodies are in like mild flight or flight stress response, trauma responses. In my case, like working in a high stress environment, for many years, I was basically living in a sympathetic nervous system or I was like, I just started that just became my normal. And then once I started getting training on that and understanding actually how the body responds to stimulus and what the body needs to unwind. And one of the core premises of Hakimi and somatic psychotherapy is that in the same way, if you got a cut on your hand, the body, like in the right conditions, is just going to heal itself miraculously. It’s the same for the psyche, but we need to allow when we actually give loving attention to what’s happening in your body.

Alex Olshonksy 00:45:33  The body will just allow the psyche to sort of reorganize towards wholeness and healing. Those were the elements that I didn’t get until later in my journey that I felt were were missing and could save people a lot of time.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:46  All right, somebody hears this, they go, yeah, that’s me. I mean, I think almost everybody hears a little bit whether you want to call her an addiction or not. Almost everybody would be like, well, God, my thoughts sometimes drive me up the wall, right? I mean, at the very least, like, can we just. Could they just turn down a little bit or so everybody feels that if somebody was going to say, all right, you know what, I do want to deal with this again, I’m going to give another run at this. Maybe they’ve maybe they’ve tried to meditate a little bit. Right. Maybe they’ve never tried it. Maybe they’ve listened to an app a few times. But for not somebody who’s not a dedicated practitioner.

Alex Olshonksy 00:46:17  It’s a great question.

Alex Olshonksy 00:46:17  And there’s a there’s a few different angles to, to take here. And so it really one requires a holistic approach. But just for someone who’s listening who might want to say like, okay, what can I start practicing immediately? The first thing is actually having just some awareness that the overthinking is the result of a protective strategy from the thinking mind trying to keep a part of you safe, right? And so that there’s a part of you when something that you’re feeling in those moments that is begging some some care and some love. And so I like to first just invite people to, just to, to have some awareness that like, oh, there’s something in you that is working really hard to keep you safe and to keep you well. And then from there, I think a really great entry point is actually to like, really drop down into the body with some meditative awareness. And the reason being that like most people, we most, most for most people, it feels like our thoughts are located up here in the head.

Alex Olshonksy 00:47:22  For some it’s in the heart. But most people, especially in our Western cultures, in the head. And so the more that actually you then can start resting attention on that, which is not a thought. And so one just allowing attention to drop down and into the pelvic bowl. breathing and filling up the three dimensional space there. Maybe even going even lower all the way down to the soles of the feet. And one of my favorite prompts is like imagining that each sole of your foot had nostrils, and you’re literally just like breathing from the earth, from the soles of your feet. And even if, like, someone’s listening along and maybe just practicing that, you might notice, like just even as I narrate this, it just slows things down, right? And the more we slow down, the more that the thinking mind can relax. And so that, in a nutshell, is just one really basic great practice that you can do at any time. And so like I encourage people like if they’re busy and working and like so some people might be like, I don’t have time to meditate.

Alex Olshonksy 00:48:17  It’s like, hey, you can be in your zoom meeting and rooting into your back body, which signals safety to the brain. Psalm feeling the pelvic bowl. Breathe, feeling the feet breathe. And really just allowing attention to to be aware of those areas while you’re engaging with anything else, and that will help to just reduce the noise and the thinking mind. Yeah, maybe I can start there. There’s a lot more I could share about where people can go after that.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:46  That’s a good start. I’m going to ask a couple questions. Let’s say somebody did say, all right, I’m going to give this ten minutes a day. You, in your article, claim that with ten minutes a day, you can make some progress on this. Yeah. Would that be it? Like, just keep my attention in my feet or in my pelvis area. And every time my attention wanders, as it inevitably will of, you know, countless times I just bring it back to that. And that’s what I kind of want to do as a starting point.

Alex Olshonksy 00:49:14  I think that’s a great starting point, but essay that I mentioned that I wrote and I’m working on follow ups, I have some follow ups, have other like a whole set of practices. And so really you’d want to be doing each practice for, let’s say, ten minutes a day for three weeks at a time until you felt good at it. And so I’d start, though with something like that, where you’re actually building the skill. Going back to where we started, the conversation of training attention to rest on something that’s not thought in the body is one of the most reliable ways to get there, because we all have access to it. But then from there, like I’d also invite people to start paying attention to like just your whole field of experience and starting to zoom out and notice, like the entirety of the visual field. And I can give a little practice here. Sure. Yeah. And so one thing that people can do that I really like is to so if you bring your hands to the, the sides of your, of your head like this, like right by your ears and what you do is you move your hands forward and back in space like this.

Alex Olshonksy 00:50:13  And what you’re doing is you’re looking for the point in which in your periphery, as you look straight ahead, the hands disappear. And when you do this in this way, it just allows your, your, your field of vision to get much wider. And you notice that there’s actually this really big, Miraculous like ultra 4K display just happening right before you. And so there’s this huge thing that’s right here that’s not thought. And humans are primarily visual creatures. Creatures. Something like 60% of our processing happens from like the visual cortex. And so using this like this whole the bigness of the visual field is a great thing for people to notice, because that’s all this is not a thought. Right. And so that would be like a progressive practice of continuing to get like really more interested in that, which isn’t a thought. And then eventually, as in I’ve described this in some of the other practice guides, like you want to start looking into the nature of thoughts themselves, like, am I in control of my thoughts in the way that I think I am? I the voice in my head that I often mistake myself to be? And this is where the spiritual kind of insight comes in.

Alex Olshonksy 00:51:28  And you can even make that practice digestible for ten minutes a day, but it is a good progression to follow, I believe, where it’s sort of like one, you start with the basis of sort of like recovery, then the somatic of building into the body, working with the sense gates, and then eventually start looking into the nature of sort of thought itself and like, who? Who are you really? And I could give a quick practice to help with that. Or we could just save it for another time, too.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:57  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed.net newsletter again one you feed.net. So I want to end with something that you mention in your writing. And I talk about all the time and is in my book, and I think it comes from the 12 step world idea, though, which is this idea of it’s easier to actuate into, you say, new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:49  Give me your take on that.

Alex Olshonksy 00:52:50  Yeah, yeah, it’s such a such a good one. And I think something that surprises people, like going back to the last question, I was like, if I actually want to practice not overthinking, like, what do I do? And I’ve been teaching workshops on this. And what has surprised people is that you’re actually already doing so much without thinking about it, whether that’s walking or driving or playing certain sports. Like, we actually know how to move through the world and move through this life without thinking about it. And so one, you can start paying attention to the ways in which that’s already happening. But I think just more like fundamental to this quote and recovery itself is that, you know, you can’t think your way out of addiction, you can’t think your way into healing, you can’t think your way into spiritual insight. You have to actually take action and move. That’s what leads to lasting change. And so this one for me, I think is so important, especially in a world in which it’s so easy to distract ourselves or outsource our thinking now to AI, where instead just do the thing, just put one step in front of the other, like perfection is the enemy of good in this case, and in my in my life, I certainly had to just literally move forward in order to start making some things happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:22  Beautiful. That is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to go deeper into aspects of contemplative practice in the post-show conversation, where I’m going to actually get to nerd out on a couple things. So if you want to hear that listeners and you want to add free episodes and you want to support this show, you can go to one you feed. Thank you so much, Alex. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Alex Olshonksy 00:54:47  Thank you Eric. This has been a real honor.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:49  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:15  Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.