Alex Olshonsky

A few months ago, I wrote my core thesis: overthinking is the subtlest addiction of them all. Most of us are lost in it without noticing, and the machines we built to think for us only make it worse. To my surprise, it went viral, with hundreds writing to me about migraine relief, OCD softening, and longtime meditators finally breaking through. You are not the voice in your head, but something much vaster. Learning to live that way is a trainable skill, just a hard one in modern life. So I wrote a proper guide weaving contemplative practice, somatic psychology, and the most overlooked piece, addiction recovery.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of juice out of setting an intention first thing upon waking to open my heart just a bit more throughout the day. Can I be even 1% more loving today? And I find it’s helpful to not aim too big, but start small, like just a tad more, knowing I might get lucky. I’ll sometimes have days where my heart feels like 350% more open, even though quantifying such things is well beside the point. And when I forget about the intention, that’s yet another chance to open the heart. Toward myself, but more importantly for me, toward the other people in my life. It’s a morning prayer that colonizes your consciousness with love.

Had a great time guest teaching again at my dude @jonnym1ller's Nervous System Mastery, exploring overthinking as an addiction. One question that came up, and that I get a lot: what about daydreaming that feels good, or chewing on an idea that feels productive and interesting? The point isn’t to go to war with your mind or make thinking the enemy. The mind is a wonderful tool. But the key differentiator here is the negative consequences, because a defining feature of addiction is compulsively continuing despite the harm it causes. The tricky thing is that thinking can feel good in the moment, yet still be hurting you. And the point also isn’t to label you an addict, but to explore what’s possible when we bring together principles of recovery, somatic psychology, and contemplative insight. One thing to notice: how clenched are you while doing this thinking? And, in the spirit of no-BS recovery, ask yourself squarely: does the thinking create suffering for you? Does it leave you more anxious, pull you away from the people in front of you, or keep you awake at night? If not, great! Have at it. But if it does, that’s something to get curious about.

One orientation that can change how you experience reality is to practice living from a place where you are already whole, complete, perfect, free. And understanding that there will be near-constant invitations to forget this, to forget what you are at your deepest essence. The invitations come on a spectrum from the most basic shit, like getting lost in your phone, to rehearsing a conversation, to the bigger triggers around status, conflict, and uncertainty. But instead of making this another thing you need to fix, you notice the invitation to believe that something is wrong with you, that you’ve all of a sudden stopped being whole. So much of our conditioning, starting at a very young age, trains us to believe we are not enough and need to be improved, and thus to follow these pulls without awareness. But when you start practicing seeing them as invitations, there’s more agency, more possibility space to decide whether to engage – or just to let them arise, feel them, watch them pass. And as you re-remember, your days start to get soaked with a bit more wholeness.

Sometimes I’ll admire what someone has built online, then realize I would absolutely hate the relationship with social media that seems to come with it. Fortunately, if you do the type of work that I do (where an online presence is essential), you can still build a thriving business while checking in sporadically, poasting lightly during the workweek, and taking weekends completely off, with regular longer breaks. I used to be online a lot, and benefited from regular poasting that helped build the modest yet engaged readership I have now. So, alas, this advice doesn’t apply as much to people starting out. But it’s important to be honest with yourself about what relationship you want with this beast, and how that changes with the seasons of your life. You won’t grow as fast this way. But that’s okay, because it feels better and makes poasting more fun.

People vastly underestimate how learning and change compound. How each (!) time you catch yourself lost in thought, even if it doesn’t feel significant, that noticing builds on itself. We too often bypass our reward system. Especially when it comes to meditation or inner work. Even when we do the exact thing we’re trying to cultivate, which is to wake up from being distracted or numbing out, we turn it into another opportunity for self-attack, berating ourselves for drifting off again. Yet if you can shift from that full-blown inner critic mode to legitimately celebrating or giving yourself some credit for coming back to presence, bringing a vibe of inner friendliness, you’re meaningfully reinforcing the noticing, the thing you want to happen. We learn through positive reinforcement, and each micro-return builds on the last, until presence starts to gain a momentum of its own and you don’t have to work nearly as hard to come back to what you are.

There's a vast intelligence available to you that you can learn to trust as you relax the need to think your way through everything in this life

All addictions are a misdirected search for God

Today we wrapped up the first cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. Feeling gratitude for such a heartful group of people, many of whom were hardcore about practicing. It was humbling to see people get a taste of how much bigger this is than overthinking, how it opens up more presence, connection, and the ability to move towards what you want in life... the good stuff. It went so well that I’ll def be running it again. Thanks to everyone who helped bring this thing to life, including those who read the essays. I’m taking a much-needed week off starting tomorrow :)

I can’t stress how big a life upgrade it is to shift from immediately checking your phone upon waking to giving yourself 20, 30, 60 (!) min of spaciousness. You can be slow and cozy with your coffee, do spiritual practice, start your most important work, or do anything where you’re not playing defense or getting hosed by the winds of the algos, emails, texts. Instead of priming your consciousness with whatever madness is on your phone, you prime it with the sacred and let that set the tone for your day.

Embodiment often starts with a sense of inhabiting your body, of finally arriving in your felt experience. After a lifetime of dissociation, dwelling mostly up in the head, this is huge. Breathing starts to feel good. You can actually feel your feet rooted on the earth. But there’s a way this can become another obsession with yourself. What’s happening inside your body begins to feel more important than anything else, narrowing your experience. And when the culture around therapy and somatics treats inner awareness as the goal of embodiment, it only reinforces this. To get a sense of what’s beyond that, think about a dream. There’s a person you experience yourself as, but the bizarre characters and scenery and feelings are all made of the same consciousness. The whole dream is happening *in* you. And it’s the same in waking experience. You are not *in* your body – your body is *in you*. So a more mature embodiment is not just the sensations in the physical body, but feeling the room, the land, the energetics of people you are with, subtle vibes from beyond, feeling all of this reality. Embodiment in this deeper sense includes much more than the little me inside the skin, which is what many early spiritual traditions pointed toward. And to taste it, you might just relax and let the entirety of your experience in at once, feeling it all as part of your body. It's a very pleasant way to walk around.

This seems bad *goes back to scrolling*

Reading this mega essay, with its masterful visuals, is guaranteed to relax your butthole and open your mind

According to some of the world's best spiritual teachers, you're probably addicted to thinking

I dig @arthurbrooks's rules for breaking digital addiction: • No phone for the first hour after waking and the last hour before bed • Zero tolerance for phones in the bedroom and during meals, not even on the table • Screen to grayscale and notifications kept to essentials • Delete social media apps from your phone and check on a different device instead • Check social media in 1-2 planned windows, maxing at 30–45 min/day • Take four consecutive days off from devices each year, on retreat or vacay Simple, perhaps even obvious, yet genuinely life-changing if you actually apply it.

My course officially starts tomorrow! It’s been a big push to get here, and we now have a crew of 32 very cool people. Spend September getting out of your head and bringing more presence into your days. It’s not too late to join us! breakoverthinking.com/