If you struggle with overthinking, this might help—a mindfulness full-body scan.

Start by focusing on your breathing.

You don't need to do anything particularly special with your breathing—just notice it going in and out of your nose or the rise and fall of your chest. Probably with your eyes closed is best.

You're scanning your whole body, one centimetre at a time.

You might start from your toes and come up, or from the top of your head and go down.

Just, with your mind's eye, investigate every part of your body.

How do your toes feel?

How cold are your calf muscles?

Are your knees sore?

Going up and just feeling every part of your body individually, you can also do this with thoughts and emotions.

Try to capture the thoughts and emotions: Where are they located in the body?

What are they doing?

Where are they travelling from and to? You can do this with emotions.

You might be sitting there thinking, "God, I'm so angry." Where is the anger?

What is the anger?

Go find it in the body.

Is it heat?

Is it tension?

Are some parts of your body feeling one thing, and other parts feeling something else?

Just scan and look for the feeling without acting on it.

Of course, a simpler version is just to do mindfulness breathing.

Lie or sit in a comfortable position with your eyes closed and just focus on your breathing in and out.

Stay with whatever sensation you notice.

Now, of course, you're going to regularly be distracted and carried away by thoughts—that's fine.

You can't stop that from happening, but the key is to just keep noticing when that happens and come back to investigating the breathing.

So, you're going to go back and forth between focusing on the breathing and being distracted by thoughts.

This is also a great training exercise that I recommend all of you do to help practice letting go of a thought once you're attached to it.

It's not so much stopping the thoughts from happening, but detaching from them.

One of the simplest ways to detach from a thought is to find something else to focus on.

To dive deeper into this topic, check out the original video here:

https://youtu.be/Y4ic90Cw3oc

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