An exercise to clear your anxious mind

🤔 Today’s tip: To stop overthinking, focus your gaze on one tiny detail.

The French psychoanalyst François Roustang devised a series of techniques to help his patients break their bouts of overthinking. The easiest of these is one you can do anywhere, at any time: Zoom in on a single small detail of a nearby object, like the pattern on a throw rug or the design on your notebook. Allow everything else in your field of vision to fade away. “The aim is to isolate what you’re looking at from its context,” Ollivier Pourriol explains on Forge, “banishing everything else into the background haze.”

You can use this mind-clearing exercise to stop anxious thinking in its tracks. The moment of clarity you create will give you the space you need to make your next move. “When your mind gets stuck in a ruminative loop,” Pourriol writes, “the solution, counterintuitively, is to think less.”

📚 More from Forge on getting out of your own way:

A Better Way to Pay Attention
Read more >>

How to Stop Overthinking
Read more >>

Four Mindset Traps Holding You Back at Work
Read more >>

The Forge Daily Tip is sent every morning via email. ☀️ Subscribe to The Forge Daily Tip here.

You’re subscribed to receive emails from Forge. You can adjust your settings via the link at the bottom of this email.