Your head hits the pillow, exhausted — and your mind starts racing.
Replaying the conversation. Planning for tomorrow. Re-hashing yesterday's decisions. The shoulda, woulda, coulda reel, on loop.
Overwhelm and exhaustion are common by-products of constant overthinking. But here’s what most overthinkers miss:
You can’t settle for the first time at 11 p.m. and expect your mind to cooperate.
If you’ve been go-go-go all day, planning two steps ahead, problem-solving for yourself and everyone else, your body never once returned to baseline. So at bedtime, when you finally try to slow down, your nervous system doesn’t know how. That’s not a character flaw, that’s a body that never got a pause.
Overthinking lives in your head. Presence lives in your body.
Overthinking is always somewhere else: the future you’re bracing for or the past you’re re-living.
Presence is right here, in your senses, and one of the simplest doors back into the present is a word that makes some women flinch:
Pleasure.
Pleasure can be an activating word, because most of us tie it only to sex. I want to widen it for you.
Pleasure is anything that makes your body feel good. Sensual simply means of the senses.
The flavour and temperature of your coffee, actually noticed as you drink it. Sun on your face or wind in your hair. Something delicious, actually tasted.
Small things, present things, things an overthinking mind usually blows right past on its way to the next task.
The reason these can quiet a racing mind goes like this:
We chase a lot of quick dopamine hits in a day — the scroll, the snack, the next hit of stimulation — and each one comes with a little crash after it. Our bodies weren’t really built to thrive on that. Women’s bodies tend to thrive far more on oxytocin: the slower, settling, connected kind of hormone.
This may surprise you, but if we aren’t intentional about seeking healthy pleasure, we will unconsciously seek out unhealthy pleasure. The screens late at night, the eating we don’t even taste and, for some, addiction.
Little moments of savouring throughout the day are how your nervous system learns, over and over, I can come back down. Then nighttime isn’t the first attempt.
Start embarrassingly small.
I’m not asking you to sit outside for an hour feeling the sun. For most of us, that’s a lot to ask.
Take the transition moments you already have. Walking from the house to the car — take one extra moment to take it all in before you open the door. Walking from the car to the office — same. A few seconds, before the go-go-go starts again.
A few more to choose from: pick one, the most doable one, and practice it for about a month before you add another:
- Rub lotion into your hands in the morning, and actually feel it.
- Notice the temperature of the water when you wash your hands or the water hitting your body in the shower.
- Do one small thing for yourself first thing in the morning — before the chores. We were taught responsibilities first, pleasure only if there’s time left over. But a few minutes of joy first tends to vitalize the body instead of drain it.
- Eat sitting down. No screen, no task, no driving. Chew slowly. When we eat in rest-and-digest instead of fight-or-flight, we actually digest our food — and our nutrients feed our mind, not just our bodies.
Before you go looking for the big, miraculous fix for your overthinking, check the boring basics first: Are you fed? Hydrated? Rested? There’s no point doing nervous-system work on a body whose basic needs haven’t been met. Eating and sleeping may sound boring, but amazing things happen when we check them off the list.
One small pleasure, savoured on purpose, is a nervous system learning it doesn’t have to brace all day — and a mind that doesn’t have to do all its racing at night.
If you’re tired of the racing thoughts and ready for more ease and more energy for the things you love, reach out today — right here in Belleville, ON — and let’s begin.
Danielle Van Alstine
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