How to Stop Overthinking: A Former Monk’s Tools for a Calm, Clear Mind
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Sam Yo
You Don’t Need to Escape to Find Stillness
Overthinking is not a thinking problem. It’s a nervous system that learned to feel safer by thinking — and the strategy now runs on autopilot in moments when there’s nothing to control.
It’s the conversation you can’t let go of. It happened at 4 PM, and now it’s 1 AM, and your brain has rehearsed every possible version of it, every line you wish you’d said differently. You know your brain is doing the same loop it always does. You can’t seem to make it stop. If that’s where you live some nights, you’re not broken, and you’re not alone.
I want to share what I learned from Sam Yo — a Peloton instructor, author, and former Thai Buddhist monk. Before the monastery, Sam was a successful West End performer with a fast car and a louder and louder internal noise. A near-crash left him sitting in unexpected silence, and that silence was the most uncomfortable thing he’d ever felt — because for the first time in years, his mind was clear. He left the stage for a Thai monastery shortly after.
We sat down on the Love, Happiness & Success podcast to talk through why the mind won’t stop, the daily anchors he uses to quiet a restless mind, a 90-second breath that interrupts a spiral in real time, and how to be present without ever sitting cross-legged for an hour. His through-line: you don’t need to escape your life to find stillness. You learn to carry it.
“You don’t need to escape to find stillness.” — Sam Yo, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Sam Yo: We live in a world where we can upgrade everything. We can upgrade our phones, our houses, our bodies. But we’re not really taught how to upgrade our minds. And I think that’s why people a lot of the time feel overwhelmed.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: On today’s episode of Love, Happiness, and Success, we are talking about that mental space where you feel like your brain won’t shut down. The overthinking, the overwhelm, all the tabs in your head open at the same time, the 2:00 AM spiral, and what actually helps with that. Not just the generic “breathe” or “imagine a beach,” but real, livable practices from someone who’s lived on both sides of this coin — the chaos of life, and the stillness.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My guest today is Sam Yo. He has lived a life that almost sounds like something out of a movie. He was a successful West End actor before he walked away to enter a Buddhist monastery and cultivate internal stillness. Today he’s one of Peloton’s most beloved instructors and the author of a new book, The Monk’s Mindset: Finding Stillness in a World That Won’t Stop Moving.
Sam Yo: A lot of us walk around with an emotional disconnect that we try to hide. We’re kind of living life, but we’re not really living in life, until something tells us we need to.
Sam Yo: I got my first job when I was 20. I went straight into the London Palladium, one of the biggest stages in London, performing for about 2,000 people. On the outside I seemed very successful. Good job, good financial foundation for the first time in my life, a fancy sports car. But I always had this disconnect within myself. Growing up first generation in London, not quite part of British culture or Thai culture, just navigating the line in the middle.
Sam Yo: They train you physically as an actor and a dancer, but they don’t train you mentally. So when you’re on the rollercoaster, you don’t know how to deal with yourself. There was an incident where I nearly crashed my sports car. I was 23. The car nearly toppled over. My instinct turned the wheel left, and the car came down with a thud. I just sat there and it felt so uncomfortable — not because I could’ve had a horrific accident, but because for the first time in my life I was still, and I was aware. My mind was completely clear, and it felt so uncomfortable. I realized I had all these tabs open in my mind and none of them were closing.
Sam Yo: A few months later I told my mom I was going back to Thailand to become a Buddhist monk. She thought I was joking. We live in a world where we can upgrade everything, but we’re not taught how to upgrade our minds. That’s why people feel overwhelmed even when life looks good on the outside.
Sam Yo: A lot of people think it’s complicated, but you can start with three monk mindset moments in your day. In the morning it’s all about intention. When I first wake up, I don’t move. I’ll just breathe maybe five breaths, and within that breathing I set the intention of how I want to show up today — before the notifications and the algorithm and all the tabs start to open up.
Sam Yo: In the afternoon, when your energy starts to drop, that’s a reset. People tend to reach for the stimulants and get coffee, but there’s other things you can do — movement, stretching, what I call creative meditation. I’m obsessed with Lego, so when I need a break from all the meetings, I just open a bag of Lego and focus on that one thing.
Sam Yo: And in the evening it’s about reflection. Journaling puts a lot of people off because they overcomplicate it. So all you need to do is when you’re brushing your teeth — you’re already there — reflect. “How did I show up today? How can I show up better tomorrow?” Intention, reset, reflection. These small points are already in your day, and you’re not upheaving your life to do them.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It’s very simple. What did you notice change in people when they start doing this daily?
Sam Yo: They become more present. We’re very reactive creatures. When we’re not moving with intention, it shows up in how we talk to people, too.
Sam Yo: There’s a thing in the book — “Empty Your Cup.” We always speak when our cup is full. If our cup is full, no one else can refill it for us. So when you’re in a conversation, empty your cup and allow the other person to fill it up. A lot of the time in life we’re waiting to respond instead of actively listening.
Sam Yo: The monastery was a huge shift, especially coming from the entertainment industry, where the loudest voice always wants to be heard — and I was very much like that. Just sitting and listening, allowing silence to speak louder than words, because the silence reaffirms: I’m listening to you. I’m connected to you. I’m invested in you. My teacher, Ajahn Paul, would just listen and look at me, soaking it all in before he replied.
Sam Yo: I still practice the art of listening in my job at Peloton. After a live session we have a meet and greet, and sometimes it runs longer than the class because I’m actively listening. Sometimes I’m more tired after the meet and greet than after the physical class, because I was really listening to people.
Sam Yo: In the monastery we were always taught to live with kindness and compassion. As humans we’re empaths — we draw energy from the person in front of us. The environment and the people around us help us close some of those tabs, when we realize some of those tabs don’t need to be open. A lot of those tabs are worries and anxiety and things we can’t control anyway.
Sam Yo: But there’s one thing we can control: kindness and compassion. In my book I created a practice I call the Ripple Jar. You keep a jar at home, and whenever anyone in the house sees or does an act of kindness or compassion, you write it down and put it in the jar. At the end of the week, you read them out. Because kindness and compassion are contagious.
Sam Yo: We think we have to broadcast big grand gestures, but it’s the small, tiny ones that hold up the big ones. It’s the small habits that get us there, not the big goal at the end of the rainbow.
Sam Yo: Anxiety begins the moment you realize that most things you’re trying to control were never yours to begin with. We try to solve world problems and get overwhelmed, but those were never ours. What we should focus on is the smaller conflicts around us — the relative you stopped speaking to, the disagreement with a neighbor. If we start fixing the smaller things, that helps a lot of our overthinking.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: As a psychologist, I think there’s a difference between anxiety — rumination, overthinking things you can’t control that are unlikely to happen — versus a healthier fear that’s mobilizing, that says “pay attention, take action.” Mobilizing energy versus paralyzing energy. What would a monk’s mindset say about that?
Sam Yo: All these anxieties and thoughts you’re having, they’re all thoughts, and we are not our thoughts. We’re just a space that holds our thoughts. These thoughts are always passing. What happens is we hold onto them and believe this thought is my identity, this thought is going to define me. But they just pass. We cling onto a lot of things that are not ours to cling to.
Sam Yo: A lot of people think meditation is to clear your mind. It is not — if your mind was clear, we’d be calling the ambulance. Meditation is to meet your mind and yourself where you are, and to accept that. And to anyone who can’t sit with their thoughts and meditate, you can always just do breathwork — simple patterned breathing, focusing on the physical sensation of your breath. It draws you into the moment and helps those stuck thoughts pass.
Sam Yo: At the end of my classes I always finish with breathing. “Allow your breath to bring you back into the moment. Only in this moment can you truly celebrate how amazing you are.” I call this the one breath commitment. You can do a breathing pattern of 4-2-6. Inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for six. Before any difficult conversation, or when your mind starts to negotiate about doing something, just do the 4-2-6 breath.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I do feel calmer. And just as you walked me through that, I felt much more aware of my body. Sometimes as we’re going along having conversations, we’re very much in our minds, and that practice reconnects with the physical.
Sam Yo: When I was in the monastery, I struggled so much with sitting still and meditating. My brain would just be ticking, ticking, ticking. So my teacher told me to do walking meditation — walk around the courtyard, and the only thing to focus on is the sensation of your feet hitting the ground and the sound. After a week of that, I could sit and meditate. Movement is a form of meditation. Exercise is one of the most mindful things you can do, because the effort brings you into the moment.
Sam Yo: One very simple thing we all do is the washing up. Just feel the water on your hands and focus on that sensation. We want to do it quickly, but there’s a moment there where your only job is to clean the dishes. You have all these opportunities to bring sensation into the moment.
Sam Yo: One of my chores in the monastery was sweeping the courtyard, and I really enjoyed it. Even now, I have a Dyson, but I still use a sweeping brush, because it gives me that flow state. All I have to think about is one thing. To have the privilege of focusing on just one thing for a set amount of time — that’s self-care in its highest form.
Sam Yo: Internally we reflect our external environment. If our environment is messy, in here is going to be messy. That reset in the middle of the day can be as simple as arranging stuff on your desk or closing the tabs on your laptop you don’t use. And another thing I love: when we hold our coffee or tea in the morning, just feel the warmth of the mug. Inject a moment of gratitude every time you hold that warm cup. It shifts how you move through the day.
Sam Yo: Within my first week as a monk, I was struggling. We go out on our alms round barefoot, and I cut my toe on a piece of glass. I freaked out — “This is a sign I’m not meant to be here.” I went to Ajahn Paul and asked if I could wear slippers tomorrow. He looked at me and said, “Is it healing?” I said it would heal. He said, “So why do you want to wear slippers?” I said, “Because I’ll cut my foot again.” And he said, “Tomorrow, take a different path to get to the same destination.”
Sam Yo: Life is never a straight line, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s a puzzle. The picture at the end is never the one you thought it was — it’s something more beautiful, because of all the experiences you placed into it, taking different paths when you needed to. Rejection is redirection sometimes. If you’re at a wall right now, it’s okay. This is a teaching moment. I was reacting to the situation, and when you react to a situation, you can’t step back and see the bigger picture.
Sam Yo: There’s something else in the book. When you feel these moments, before you react — before you post something late at night ranting about something — just ask yourself three things. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Just those three things would change everything.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Those are good words to live by. Sam Yo, it has been such a pleasure.
What to take with you
Overthinking is not a thinking problem.
It’s a nervous system that learned to feel safer by thinking, often early in life, and the strategy now runs on autopilot in moments when there’s nothing to control.
Most overthinking is anxiety wearing a productive-looking costume.
Clinical research has linked rumination to both anxiety and depression for decades. If you can’t stop replaying a thought, you’re noticing a symptom, not a flaw.
Ninety seconds is often enough to interrupt a spiral.
A slow-exhale breath like the 4-2-6 activates the parasympathetic nervous system and changes the body’s signal to the brain before you have time to overthink your way out of using it.
Stillness lives in what you already do.
Sweeping a floor, washing dishes, holding a warm mug. Mindfulness research shows these brief, repeated moments of full attention produce similar effects on the nervous system as longer formal meditation.
You don’t have to do it alone.
The hardest place to do new behavior is in the moment your old pattern is most active. That’s exactly why working with a real person who knows your patterns changes things.
How to Stop Overthinking: A Former Monk’s Tools for a Calm, Clear Mind
It’s the conversation you can’t let go of. It happened at 4 PM, and now it’s 1 AM, and your brain has rehearsed every possible version of it, every line you wish you’d said differently. You know, intellectually, that trying to figure out how to not overthink something that doesn’t deserve this much of your nervous system is supposed to be possible. You know your brain is doing the same loop it always does. You can’t seem to make it stop.
If that’s where you live some nights, you’re not broken, and you’re not alone. Most of the people I work with at our life coaching practice at Growing Self have already read the books. They’ve downloaded the meditation apps. They have three articles open in browser tabs they swore they’d come back to. The problem isn’t information.
The reason I want to share this conversation with you isn’t because reading it is going to change anything. It’s because my guest, Sam Yo, gave me three concrete practices that work on a real nervous system in real time, and because the language he uses gave me a better way to describe what I see in coaching every day. What’s going to actually change a thirty-year overthinking pattern isn’t an article. It’s the relationship you have with someone whose job is to pay attention to your specific life. That’s what the coaches and therapists on my team do, every week, with people who could’ve written the description I just gave you. I’m telling you that upfront so the rest of this article lands in the right place.
With that named, let’s get into what Sam taught me. We’ll start with the most important reframe.
Why Can’t I Stop Overthinking?
Overthinking isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a control mechanism your nervous system learned, often early in life, when it figured out that thinking hard about a future or a past event was a way to feel safer. The strategy worked enough times that it stuck. Now it runs on autopilot, even at one in the morning, when there’s nothing to control and nothing to fix.
Sam Yo describes the moment he first noticed his own version of this. He was twenty-three, in London, driving a sports car he’d bought because the contract on his first West End show was good money for a kid who’d grown up between cultures. The car nearly flipped. He turned the wheel left instead of right, and the car landed back on four wheels with a thud. He sat in the driver’s seat in the silence that followed, and the silence felt unbearable. Not because he’d almost died. Because for the first time in years, his mind was clear, and the clarity itself was the thing his nervous system had been working overtime to avoid.
That’s the clinical signature of chronic overthinking. Sue Nolen-Hoeksema’s research at Yale, going back decades now, identified rumination as one of the most consistent cognitive markers of both depression and anxiety. People who ruminate aren’t thinking more carefully than the rest of us. They’re caught in a feedback loop where the nervous system reads the absence of a problem as more dangerous than the presence of one. The thinking is the way the system stays in motion.
This is why the popular advice to “just stop thinking about it” has never worked for anyone. You can’t think your way out of thinking. We’ve written more about the mechanism in our existing guide on stopping overthinking, and the same logic applies to why you can’t sleep when your brain won’t stop. The two are usually the same problem at different times of day.
That’s the underlying reason most of the people I see in coaching come in for help with overthinking. Not because they don’t know what’s happening. Because they know exactly what’s happening and they still can’t make it stop on their own. The gap between awareness and the actual ability to interrupt the pattern in real time is the gap coaching is built to close.
Is Overthinking Just Anxiety in Disguise?
In most cases, yes. Overthinking is anxiety wearing a productive-looking costume. The looping thoughts feel like problem-solving, which is why they’re hard to stop. The brain is convinced it’s working on something important. The body knows otherwise.
Sam said something on the episode that I keep coming back to. He said, “We are not our thoughts. We’re just a space that holds our thoughts.” That’s a clinical idea dressed in language anyone can understand. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we call it cognitive defusion: the practice of stepping back from the content of a thought and noticing the thinking itself. The thought “I shouldn’t have said that” isn’t a fact about reality. It’s a sentence your brain produced. The sentence can be true or false or partially both. It is not, in any case, you.
The reason this matters for anxiety specifically is that anxious minds tend to fuse with their own thoughts faster than calm minds do. The thought “what if I get fired” arrives, and the body responds as if you’ve just been fired. Heart rate up. Cortisol up. Muscles tight. The body’s response then produces more anxious thoughts, which produce more body response. That’s the loop. The loop is not your fault, and it’s not a sign that anything is wrong with you. It’s a sign that a system designed to keep you safe is firing in a moment when there’s nothing to be safe from.
If what I’m describing is hitting close to home, especially the body-response part, anxiety therapy at Growing Self is built around exactly this pattern. The first conversation with a therapist on our team is free, and the only goal of it is to help you figure out whether what you’re describing is something therapy is the right fit for. Most of our clients come in describing it as overthinking. By the third session, most of them are describing it as anxiety. Both are true.
Take the free Self-Esteem Test and get a personalized starting place. It’s a quick, clarifying first step toward understanding what’s underneath the loop.
Take the Free Self-Esteem Test →How Do I Calm a Restless or Anxious Mind?
You interrupt the loop with the body, not the mind. The shortest version is a slow exhale. A slow, deliberate exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your body responsible for telling the brain the threat has passed. Three to five rounds of slow breathing will move most people from a spiraling mental state into a calmer one within ninety seconds.
Sam walked listeners through his version of this on the episode. He calls it the one breath commitment. Inhale through the nose for four counts, hold for two, exhale through the mouth for six. The asymmetry matters. The exhale needs to be longer than the inhale. That’s the part that does the work.
This isn’t woo. A 2018 systematic review in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by Zaccaro and colleagues looked at the psychophysiological effects of slow breathing and found consistent improvements in markers of parasympathetic activity, including heart rate variability and cortisol levels. The body is built to respond to breath. Most of us just never learned how to use it on purpose.
Beyond the single breath, Sam offered a structure he calls the Three Monk Mindset Moments. One in the morning, before you check your phone: five breaths and one sentence about how you want to show up that day. One in the afternoon, when energy drops and most people reach for coffee or the algorithm: a reset on something physical, even if it’s stretching for two minutes or opening a box of Lego on your desk. One in the evening, while you’re already brushing your teeth: a single question about how the day went and how you want tomorrow to go differently. None of these require time you don’t have. They use time you already spend, and they add tethers across your day.
This is the same principle behind how to improve mindfulness in any practical way: small, repeated, embedded in your day. Not the version that requires you to disappear to a retreat. The 4-2-6 breath buys you ninety seconds. The three daily anchors build a tethering structure across your week. Both work, and you can start either one tonight. Neither one replaces the actual conversation with a person who can help you map your specific spirals and the specific moments they show up. That’s what coaching with my team is for.
How Can I Be Present Without Hours of Meditation?
You pick one daily action you already do, and you bring full attention to it. That’s it. The action doesn’t have to be special. Washing dishes counts. Sweeping the floor counts. Holding the mug between your hands while the coffee is still hot counts.
When Sam first arrived at the monastery, he could not sit still and meditate. He was twenty-three, athletic, used to motion, and his nervous system rebelled at the stillness. His teacher, Ajahn Paul, told him to walk instead. “Walk around the courtyard,” he said, “and the only thing I want you to notice is the feeling of your feet hitting the ground and the sound they make.” Sam did this for a week. After that week, he could sit and meditate without struggling. The walking had done the work the sitting was supposed to do.
This matters because most people, when they try to be more present, picture themselves sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed. That image is doing a lot of damage to the mindfulness conversation. Most of us are not built that way, and most of us don’t have the time. The research bears this out. A 2013 meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review by Khoury and colleagues, looking at over two hundred mindfulness studies, found that brief informal practices distributed across the day produce comparable outcomes to longer formal sessions for most non-clinical purposes.
Sam mentioned that one of his daily practices is sweeping the floor with a brush. He has a Dyson. He uses the brush anyway. The reason, in his words, is that sweeping gives him “the privilege of focusing on just one thing for a set amount of time.” He calls that the highest form of self-care. I find that more compelling than any meditation app I’ve ever opened.
The free Self-Esteem Test is short and gives you a personalized read on what might be driving the noise underneath. The easiest place to start.
Take the Free Self-Esteem Test →Why Reading This Article Probably Isn’t Enough
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it’s the part most articles like this leave out. The practices I just walked you through are real and they work. People use them. Lives change because of them. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article thinking that reading it was the work.
Here’s what almost always happens. You read an article like this one. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful. You make a mental note to try the 4-2-6 breath the next time the spiral starts. And then the spiral starts at one in the morning three nights later, and your nervous system does what it has done for thirty years, and you find yourself in the same loop you’ve been having for a decade, wondering why nothing changed.
The reason is simple. You are not unmotivated, and you are not broken. You are trying to override an entire pattern, by yourself, in the middle of the moment that pattern is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do new behavior. It is almost impossible to do alone.
What works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can text after a hard night, who can help you debrief and recalibrate before the next one. That’s what therapy and coaching for personal growth actually is with our team. Not lectures. Not generic advice. A real ongoing relationship with someone who is paying attention to your life. We also run The Happiness Class, which teaches the cognitive piece of this work in a structured way for people who want a self-paced entry point.
If something in this article landed somewhere specific for you, that’s the signal to talk to someone. We do free first conversations for exactly this, no pressure, no commitment. Just a real conversation about what’s actually going on for you and whether what we do here might help.
The Three Filters Before You React: Is It True, Is It Kind, Is It Necessary?
Toward the end of our conversation, Sam shared one more thing that has stayed with me. It’s a filter his teacher gave him, three questions to ask before you react to anything. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?
On the surface, the filter is meant to apply to the small reactive moments of an ordinary day. The text message you’re about to send when you’re annoyed. The comment you’re about to post at midnight. The thing you almost say in the moment of a hard conversation that you’d take back five minutes later. Sam uses it in those moments. So do I, in the version I’ve adapted for my own life. The three questions slow the gap between impulse and action just enough to let you choose.
But here’s the part of the filter most people miss. It also applies to the larger choices we’re avoiding. The choice to reach out for support is one of them. So before you close this tab and move on with your evening, ask yourself the three questions about your own situation.
Is it true that you’ve been trying to figure this out on your own for too long? Is it kind to you to keep trying to fix a pattern that has been running for thirty years without help? Is it necessary to keep waiting until it gets worse?
If the answers are yes, yes, and no, that’s your signal. Schedule a free consultation with my team. It is just a conversation. No pressure, no commitment, no sales pitch. The only goal is to figure out, together, whether what we do is what you actually need. That’s the most useful first step I can offer you from a blog post.
Sam, thank you for the conversation. For everyone else, thank you for reading. Take care of yourself.
XO,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Sam Yo
A Peloton instructor, author, and former Thai Buddhist monk. Before the monastery, Sam built a successful career on London’s West End — until a near-crash at twenty-three left him in a moment of unintended silence he describes as the most uncomfortable, and clarifying, thing he had ever experienced. He left the stage for a Thai monastery and returned years later with a body of practice he now teaches to a Peloton audience in the millions. His book, The Monk’s Mindset: Finding Stillness in a World That Won’t Stop Moving (Blackstone, 2026), brings those practices to readers. His arc from monastery to Peloton was recently featured in PEOPLE Magazine.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000). The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), 504–511.
- Khoury, B., Lecomte, T., Fortin, G., Masse, M., Therien, P., Bouchard, V., Chapleau, M., Paquin, K., & Hofmann, S. G. (2013). Mindfulness-based therapy: A comprehensive meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 33(6), 763–771.
- Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B., & Gemignani, A. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353.
