How to Stop Overthinking: A Psychologist’s Guide to a Calmer, Braver Mind

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: We wouldn’t look both ways before we crossed the street if we didn’t have some anxiety. The trick is just to learn how to use it rather than it just controlling you.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My friends, every single one of us has some work to do when it comes to our relationship with our own anxiety. Sometimes feelings of anxiety are actually really healthy and worth listening to. Other times, it’s related to unfinished business that needs to be dealt with differently. But anxiety can also show up in our relationships. It can lead us to be anxious or avoidant. Sometimes it can inhibit our communication and ability to show up authentically, especially in relationships where there are differences.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: A lot of people have this idea right now that the healthy thing to do is to not associate with people who think a certain way or who voted a certain way or whatever. And I just think it’s causing people to box themselves into these little tiny boxes that are actually not so good for them. I want people to recognize the importance of connecting and being authentic, even if there’s disagreement — that it’s okay.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: By the end of our time together today, you’re going to have some new visibility into your own anxiety, a new set of tools, and even language for understanding what’s going on inside of you, how to deal with it — but also some new ideas that will support your ability to be courageous and lovingly authentic, even in relationships that are fraught with differences. My guest today is Dr. Chloe Carmichael. She’s a clinical psychologist and a USA Today bestselling author of Nervous Energy: How to Harness the Power of Your Anxiety, and more recently, a new book called Can I Say That? Why Free Speech Matters and How to Use It Fearlessly.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Thanks, Lisa. I’m really excited to be with you.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: A lot of clinical psychologists or people in the healing professions in general usually come from a place of wounding. I started out as a consumer of therapy — and I mean, I still am. I had a very tumultuous childhood, and getting into therapy was super helpful. Then I started going to yoga classes as a 17-year-old. It was just a total stroke of luck — I saw an ad in the newspaper for a free class and went, and it was a life-changing experience.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: I became a yoga teacher, and then I was teaching private yoga lessons in New York City — which, I didn’t plan it this way, but the only people in New York who can and will hire a private yoga teacher tend to be busy, stressed-out, high-achieving professionals. Through my work with them, they wanted customized lessons paired up with meditations. That sparked a deeper interest in the body-mind connection and how the brain works.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: So going to get a PhD in clinical psychology just seemed like it would be amazing, because I could deepen the work I was doing myself and the work I was doing with clients. Six years later, I became a clinical psychologist and started working with New Yorkers. The most driven among them had a lot of anxiety, and they had a love-hate relationship with it. They’d say, “Dr. Chloe, help me. How do I get rid of my anxiety?” But they had this attachment to it — they knew on some level it was giving them an edge.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: That’s how I started explaining to them about the healthy function of anxiety, which is to stimulate preparation behaviors. The goal isn’t to “get rid of your anxiety” — we wouldn’t look both ways before we crossed the street if we didn’t have some anxiety. The trick is to learn how to use it rather than letting it control you. That was the first book.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: During COVID I started to notice a lot of people getting really anxious about cancel culture. Driven, high-functioning people who wanted to communicate, hash out ideas — but were getting scared to do that because of cancel culture, and nervous about hurting other people. That’s why I wrote the new book, Can I Say That? It promotes mental wellness to be authentic, to communicate truthfully even if we disagree, to understand we can tolerate disagreement.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Holding things in does actually create anxiety, because we’re in suppression and repression. We can’t really grapple effectively with what we can’t acknowledge and discuss and talk our way through. There’s a lot of overlap.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: When we get anxious, Mother Nature gives us a little shot of adrenaline. That’s why a lot of people experiencing anxiety say, “Oh, I have sweaty palms and racing thoughts, I can’t sleep, I feel restless.” A lot of times they’ll say, “I’ve tried to take a deep breath and visualize a beach, and it’s just not working.” Sometimes the healthiest response is to ask: “What does this anxiety want me to do?” Because that adrenaline is excess energy. That’s why I called the book Nervous Energy.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Suppose you’re anxious about a test. Visualizing a beach isn’t really going to help. But if you funnel the energy into “I’m going to make 15 flashcards and review them” — you give those sweaty palms something to do so you’re not just stewing. After the test, if you’re still feeling like the adrenaline is coursing but the threat is over, absolutely visualize the beach or down-regulate. A lot of people get into a knee-jerk response with anxiety, thinking it’s something to be gotten rid of, instead of recognizing it’s sometimes a gift.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: There’s a difference between what I view as healthy fear — yeah, you have a test coming up in three days, let’s make those flashcards — versus a non-functional anxiety, being stuck in a rumination loop or feeling threatened by something that objectively isn’t a threat. That moves into the realm of disorder, like generalized anxiety, where people feel unsafe even when they’re actually safe.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: When people are having that ruminative anxiety and they couldn’t even tell you what it’s about, oftentimes there’s something they’ve pushed underneath the surface — which connects to language. When we get people to start naming and verbalizing, or mind-mapping, they can start to understand: “Maybe I’m anxious about everything because I have an underlying belief that I’m not good enough and everybody’s going to find out.” Or, “Maybe I don’t want to confront my anxiety about my relationship, so I just obsess about everything else.” There can be little cover paths our minds take sometimes.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: When there’s anxiety that isn’t healthy fear, when you get under the hood, there’s an engine of anxiety connected to an unresolved trauma or a tension in your life or an old limiting belief — and when we use our ability to articulate and connect those dots and put those feelings into words, that is the path forward. The communication is the remedy in some ways for the anxiety that’s actually a problem.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: In Nervous Energy, I offer nine tools, and the first one is a mindfulness exercise where you specifically study the anxiety. Some of the tools are about leaning in and seeing how you can be effective upon the anxiety; some are about learning how to pivot away from a topic. Sometimes we’re just in a cognitive habit of thinking about something for no reason. We’re just auto-tracking onto something.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: First I would ask: is this a practical concern? Is there something I could actually do about this? If you know you’re prepared, ask yourself: do I feel like I have to feel this way, otherwise I’ll become really lazy and complacent? There’s so many paths a person could go down — but the first step is to ask yourself if there’s an obvious practical basis as to why I’m nervous.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: If there’s really no issue you can think of, then I would consider a mind map. Say I haven’t had a bad experience in dating, I don’t know why I’m so nervous about dating. I might do a mind map where you just put “dating” in the middle of a piece of paper with a circle around it, and then you draw a few spokes out and write what are the first three things that come to mind. Then for each of those, you draw a few more spokes out — what are the first few things that come to mind about those things. Once you’ve kind of tapped out all of the data points, you might start to say, “This wasn’t really on the surface for me, but I’m starting to realize I recently turned 30 and it carries a different weight for me now.”

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Frankly, for some people, they just need to exercise. They’re not getting enough movement in their day, so they’re just sitting with a bunch of cortisol trapped within their body. Of course you’re feeling on edge, and you’re transferring it onto whatever is in front of you. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but there is a lot of helpful exploration that can be done.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Just get curious — there’s so much value in understanding what this is really attached to. I love the mind map exercise. And the physical dimension of anxiety is so real. Physiologically, if we are activated, our brains will sometimes manufacture a reason that isn’t actually the reason.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: A really powerful experience I had early in my career — I once had a client I was working with for months, major anxiety. We talked about all the things, the historical stuff and the current things. It just wouldn’t move. Then this person went on a week-long backpacking trip in the woods, and we reconnected, and they were like, “I feel like a new person. I have no anxiety. I’ve been sleeping at night. I feel so much less irritable.” I’m thinking, exercise, vitamin D, what’s going on?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Then I saw them the week after, and they were a wreck again. Not sleeping, exploded at their partner, anxiety everywhere, ruminating, so mad at work. All the agitation was back. Turns out — and I didn’t even know this as a therapist, I didn’t think to ask — this person had been consuming about eight Diet Cokes every single day.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Oh my goodness.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Plus coffee. So the caffeine and the aspartame — a literal physiological response to the substances they were consuming. They didn’t carry two cases of Diet Coke with them into the woods.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: I’d melt down if I had eight Diet Cokes. Anybody would. I’ve said to clients before, maybe you’d do better to skip sessions with me for a week or two and see a personal trainer or a nutritionist instead. Maybe that would do you more good. If I feel a person is in a rut, I start asking those things.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: I sometimes tell clients: if anxiety doesn’t feel like it’s listening when it’s whispering, it may start shouting. With panic disorder, often a client would come in and say, “I don’t understand. I just every once in a while completely freak out and melt down, but I don’t have any stress. There’s nothing going on in my life.” They’d always be the people who’d say they had no reason at all to be anxious — and we’d usually find there was something under the surface they were pushing down. That’s why it was coming out in bursts of panic. It was the only way the anxiety could get their attention.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: The new book, Can I Say That? is about cancel culture anxiety. Every topic right now just feels so loaded. Family members are going no contact with one another. People are defriending each other online, or getting uninvited to the barbecue because of differences about social issues.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: High-functioning people — people who can hold a job, keep an apartment — by definition, their interest goes beyond just themselves. They’re interested in the community and the people around them. So they tend to have thoughts and opinions about social issues. And yet, in our current climate, that’s become very anxiety-provoking, because they feel like they’re going to step into a cancel-culture landmine.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: Since the healthy function of anxiety is to stimulate preparation behavior, and a lot of the ways we do that is through talking — when we name our emotions, our amygdala starts to calm down. When we talk to another person authentically, we experience what’s called neural coupling — our brains literally begin to get on the same wavelength. As humans, we’re hardwired for connection. So when we don’t get that, because we’re afraid to be authentic, we get this epidemic of loneliness, our cortisol levels are higher, and we go into suppression and denial.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: The mentally healthy thing to do is actually to have a diversity of viewpoints and friends and people in your life. A lot of people have this idea right now that the healthy thing is to not associate with people who think a certain way or voted a certain way. It’s causing people to box themselves into these little tiny boxes that are actually not so good for them. I want people to recognize the importance of connecting and being authentic, even if there’s disagreement.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: In an increasingly polarized culture, almost any perspective is going to upset someone — and what that does to us in terms of self-censorship and feeling inhibited in communication, it impairs our ability to experience healthy connections. I’ll do a quick plug for my personal hero, Dr. Bill Doherty, and the work he’s doing with the Braver Angels movement — bringing together people for the purpose of understanding in a way that’s difficult to do when we’re being reactive or vilifying other people.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: There’s a section in my book that outlines the difference between self-censorship versus healthy self-restraint. Self-restraint is fine — your mother-in-law says, “How do you like the soup?” and you say, “It’s delicious.” Things where it’s just fine to let it go. But when you’re standing around with the soccer moms and they’re making jokes about a certain political candidate — expecting everybody to laugh on cue because, well, everyone agrees that candidate is trash — and you find yourself laughing along, smiling and nodding because you don’t want people to know how you really feel about that issue: that’s when you know you’re in the self-censorship category. You’re hiding something important about your values and beliefs, not just whether you like the soup.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: One of the issues we’re collectively facing is that we’re all existing in our own echo chambers — only being exposed to news and ideas and even events that already match what we believe. In these small moments of connection, standing around with the soccer moms, there’s an inroad to — not influencing or changing anyone, we don’t need to do that — but offering a perspective they might not have considered before.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: I wrote this book myself having been someone that did quite a lot of self-censorship — afraid of stepping on toes, afraid of conflict. One of the things I came to realize: if we don’t give that person even the opportunity to know that we see things differently, it’s actually kind of passive-aggressive of us. I found myself resenting somebody for “not being able to hear my opinion” when the truth is, I never gave them the chance. I never shared it, because I thought, “Oh, well, she’d just cancel me.”

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: If we don’t give people the chance to know or be exposed to different opinions, we’re actually not helping them — or giving them the chance to have an authentic relationship with us. I know it can be hard. So sometimes one of the things I suggest is a little half step. You don’t have to come out and say, “Oh, I see the issue differently.” Sometimes it’s okay to shrug and say, “I don’t know — I guess there’s multiple perspectives on that one.” Not even acknowledging your own perspective necessarily, but stepping out of the role of, “I better laugh and pretend to agree.” Even just coming out of that much.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: One of the things language does is help us process our own ideas. We’ve all had the experience of saying something aloud and thinking, “Well, gee, maybe I don’t actually agree with that as I hear myself say it.” When we don’t let ourselves do that, we can have an impoverished sense of thought. The amygdala calms down when we name our emotions. When we stifle all of that and pretend to have thoughts and feelings and opinions we don’t have, it’s stressful — because we’re sending ourselves the signal that our beliefs would be terrifying if they were exposed.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: When we feel threatened and unsafe, that restricts our ability to process. If we’re not able to talk through things, or take on board somebody else’s ideas, we can’t do that when we’re feeling threatened. By finding ways of engaging in open dialogue, it gives us opportunities to even shift our own thinking through the power of connection — to build bridges to the center, help somebody else maybe modify theirs. But it requires emotional safety in order to do that.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: When we get flared up inside — whether by what somebody else is saying, or just by being afraid of what they’d think about what we’d say — when our heart rate goes above 100 beats per minute, we’re not cognitively processing as clearly. One of the exercises I talk about in the book is reflective listening. Person A says what they think. Person B just summarizes it back without even judging it: “Okay, did I hear you correctly? Here’s what you think about this issue.” Person A confirms or clarifies, and then they switch roles. It’s amazing how often people are just talking past each other, not truly understanding each other because of the agitation.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: The goal doesn’t have to be to persuade the other person — even just to understand. Do we see the facts of this situation the same but interpret them differently? Or do we actually disagree on objective facts, and that’s why we have different opinions? Becoming curious about the nature of the disagreement can be better than trying to persuade.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: There’s a technique in the book — an acronym called WAIT: Want — do you want to talk about it? Appropriate — is it the appropriate time and place? Inoculate — drop a little hint that you read an interesting article that shared a different perspective. Sharing in baby steps can be a nice way to get your feet wet and see how the person reacts, if it’s important to keep the relationship no matter what.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: It can also be helpful to plan what I call a debrief date afterwards. Say you’re dating somebody and you’re going to open up about some values-based issues where it’s important to be authentic, but you sense the person might reject you. Plan a debrief date with a good friend afterwards — if the conversation goes well, you have somebody to unpack with. If it doesn’t go well, you already have a built-in support system. Or if you’re thinking of speaking up in a group setting, ask somebody in advance to be your ally, so you’re not speaking up by yourself.

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: You have to accept the other person has the right to not like what you’ve said, but the goal should be that you can always narrate your experience to them: “I have a feeling we might disagree on this, and that’s okay with me, but I want you to know how I really feel about it, because I’ve been doing you a disservice by smiling and nodding and acting as if I agree. I want to be authentic with you, because I want us to be close and real with each other — not because we have to agree.”

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: One last tip — have two or three good pivot topics in your back pocket. After you’ve shared, even if things are a little awkward but it feels better to move on, you can be like, “By the way, how are things going with that situation you told me about?” — something they wanted to talk about, so you don’t have to stay stuck on the topic if it doesn’t feel good.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Where would people go to learn more about you and your work?

Dr. Chloe Carmichael: They can go to drchloe.com — or freespeechtoday.com, which forwards to drchloe.com. That’s where people can get all my books, which are also on Amazon and available as audiobooks. I also like to be active on social media, so if people want to connect and even challenge my ideas, I love it. I welcome it.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So many important ideas were shared today, and I love Dr. Chloe’s message about curiosity. To me, that is the big theme. How do we become more curious about our own internal experiences and stay with them in a curious way, in order to understand: what is this really?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Door number one — is this fear that I should listen to? Are there actual risks here? And if so, how do I manage those competently and allow my anxiety to help me prevent potential problems?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Door number two — how do we understand if the things keeping us up at night aren’t actually due to something specific or actionable, but instead some unfinished business with the past, or something in ourselves that needs to be attended to and healed in a different way?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Door number three — are we drinking too much coffee? Always a possibility. Not getting enough exercise — understanding how that in itself can create differences in the way we feel, the way we show up in relationships.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: And in an associated way — how do our anxieties influence the way we show up with other people? When we’re in moments of potential conflict, are we able to handle this in a calm and intentional way that helps us become more authentic and broach hard conversations where we take the risk of being seen and understood as who we really are and what we really believe — even with people who might disagree with us, maybe even disapprove of us? Being able to put our cards on the table and develop genuine relationships with people who might hold different beliefs benefits not just us, but contributes to the healing of a fractured culture.