Don't Overthink

 The winner of the monogram giveaway from my last post is commenter #17 - Allison Morrison.
I'll be back Friday to post the winner of the book in today's giveaway.

In my teen years I experienced some highly stressful situations, and developed the tendency to ruminate. (I also had it modeled for me by a loved one.)  Ruminations - a fancy word for overthinking things or dwelling on our problems and all their possible causes and effects - are very compelling.  

When you're in the middle of ruminating, you feel you absolutely need to continue in order to figure things out.  You feel you're gaining insight or preparing yourself for the next move. The obsessive dwelling feels necessary and makes sense to the person caught in it's grip.

If you do this kind of thinking much, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

In reality ruminating wears you down - emotionally, spiritually, sometimes socially, and often physically.  I'm so glad I've learned how to stop this type of thinking in it's tracks.

The professor I quoted in today's P31 devotion, Dr. Lyubomirsky, emphatically states, "If you are someone plagued by ruminations, you are unlikely to become happier before you can break that habit. I will go so far as to say that if you are an overthinker, one of the secrets to your happiness is the ability to allay obsessive overthinking, to reinterpret and redirect your negative thoughts into more neutral or optimistic ones."

She has done years of research on this, and poured over the research of others on happiness and rumination.  And her conclusion mirrors what the Bible teaches us in Philippians 4:6-9.

Once again, ancient truths from the Bible prove real and relevant today.

So how did I stop ruminating? First, I became aware of it when it was happening, which was usually late at night when there was nothing else happening to distract me from such thoughts. Perhaps by God's grace, I began shivering when I'd followed the negative thinking for too long. The shivering caught my attention - I was powerless to stop it (unless I stopped the thoughts) and usually I wasn't even cold.

The shivering became my cue I was ruminating, and that became my trigger to pray it out to God, ask for His help and peace, and then let it go.  If I still couldn't get my thoughts off the problem I'd put them onto God by listening to christian music, journaling my blessings, or reading a book or the Bible.

Those sound like pat answers, but they're not. They're power-filled answers.

 “Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing.

Then the God of peace will be with you.” ~Philippians 4:6-9

The God of peace is now with me.  May He also be with you today. Let's both turn each worry over to Him to deal with. Leave a prayer request or a statement of thankfulness in the comments here and you'll be be entered to win a copy of my new book It's No Secret: Revealing Divine Truths Every Woman Should Know.

 Grateful for God's Peace.