From the space between send and reply, this is Overthinking the Awesome with David Cosgrove. Welcome back. You are thinking too much. Good, so am I. Let's put that big brain of yours to work. I want to give a quick thanks to this episode's sponsor, Westwood Provisions, handmade candles out of Simsbury, Connecticut. When I'm recording or writing, the right atmosphere matters. These folks get that. Connect with Westwood Provisions on Instagram and Facebook. Tell them the overthinker sent you. Your heart skips a beat, or your head hurts, or your stomach feels off, or there's a twinge in your chest, a flutter in your pulse, a sensation you don't recognize. And suddenly you're paying attention. Very close attention. What was that? Is that normal? Has it happened before? Should you Google it? You Google it. And now you're down a rabbit hole of symptoms and conditions and worst case scenarios that you can't unsee. This is health anxiety, body scanning, the overthinking brain turned inward, treating every sensation as a signal, every twinge as a warning. And before I go any further, let me be clear. I'm not a doctor. This isn't medical advice. If you're genuinely concerned about a symptom, go see a professional. Call your doctor. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Got it? Okay, let's move on. But if you're someone who catastrophizes normal body sensations, if you've ever been fine until you notice something and then couldn't stop noticing it, this episode is for you. Why does the body become a focus? Overthinkers often become body focused for one main reason control. When life feels uncertain, when external circumstances feel chaotic or unpredictable, the body becomes the thing we can monitor, the thing we can scan for threats, the thing that feels, at least theoretically, within our domain. So we start paying attention. Too much attention. And the more we pay attention, the more we notice, and the more we notice, the more we interpret. And interpretation is where the spiral starts. Because your brain is a pattern-seeking machine. It wants meaning. And when it's focused on the body, it starts assigning meaning to everything. That twinge isn't just a twinge. It's evidence. That headache isn't random, it's a symptom. But here's the truth. Bodies are weird. They make noises. They ache. They flutter. They do strange things for strange reasons, most of which mean nothing at all. Let's find the click with this. It's usually the moment you go from noticing to investigating. From hmm, that felt weird to oh God, what does that mean? Or it's the moment you open a search engine, the moment you start checking your pulse, your skin, your symptoms against the list. That's the click. The shift from observation to analysis, from sensing to interpreting. Notice it. Name it. I'm investigating now. I've moved from noticing to monitoring. How do we redirect this? Let's shift from interpretation to observation. When you notice a sensation, practice naming it without assigning meaning. Not my heart is racing. Something must be wrong. Just my heart is beating faster right now. Not I have a headache. Oh god, what if it's serious? Just there's pressure in my head right now. This is harder than it sounds because your brain wants to interpret. It wants to know what things mean. But meaning is where that spiral lives. For right now, just observe. Be a reporter, not a detective. This is happening, I'm noticing it. I don't need to solve it yet. How do we switch this into the awesome move? Here's the move. Trust patterns, not single data points. One weird sensation means nothing. Your body does weird things all the time. If you paid this much attention to every sensation, you'd never think about anything else. What matters is patterns, recurring symptoms, things that persist or worsen, things that affect your functioning. A one-time twinge, that's noise. A persistent worsening symptom, that's signal. And you can trust yourself to tell the difference. So when your brain wants to spiral from a single sensation, remind it, one data point isn't a pattern, I'll pay attention if this keeps happening. But right now, I'm gonna let it pass. And here's the bonus move. Instead of scanning for what's wrong, try noticing what's working. Your lungs are breathing, your heart is beating, your body is doing thousands of things right now, millions of things right now, with no input from you. Again, that's not toxic positivity. That's counter evidence, that's giving your brain something else to notice. Your body is talking to you all the time. That's normal. That's how bodies work. But not every message is urgent, not every sensation is a warning. Sometimes your body is just being a body. You can notice without spiraling, you can observe without catastrophizing, you can be aware without being alarmed. Awareness is helpful, obsession is optional. This has been Overthinking the Awesome. I'm David Cosgrove. The book goes deeper. Overthinking the Awesome is available on Amazon and Audible. Have some questions or topics? Hit me at DavidCosgrove.com or find me on Instagram at Del Piambo Music. Stay safe out there, and remember, your mind isn't too much. You're just learning how to play it.