How often do you catch yourself overthinking things?

Do you ever find yourself lost in thoughts about what happened last night or last year? Maybe about what will happen next year?

Perhaps you start practicing and are suddenly lost in thoughts of that wrong note you played in a performance two years ago, or you're wondering what your income will be like this year and how the job market will look when the pandemic begins to subside? Maybe you're just thinking about that hair that's always completely out of place.

The examples above are valid and also distracting in different ways. It's certainly not uncommon to get lost in thinking about the bigger picture.

There are a million ways we can distract ourselves: overthinking something from the past, obsessing over things that haven't happened yet, focusing on things that are actually inconsequential, or telling ourselves what a terrible job we have done, are doing or will do. These are just a few that I may, or may not, have some personal experience with.

What has helped me tremendously with overactive and critical thoughts is mindfulness meditation.

I don't mean that meditating has stopped the ridiculous banter that can happen in my subconscious. I'm not actually sure it is possible to stop that. Rather, meditating has shown me a new perspective on my tendency to overthink and overcomplicate my day to day life.

The reality is, most of us end up in this chaotic mind state without even realizing we have let these thoughts run rampant.

What mindfulness meditation tells us is that we have a choice about how to react when we have these feelings or distracting thought patterns.

You may not notice right away that your mind has wandered, or that it's taken you down another rabbit hole of dissecting one of your self labeled flaws, but at some point you will notice.

That moment of noticing is the magic moment! When you notice you are telling yourself stories or being exceptionally hard on yourself, or even that you are simply distracted, you acknowledge that it's happening. Notice what it feels like physically and mentally. Then, send those thoughts on their way by beginning the task at hand again.

In mindfulness meditation, the goal is usually to focus on the breath. Or, that's the assumed goal. The real objective is to notice when your mind has wandered and bring yourself back to focusing on the breath. 

The intention is to see your thoughts and patterns of thought as passing events. You didn't actively call upon them or set out to derail your warmup, meditation session, or performance, but once you notice that it's happening you can move on.

It's ok to also acknowledge anything helpful coming from these thoughts. In fact, it's encouraged. Can you learn anything useful from how you've distracted yourself? If you can, great, keep the material you can use. If you can't, also great, then it becomes even easier to let those thoughts go.

Here's an example of how this could play out in a regular activity, let's say, beginning your first practice session or warm-up of the day:

• You are about to begin practicing when you start thinking about how tired you are. You'd actually really like a coffee, but you already have your instrument half assembled
• As you continue to think you remember the emails that went unanswered yesterday afternoon or maybe a project that's due tomorrow.
• You start thinking about how the semester has gone so far and remember that one studio performance that went terribly. You can't believe that your tone was so awful, and how about those tempo issues you had?
• At this point, you look at the clock and realize, woah! Ten minutes of your free half hour are already gone!! You just want to pack it in and get a coffee. What's the point of getting started now? Will it make you feel any better about that awful performance a few weeks ago?
• Here is where trading overthinking for simplicity can happen. You have realized that your thoughts have spiraled away from you. Are they giving you anything useful to work with? Are you just rehashing things that have already passed? 
• Notice how you feel thinking these thoughts. What are the physical sensations? Give yourself some time to really feel them.
• Now that you've acknowledged that you've been distracted, what was distracting you, and how you feel, you can let it go.
• As simple as that. You have given these thoughts their time, and now you can move on to the task at hand. You can have a fifteen or twenty minute warm up that helps you being your day and focus on skills you are developing and stop your thought pattern where you noticed it. Not to mention, you will likely feel better and accomplished for having stopped a subconscious negative thought pattern.

The real magic of mindfulness meditation is the awareness of what happens in our subconscious, and that's what I think translates so well to life, and especially life for a musician. 

Give it a shot the next time you notice yourself thinking about that note that happened two lines ago or about all the reasons you shouldn't start practicing. Be aware that your subconscious has taken you on a little side trip and then do your best bring yourself back.

It's important to note that we will need to do this again and again, thousands and thousands of times. But like our muscles we train through regular practice, the more you exercise this ability, the stronger it becomes.

Thoughts and feelings are not truths, rather, they're events that we can choose to participate in or not.

I meditate.

Sometimes I love it. Sometimes, it feels like absolute torture. I haven't done it for very long, and it took me a long time to decide to start.

Maybe that all sounds crazy to you. Maybe you are thinking, "who has time to meditate?" or, "that sounds awful!" Sometimes I have those thoughts, too. It can still seem crazy to me to spend time getting to know my mind - shouldn't I already know it based on the amount of time we spend together?

But, when you start thinking about the speed of our every day lives, the amount of information we process, the expectations we have for ourselves (we all have at least one constant, nagging self critique....why isn't my waist smaller? why don't I speak up at work? why I am so bad at xyz?). it makes sense that we might not be super in tune with ourselves. 

I think we could all benefit from a daily dose of meditation.

There's so much to unpack about understanding the difference between thoughts and facts or how we allow our feelings to run over us repeatedly day in and day out, but one of the concepts that has recently thrown on a hundred lightbulbs for me is what's known as efforting. 

This particular idea of effort vs allowance is something I picked up after reading (and re-reading) The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford, and then more recently, from doing a guided meditation also by George Mumford on the Ten Percent App (I would highly recommend both the book and the app).

Sometimes concepts take a few iterations to stick.

As musicians - or anyone in a highly self-driven and competitive field (this absolutely includes being a student!) - we are constantly self-critiquing. It's how we get better, and it's important for continued independent musical growth. However, I know I am not the only musician that has gone so far down the rabbit hole of self-critique that you can't get back out, even (or especially) when you are in the middle of a performance. 

So recently, as I was doing this guided meditation, George was talking about pushing yourself through something because you believe you HAVE to do it, even if it's not working. You're pushing through because you want the end result (that you actually don't even believe you will reach) so badly. He calls this frustration and discomfort that we create for ourselves "wrong effort." Wrong effort lacks sensitivity toward yourself - it's when you are just trying too hard.

Here's what he said that completely smacked me over the head: "When your energy is driving you to the point where you are always looking to see how you are doing, you're not present to what you are doing."

All of the performances where I struggled for an entire concert to forget that one note that was a little out of tune, or cracked, or was just wrong came racing back. Times where I couldn't think about the phrase because I was stuck thinking about how that breath I just took wasn't as good as it was in practice, and any experience where I couldn't turn off the thoughts that are meant for the practice room were suddenly vivid in my mind.

You could also just as easily apply this to the way our culture has us comparing ourselves to others constantly. 

We are not meant to think about how all the time.

Now, I certainly haven't mastered the application of allowance over efforting, but I do know that the way I can get better at this is by working on my mindset. Creating a right effort is creating spaciousness in my attention and allowing the thoughts of how to flow like water. To allow them to come up, and then also consciously allow and encourage them to move on. 

What I'm learning most through meditation right now is the importance of creating space - creating awareness without attachment. I have a long way to go, but in just two or three months of consistent practice, I already see the impact in both performance and every day life. 

Have you ever considered effort vs allowance in your own practice and performance? In what ways are you efforting?