3. Turn Down the Dial
I wish the last sentence of chapter 2 was true, don't you?
Wouldn't it be amazing if I had one thing you could do that would stop all your overthinking forever?
All your friends would say, "What's different about you? You seem more calm, confident, and successful. Have you been drinking a lot of water?"
"Thank you for noticing, but no, it's not water. It's Jon Acuff. He told me the cure to ending overthinking. I'd share it, but you should buy the book yourself so his kids can go to college."
Wow, I wasn't expecting that. My oldest daughter's high school English teacher told her to just find a free PDF of Lord of the Flies online instead of buying the book or to get a bootleg copy of the audiobook on YouTube. That you're telling people to pay for art is truly encouraging.
Art is exactly what it would be, this perfect cure. It would be a miracle. My singular masterpiece. It wouldn't stay singular for long, of course, because if it was successful, I would immediately release a follow-up book to capitalize on my newfound fame. That one would be called The Second Cure, or Cure-ier, and I'd be on the cover of that one with a wry grin that seemed to say, "I can't believe I found another cure for overthinking either!"
I spent decades looking for that one thing that would end my overthinking forever. I'm a sucker for motivational gurus, and the bigger the overpromise, the bigger my belief that this one would be the one that worked. I was convinced I was only one idea, one technique, one hack away from changing everything all at once.
I was wrong.
No matter what I tried, no matter how long I held my breath, no matter what I studied, I couldn't completely turn off my broken soundtracks. You know you're a bit stuck when you try to play your meditation app at 2× speed. It worked for audiobooks. Maybe if I got twice as much mindfulness in half as much time, everything would be fixed. Despite my best efforts, my broken soundtracks still kept getting loud sometimes. I kept retiring them, assuming they'd be gone forever. But then they'd pop up in unexpected moments, like Brett Favre refusing to leave the NFL for good. I felt like a failure until I had breakfast with David Thomas.
It's a Dial
David Thomas wears cool glasses. That's not the most important thing about him, but it is distinct. He's one of those guys who can wear glasses with clear frames without looking like he's a dad still trying to pull off Air Jordans. "What, these? Didn't mean to flex." In addition to his excellent ocular fashion sense, he's also the director of family counseling at Daystar, a center for kids in Nashville. He's the author of six books and an accomplished public speaker, but it was an offhand comment he made over coffee that changed what I believed about retiring broken soundtracks.
In the middle of a long list of questions I was asking him, David said, "The problem with the internal voices we hear is that we want a switch." I hadn't heard thoughts described that way, so I asked him to explain what he meant.
"We think that there's a switch out there and if we can just find it, we can turn off the background noise completely. We only have to do it one time and we'll never hear it again. People want there to be a switch."
"Those people are crazy," I replied, having spent the last few years of my life looking for that exact thing.
"It's not a switch though," he continued, "it's a dial. The goal isn't to turn it off forever, the goal is to turn down the volume. It's going to get louder sometimes. That's how dials work. But when life turns up the negative thoughts, we get to turn them down. That takes a lot of the pressure off because when you hear one again, it's not a sign that you've failed to shut it off and need to go find a different switch. It's just time for an action that will turn it back down."
I wanted to jump on top of the table in the diner and shout, "It's a dial! It's a dial!" and then throw a sixpence to a street urchin like I was Ebenezer Scrooge so he could buy his family a fat Christmas goose.
When you live with a switch mentality, you set yourself up for automatic failure because it triggers the perfectionism soundtrack. It goes something like this: You hear a soundtrack that says, "If you could find the switch, you could turn it off and never be bothered by broken soundtracks again. You're just one book, one exercise, one diet away from never hearing negative thoughts." The switch can be any positive thing that you believe will deliver instant, forever silence from a broken soundtrack.
That's when the perfectionism soundtrack gets louder. "Perfection is possible! The switch is the answer!" That's an amazing promise. Who doesn't want to believe that? So you try the new thing and it works for a while. The breathing technique relaxes you. The book offers fantastic insights. The counseling session encourages you. But then a week later, a month later, a day later, depending on how strong a particular broken soundtrack is, you hear it again.
Oh no! It wasn't perfect. It's still playing. The switch failed. Perfectionism will never tell you that it's the switch's fault. It's always your fault. It does this because then you'll start looking for a new switch instead of questioning the whole process. Time to find a second switch. You read a different book, try a different diet, change jobs, change cities, change spouses. That's what it's like to live with a switch mentality.
A dial is just the opposite. A dial approach says, "The goal isn't to stop listening forever to all my broken soundtracks. The goal is to turn them down when they get loud. The goal is to head them off at the pass when a traffic jam, unexpected corporate merger, call from an estranged sibling, or any of the billion surprises life throws at you cranks the volume to 10."
Retiring broken soundtracks is a patient practice, not a singular event. Some days you won't hear any broken soundtracks at all. Other days you'll look up and realize one snuck back into your life when you weren't paying attention. When that happens, you have to turn the dial down.
What It Takes to Develop a Few Turn-Down Techniques
You have two options when it comes to life: manicure your world so perfectly that nothing ever threatens to turn the volume up on a broken soundtrack, or learn a few healthy ways to turn the dial down when it gets loud.
In the first approach, you have to avoid every idiot online, rain, taxes, long wait times at restaurants, people who are slow getting off airplanes, unexpected global pandemics, and Carol from accounting. This is very time-consuming and, I'm afraid to say, impossible.
In the second approach, you learn a few techniques that you keep in your back pocket and use to turn down the volume before it gets too loud. This approach is a lot more fun and actually possible. That's the one David Thomas challenged me on there in that diner.
"What are the techniques?" I asked him, taking notes as fast as I could and hoping he would give me four or five very specific things to do. (I was still looking for switches at this point.)
David explained, "They're different for every person based on how they're wired, but essentially they're a handful of actions you take in moments when the music gets too loud. For instance, for some people, they'll list petting a dog as one because it's been proven to release serotonin. I always tell people to make a few of them physical. We're trying to move the blood back from the dinosaur part of your brain to the thinking part, and movement helps. They shouldn't involve screens at first; they should be easy, accessible, and extend beyond one context."
The reason they should be easy is that broken soundtracks love complicating things because then there's lots of fodder for overthinking. Let's pretend that one of my broken soundtracks is that I'll never be able to write another book. Let's imagine for a second that every time I sit down to write, that soundtrack tries to fire up and tell me I'm out of words, every good book has already been written, and everyone already knows the ideas I think are so new. Hypothetically.
Maybe one of my techniques is that when I hear that soundtrack, I turn it down by writing in my favorite seat in my favorite coffee shop at my favorite time of day. That sounds great on the surface, but what happens when I show up one day and someone is in my seat? I know exactly what happens because here's the conversation I've had a dozen times:
Soundtrack:	Someone is sitting in our seat.
Me:	It's not a big deal.
Soundtrack:	Are you kidding me right now? It's the biggest deal of all the deals that have ever been. That spot is perfect. The table is small enough that you don't feel bad about hogging a big table by yourself, but it's big enough that you still have room to spread out your stuff.
Me:	Like a Goldilocks table.
Soundtrack:	Exactly. And the lighting is perfect. It's bright enough to get some work done but also moody enough that you feel like you're a character in a movie who is going through some stuff but is going to make it. That table is also an adequate distance from the children's room, which means with noise-canceling headphones you can barely hear them. I demand we get some very private work done in this very public place.
Me:	I think it's going to be okay.
Soundtrack:	How about you leave the thinking to me. What you're not seeing is that our only option is to sit near phone-call guy, the one person here who feels empowered to have loud conference calls like he's in WeWork and not a coffee shop. "I DON'T KNOW, GREG! I RAN THE NUMBERS AND I DON'T THINK THE CLIENT IS GOING TO GO FOR THIS NEW BUDGET!" This is a nightmare. I can't believe someone is in our spot.
Me:	It's not technically my spot. I don't own it.
Soundtrack:	Not with that attitude you don't. Let's just go home. None of the work you do outside of your spot is going to be good anyway. Let's call it a wrap. This day is over. P.S.: You'll probably never write another book.
Me:	It's only 7 a.m.
Soundtrack:	Life comes at you fast.
I wish that conversation was even a little bit exaggerated, but I promise you it's not. "Writing in my favorite seat in my favorite coffee shop at my favorite time of day" might seem like a good turn-down technique I can use when I'm stuck with my writing, but it's not. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's a broken soundtrack in disguise. It's too rigid. There are too many rules. It leads to more inaction instead of action, which is always the sign of a broken soundtrack.
I need to be able to use my turn-down techniques easily and in a variety of situations.