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How I Stopped Overthinking

2022-08-23 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 13:07 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Productivity and time) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed

Ali, an overthinker all his life, explains overthinking as analysis paralysis driven by anxiety about social threats and gives five strategies that helped him stop: think in experiments, weigh expected value, treat fear as your compass, overthink only on top of consistent action, and consult a mental board of advisors.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: overthinking nearly stopped his business, his channel and a first date

  • ★★★ Ali says he has been an overthinker all his life, and overthinking nearly stopped him from starting his business, starting his YouTube channel and asking his future wife out on their first date. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — What overthinking is: analysis paralysis, past and future overthinking, fear versus anxiety, social threat

  • ★★ Ali describes overthinking as broadly the same as analysis paralysis: stopping ourselves from doing things because we are in our heads about them too much. — 00:00:29 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ For Ali and most people he knows, the problem is not acting too rashly but acting too slowly, because they are stuck in their heads overthinking. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ For past-event overthinking, building a story around what someone said or did, Ali says the solution is Stoicism, CBT and similar approaches. — 00:01:55 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali thinks future-event overthinking, analysis paralysis about something we want to do, leads people not to follow their dreams and to live a life they regret. — 00:01:55
  • ★★ Brené Brown (quoted): In Atlas of the Heart, as Ali tells it, Brené Brown defines fear as a response to a threat in the moment, such as a lion walking into the room, and anxiety as perceiving that a threat may come in the future. — 00:02:25
  • ★★ Ali says no one overthinks plain fear (if a lion came in, he would run), but everyone tends to overthink anxiety. — 00:02:54
  • ★★ In the modern world, Ali says, overthinking is mostly about social risks, such as uploading a first YouTube video or asking someone out, rather than physical danger. — 00:03:23
  • ★★ Ali says the amygdala, the part of the brain dealing with fear and threat, is very attuned to social threat because in caveman times being cast out of the group meant death; the mechanism is no longer helpful today. — 00:03:23

00:04:22 — Tip one: thinking in terms of experiments

  • ★★★ Ali's first strategy against overthinking is thinking in terms of experiments: whenever he is on the verge of overthinking, he tells himself it is just an experiment, which takes the pressure off the decision. — 00:04:22 · experimental mindset

    “hey it's just an experiment”

  • ★★ Overthinking the upload of his first YouTube videos, musical singing covers, Ali treated them as an experiment he was not signing up to do forever. — 00:04:48 · experimental mindset

  • ★★ Thinking in terms of experiments, Ali says, means approaching things with wonder and curiosity rather than wanting them to turn out a certain way. — 00:04:48 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Ali says the experiment of making music videos on his YouTube channel taught him to edit videos and got him over the first hurdle of putting himself out on YouTube when the channel started five years earlier. — 00:05:31
  • ★★★ Ali's second strategy against overthinking is the idea of expected value. — 00:05:31
  • ★★ Ali explains expected value, from probability, gambling and poker, as the size of a good or bad outcome multiplied by its probability: a coin flip that wins $100 on heads has an expected value of $50. — 00:05:31

00:05:45 — Tip two: expected value, plus EV and poker decisions

  • ★★★ Instead of asking whether one decision will succeed, Ali asks whether it is plus EV, whether doing it enough times he would come out on top, which removes the pressure on a single decision. — 00:06:29
  • ★★ Ali's friend Chris Sparks, a professional poker player he interviewed, illustrates that poker players judge a decision by its quality given the information they had, not by its outcome. — 00:06:58
  • ★★★ Ali says a cold email asking someone to grab coffee is always plus EV: there is basically zero downside, and done enough times someone will probably say yes. — 00:07:20
  • ★★★ Ali says putting yourself out on the internet with a blog, podcast or YouTube channel is generally plus EV: significant downsides are very unlikely, and his own channel completely changed his life. — 00:07:20
  • ★★ Caught in analysis paralysis, Ali asks what if he treated the thing as an experiment and what its expected value is; if it is plus EV, he does it without worrying much about the outcome. — 00:07:49 · experimental mindset

  • ★★★ Ali's third strategy, which he first heard from fellow YouTuber Nathaniel Drew, is that fear is your compass: whenever he is scared of doing something it is probably the right thing, because it lies outside his comfort zone, where growth is found. — 00:07:49

    “fear is your compass”

00:07:55 — Tip three: fear is your compass

  • ★★★ At a crossroads, Ali goes towards the option that scares him more: he has always been glad of decisions he was scared of, and after safer choices he has wondered whether to have taken the scarier one. — 00:08:17
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth rule, for publishing videos, podcasts, blog posts and business work: he may overthink all he wants, but only on the foundation of consistent action. — 00:08:17

00:08:50 — Tip four: overthink only on the foundation of consistent action

  • ★★ Ali sees students of his Part-Time YouTuber Academy struggle all the time with overthinking their channels, worrying about production value, lighting, speaking to camera and editing. — 00:09:00 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali says the people who succeed on YouTube, his successful students and the creators he knows, have always treated consistency as the bedrock: you just have to keep publishing videos every week. — 00:09:00 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Overthinking and analysis are fine for Ali only on top of consistent action: he does not want over-analysing to stop the action, which is what ultimately matters, and has regretted it the few times it did. — 00:09:37
  • ★★ Overthinking long stopped Ali from taking his health seriously: he thought he could not start working out, running or eating healthily without a firm plan and having read all the papers on the evidence. — 00:10:05
  • ★★ Friends into running and working out told Ali to just get started, since showing up at the gym somewhat consistently is the main thing; he tries to apply that whenever he worries about overthinking. — 00:10:05

  • ★★★ Ali's final strategy, which his coach Corey introduced him to a few months earlier, is the mental board of advisors: imagine people you admire, living or dead, and ask them for advice on what to do. — 00:10:34

    “the MBA, the Mental Board of Advisors”

00:10:45 — Tip five: the mental board of advisors, and a bias towards action

  • ★★ Ali's mental board of advisors are authors whose writing he likes, Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport and Ryan Holiday; when overthinking he asks what they, and Derek Sivers, would say. — 00:11:04 · Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, Derek Sivers
  • ★★ Ali says his mental picture of his advisors can never predict the future, but that is not the point: he needs a bias towards action rather than towards anxiety and overthinking, his default state. — 00:11:33

  • ★★★ Ali says combating overthinking is all about replacing a bias towards thinking about things with a bias towards doing them. — 00:11:33

    “replacing our bias towards thinking about stuff with a bias towards doing stuff”

  • ★★★ Ali has met very few people who need to think harder about decisions; most, himself included, should just act, because acting brings feedback, improvement and iteration, and at least moves them forward. — 00:12:16

00:12:30 — Sign-off and a pointer to the procrastination video

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Told by a viewer that the recent videos of Ali walking around the room feel forced, the channel replies that it is experimenting. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether Ali is engaged, since he spoke of his future wife, the channel replies "Not yet". — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked which microphone Ali uses in the video, the channel says a Sennheiser lavalier. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: analysis paralysis · expected value · experimental mindset · fear is your compass · mental board of advisors

Also: People: Brené Brown · Cal Newport · Chris Sparks · Derek Sivers · Ryan Holiday · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Atlas of the Heart

Organizations: Wikipedia

Concepts: cognitive behavioural therapy · stoicism

Only in the description or credits: Corey · Nathaniel Drew

Also centred on expected value: These 8 Laws From This Book Changed My Life

Also centred on mental board of advisors: How to Make Difficult Decisions (without overthinking)

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