Walking, swimming, riding a bicycle, driving a car. At some point, they all become instinctual. There is no reason to think about the movements anymore, we are used to doing them.
One day, I tore my Achilles tendon. It took me a few months until the cast was taken off and I could think about walking again. Well, nothing was normal anymore. I still knew what walking felt like, but having had the foot in a cast for a long while, I was being overly cautious. It meant that I tried to think the movement. It took me a while to let go of such overthinking and return to a natural movement.
Sometimes we are confronted with such a situation out of the blue. Athletes know this well. Based on their sport, they can call it twisties, yips, cueties, or target panic.
It seems to be a situation in which something we’ve used its feel to execute it is suddenly inaccessible. To rediscover how to do it, thoughts are being used, leading to overthinking the movement.
But that’s not how we learned it! Thinking may have served us, not to imagine the movement, but to look back at various experiences and how the feel may have been different. The learning itself happens through gradually building the feel. It starts with something basic, like knowing that walking happens upright while keeping balance. As we learn, the feeling becomes more detailed. Walking up a hill or changing shoes alters our experience, and after a while, the feeling is integrated.
At the beginning, all of these experiences may seem awkward, but as we learn them, a sense of okness appears. It emerges somewhere between a move that doesn’t work and one that is fluid and instinctual.
What’s interesting is that the same is true with thinking. There is a feel that accompanies the process of thinking. However, quite often, we don’t notice it because of judgments that appear related to what we’ve thought.
The same is true with overthinking. It comes with a feeling of trying hard, forcing something, and not being ok. That is if ever we pay attention to that aspect of the thoughts that emerge.
