On days when the clock moves glacially, and the screen’s a bit too bright, and the divide between ass and swivel chair has been obscured, I long for the mindless money-making of my youth. For five years and $7.25 an hour, I poured coffee and smeared cream cheese on bagels for the good people of Danville—a crumb on the Pennsylvania map that also happens to be my hometown. Dunkin’ Donuts is one of two places people hang out. The other is a gas station.
Every day I’d scramble to punch the clock at 6 AM and do my best robotics routine for 10 hours straight:
Don’t give caffeine to the decaf lady.
SPLENDA, not Sweet’N Low.
Five dozen mixed. No filled. No powder.
Working at Dunkin’, my thoughts were as complex as their coffee is good. And unless you’re from New England, you know that’s “not very.”
“What if I’m stuck there forever?” I’d lament to my then-boyfriend as I peeled off a sweat-stained polo and Dickies khaki pants. I’d just graduated college and had no job prospects. My fear wasn’t entirely unfounded.
Before I knew it, I was on the other side of the drive-thru window, wearing a blazer and responsible for million-dollar budgets. As I climbed the ladder, I learned post-grad life was a different kind of humdrum: prettier and better paying, sure, but altogether insidious. Toggling between dual monitors felt more depleting than punching in someone’s order with one hand and filling an iced coffee with the other. Sitting for eight hours somehow felt harder on my body than running around for 10 with no break. And, most importantly, thinking about everything felt exceedingly worse than thinking about nothing.
The meditative nature of the service industry made my brain function more efficiently in other areas of life. You don’t have time to seek distractions or let your thoughts run rampant—you’re on autopilot rebuilding the capacity for discipline that modern technology chips at daily. Entering the sedentary office world showed me the horror of constant, unrestrained thought: You have eight hours to do your job. You will exhaust every option to avoid doing said job. You will think about everything you didn’t say to that person and every career you’ve missed out on and every flaw on your face until the clock strikes 4. And then, when you go home to write, words will escape you like a balloon in the gripless hands of a child. Man, overthinking is a bitch. Is Dunkin’ hiring?
To crave mindlessness feels like a betrayal of my reverence for intellectualism and being a generally thoughtful person. I should want to be mentally stimulated, no? Descartes didn’t use thought as the basis for existence just for me to say, “Fuck this, I’d rather sling bacon, egg, and cheeses all day.” But I feel the most alive when I am feeling more than I am thinking. And it feels really good to put my head down and move my ass rather than contemplate how long I can put off this spreadsheet to see what vegan meals Sophia from Texas eats in a day. I understand that flow state isn’t so elusive, though. It simply takes a willingness to combat my tendency to brood, which I’m improving at each day.
The need to mute my brain goes far beyond the workplace. The less I’m thinking, the more connected I feel to some mystical version of myself who’s somehow smarter, quicker, realer… and definitely happier. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes extensively about the wild archetype—one who has cultivated the intuitive boneyard of the psyche that appears cross-culturally in folklore. It’s an indigenous wisdom that society has long worked to suppress in favor of conventional, white collar smarts. As a psychotherapist, she used storytelling to help patients revive their primal spirit and heal themselves of various disorders and traumas—those often incited by chronic overthinking. Through reading Estés and drawing from my own personal experience, I’m apt to say that operating on instinct versus analysis feels like I’m using a more developed part of my brain, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It even manifests in love.
My last relationship was polluted with overthinking—all head, no heart. There was never a true sense of oneness when it was constant psychological warfare. Fights weren’t temporary or clearly resolved; we’d rip off the band-aid daily to dissect each other’s every word, glance, or quickness with which we flipped over our phones when they’d light up. Love like that seeks an answer to one question, and that is, “What’s in it for me?” It clings to emotions like fear and shame, which only beget more fear and shame, and thus, becomes cyclical and fruitless. It is a grandiose idea of love rather than raw love in motion.
But my relationship before that was all gut. We had our problems, sure, but because we were loving from that wild archetype place of instinct, we could see the bigger picture. Fights can’t become your relational identity when your love is action-based rather than thought-based. One of John Mayer’s shittiest songs actually makes a great point: love is a verb. I felt more present in this relationship because I wasn’t ruminating on the past or scared for the future—I was just being. Sometimes being meant fighting. But usually being meant laughing and playing, and that’s what I remember it for.
There is a thick wall between cerebral love and visceral love. Cerebral love is selfish. Shallow. Undeveloped. It’s too preoccupied with thinking—with weighing pros and cons, protecting one’s ego, wondering what else is out there—to surrender to the magic of unity. Cerebral love prioritizes self-preservation, setting unrealistic expectations so they can escape once inevitably unmet. Visceral love leaps before looking. It holds your hand and says we’re doing this thing because I have seen the alternative and it does not hold a candle. It’s not dwelling on the bad because frankly, who has the time when life is happening all around us? So, you fought: who cares, do better, move on. Having experienced (and walked out on) both kinds of love, I understand the sweet spot is probably achieved at middle ground—leading with your gut, but also being mindful of each other’s needs and unhealthy patterns. But if I had to pick between the two, I think my choice is obvious.
Perhaps the realm in which one’s brain runs wildest is early stage dating. To effectively play the game, one awkwardly tightropes between devoted and distant, careful not to put too much weight on the foot that will send them tumbling into either extreme. How many times has something faded into obscurity because both parties are scared to look eager, or worse, be rejected? It’s like missed connections’ more villainous cousin: you’ve already connected—you’ve done the hard part, which is meeting someone you actually like—but you self-sabotage out of fear. Every time I think I’m “too old” or “too wise” for the bullshit, I find myself succumbing to its power: waiting by the phone for a text that never comes, scoffing at the thought of sending it myself. Overthinking is the death of vulnerability, and the death of vulnerability is the death of opportunity. Funerals are expensive. Send the text.
If art imitates life, then it only makes sense that my creative endeavors have been similarly stifled by overthinking. For as brainy as writing is, the real juice comes when I can tune out the noise and employ the same finesse I used to craft lattes (albeit with janky espresso) at Dunkin’. I told my brilliant writer friend that I was tackling this topic and he immediately linked it to the beat generation. “They strive for spontaneous, automatic prose, akin to a jazz improvisation. First thought, best thought. Which is tricky and often false prophecy, but a good thing to consider if you can channel that meditative empty genius.” Text message verbatim. The days when I can abandon all concern for originality or perfectionism or the possibility of being published are the days I experience a surreal geyser of creativity. I can approach my work with the same unsullied curiosity that made me pick up a pen at age 12. The same goes for dance: still an anxious neophyte hiding in the back of class, I get better each week because I’ve learned the kind of vacuous thinking required to connect choreography to music. You’re literally memorizing something complex in a very short period of time, and yet the more you can turn your brain off, the more it sticks. If you’re ever trained in an art by someone experienced and they advise you to “stop thinking so much,” it only seems counterintuitive until the a-ha moment.
It took a while for me to admit that I’ve become more apprehensive with age—that I caught myself spiraling in some of my most historically comfortable, freeing scenarios, like stepping onto the grounds of a music festival, going for a run, or strapping into a rollercoaster. But exploring the detriment of overthinking and thus, adjusting has helped me restore the joy I was starting to lose. This process prompted its own questions, though: If my quality of life is better when I’m thinking less, does that make me a complicit robot? A cowardly escapist? Or simply a contemplative woman who’s found a way to lighten the burden of being alive? I can be my own biggest instigator of cognitive dissonance. But refusing to engage with myself is just as powerful as refusing to engage with another person. I never thought I’d be able to call myself someone who goes with the flow, but that’s how my life is starting to feel the more agency I reclaim from my recovering overactive mind. As the great Playboi Carti once said, I’d rather not talk about jus dothatshit!