Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to Simple Wins. I’m your host, Adam OLeary.
You know, I was having one of *those* mornings recently. You know the kind. Woke up, it was grey and drizzly outside, and I could just feel this low-grade anxiety humming in the background. My mind was already racing through a dozen different tasks, replaying a slightly awkward conversation from the day before, and worrying about a deadline that’s still a week away. It was like my brain had opened ten different browser tabs at once, and each one was playing a different, slightly worrying video.
So, I did what I often do in those moments. I put on my headphones and went for a walk, hoping a podcast would distract me. I clicked on an episode by Jay Shetty. Now, I’ve listened to Jay Shetty before—he’s hard to miss—but this time, it was different. I wasn’t just listening for interesting ideas; I was listening for a lifeline. And I have to tell you, the episode hit me like a ton of bricks. It was so practical, so rooted in both ancient wisdom and modern science, that I actually stopped walking at one point, just to let a particular idea sink in.
I felt like I wasn’t just being given platitudes. I was being given an actual, usable toolkit. So today, I want to share with you what *I* learned. This is my reflection, my takeaway, after immersing myself in Jay Shetty’s teachings on how to stop overthinking. This is about the lessons that are already starting to change my daily life.
The central theme that Jay Shetty kept returning to, the bedrock of everything else, was this concept of impermanence. He opened with a beautiful verse from the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 14. Let me get this quote right, because it was so powerful. Shetty recited it: **“The non-permanent appearance of happiness and distress and their disappearance in due course are like the appearance and disappearance of the winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”**
I have to sit with that for a second. *Learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.* It sounds simple, but it’s incredibly profound. Shetty immediately made it relatable. He talked about how we let the weather dictate our mood. If we wake up and it’s raining, we might let it “totally ruin our day.” But his point was, a sunny day doesn’t last forever, and neither does a rainy one. They are impermanent. They come and go like the seasons.
But here’s the part that really reframed it for me. Shetty then told a Zen story I’d heard before, but he gave it such a fresh perspective. It’s the story of the farmer and his son. The son finds a horse, and the villagers say, “How lucky!” The farmer says, **“Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”** The son falls off the horse and breaks his leg. The villagers say, “How terrible!” The farmer again says, **“Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”** Then, when the army comes to recruit all the young men, the son is spared because of his broken leg. The villagers declare it the best of luck, and the farmer, once more, replies, **“Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”**
The lesson, as Shetty explained, isn’t that we should be passive or wish for bad things. It’s that we simply cannot know the ultimate outcome of any single event. Our judgment of something as “good” or “bad” in the moment is almost always premature. The anxiety we feel—the overthinking—is often us trying to desperately label something as definitively good or bad and then clinging to that label. But if we can adopt that “who knows?” attitude, it creates a space of possibility. It doesn’t eliminate the pain of the moment, but it can eliminate the suffering we add to it by telling ourselves a catastrophic story about it.
And this is where Shetty made a crucial distinction that was a real lightbulb moment for me. He said, **“Letting go isn't about doing nothing. It's about focusing on what you can prepare... Letting go is being proactive and preparing in the way that you can.”**
It’s not spiritual bypassing. It’s not saying, “Oh well, whatever happens, happens.” It’s asking, “Whatever season is going to come my way, is my mind prepared to deal with it?” It’s about building your resilience, your emotional raincoat and umbrella, so that when the storm hits, you’re ready. That shift from a passive victim of circumstance to an active preparer for life’s seasons… that was my first major takeaway.
But okay, Adam, that’s great in theory, but what do I *do* when I’m in the middle of a spiral? When the same negative thought is just looping on repeat? Well, Shetty’s next lesson was incredibly tactile, and it’s backed by science. He talked about getting the thought out of your head and onto a page.
He was very direct. He said, **“It's really hard to filter thoughts while they're spiraling and circling around your mind. When you actually write down how you're feeling, you're extracting that emotion from within yourself and taking it into a place that you can get tactile with it.”**
This makes so much sense. A thought in your head is abstract, slippery, and powerful. The same thought written on a piece of paper is just… words. You can look at it. You can analyze it. And most importantly, you can destroy it.
Shetty didn’t just suggest this as a nice idea; he cited a 2024 study from Nagoya University. He explained the findings: **“Participants who wrote down their angry thoughts and then shredded or discarded the paper experienced a significant reduction in anger. In contrast, those who kept the paper saw only a minor decrease in anger levels. The act of physically disposing of the paper played a crucial role in alleviating negative emotions.”**
He backed it up with another study from Ohio State University in 2012 that showed the same thing. The key isn’t just the writing; it’s the *releasing*. It’s the physical act of ripping it up, throwing it away, or even burning it. He even mentioned studies about burning photographs of an ex-partner as a powerful symbolic act for closure.
I love this because it’s an *action*. It’s not just thinking about thinking differently. It’s a ritual. It’s a ceremony of release. Shetty’s instruction was clear: **“Next time you find a thought appearing in your mind every single day, I want you to write it down on a piece of paper. I want you to rip it up. I want you to shred it... and let it go and see how you feel lighter and liberated from that weight.”** I’ve tried this. It works. There’s something primal and effective about it.
The next lesson connected my internal state to my external environment in a way I’d never fully appreciated. Shetty stated a “hidden truth”: **“Your outer reality shapes your inner world.”** He argued that it’s almost impossible to have a peaceful mind in a chaotic space. He asked, **“How many of us are hoping to have a peaceful mind in a chaotic living room, a peaceful mind in a messy kitchen?”**
He then broke down the science of clutter. First, cognitive overload: clutter competes for your attention, impairing your ability to focus. He cited fMRI scans showing people in organized environments could concentrate better. Second, it elevates stress hormones: he mentioned research showing that women who perceived their homes as cluttered had higher cortisol levels. And third, a cluttered bedroom can negatively impact sleep quality.
His solution wasn’t to feel guilty but to take small, practical steps. His advice was brilliant in its simplicity: start small with one drawer or one cupboard. Set a timer for 30 minutes. And crucially, **“create spaces for each of the items.”** He used the analogy of wanting his home to have the warmth of a home but the organization of a hotel, where everything has a designated place. This idea that the act of cleaning and organizing is itself a form of mental filing—that when you clean up the tabs on your laptop screen, you start to declutter the tabs in your mind—that really resonated with me. It turns a chore into a healing practice.
But perhaps the most powerful lesson for me was the Buddhist teaching of the two arrows. Shetty explained it beautifully. The first arrow is the pain of life—the setback, the criticism, the loss. This arrow is inevitable. We all get hit by them. But the suffering? That’s the second arrow. And that second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves. It’s the story we tell ourselves *about* the pain. The **“Why me?”** The lamenting. The blaming. The agonizing.
Shetty’s crucial insight was this: **“When we can shift that story to instead of why is this happening to me all the way through to well what can I do about it? What skill is this asking me to develop? What is this reminding me that I've forgotten? What wisdom is inside of this that I need to learn? As soon as you shift to a solution, proactive approach, you don't have the suffering. You will always have the pain. You don't have to suffer from it.”**
This was the core of the entire talk for me. My overthinking is almost always that second arrow. It’s me shooting myself again and again with the story of my own pain. Shetty then gave a simple, two-step method to stop this in the moment.
Step one: Stop. Visualize a big, mental red stop sign. Even say it out loud: **“Stop.”** Shetty explained that this act **“activates the prefrontal cortex, interrupting automatic emotional reactions and giving you mental space.”**
Step two: Shift. Immediately ask a reframing question. Shetty offered a few, but the one that stood out to me was, **“If I wasn't feeling upset, how would I respond differently?”** That question creates instant distance from the raw emotion and allows your wiser, more rational self to step in.
He ended with a piece of advice that cuts through so much of our modern anxiety: **“Don't delay what can be done today.”** He applied this brilliantly to communication, pointing out how we often avoid replying to messages to avoid disappointing someone, which ultimately causes more disappointment. He said, **“True kindness lies in clarity of intention, not silence out of fear.”** And this line was a dagger to my heart in the best way possible: **“Compassion isn't about avoiding discomfort. It's about expressing your truth with grace.”** So much of our overthinking is just delayed conversations happening in our heads. Having the real conversation, with clarity and grace, is the ultimate act of letting go.
So, what did I learn from Jay Shetty? I learned that my mind is like the seasons, and I need to build a better wardrobe for all its weather. I learned that my thoughts aren't just abstract ghosts; they can be written down and physically released. I learned that my messy desk isn't just a messy desk; it's a contributor to my messy mind. And most importantly, I learned that while I can't avoid the arrows life shoots at me, I have a choice—a real, tangible choice—about whether I shoot the second arrow of suffering into myself.
These aren’t just spiritual ideas. They are practical skills, supported by both ancient texts and modern labs. They’ve given me a framework to understand my own anxiety and, more importantly, actionable tools to work with it.
I’ll leave you with the same sign-off Jay Shetty used, because I think it’s a beautiful sentiment. He said, **“I'm forever in your corner, and I'm always rooting for you.”** And after listening to him, I genuinely believe he means it. And on that note, I’m rooting for you, too.
Thank you for listening. I’m Adam OLeary, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
