You might not have noticed it when it happened, but somewhere along the way, you started living from the neck up.

Overthinking. Analysing. Replaying.

You became your thoughts.

But what happened to the rest of you?

For many, this feels like survival. But it also creates a split: between the mind and the body, the rational and the intuitive, the thinking and the being.

This split has deeper roots than you might think.

In the 17th century, philosopher René Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am,” separating the mind from the body in a way that would go on to shape Western medicine and how we treat mental illness. Consequently, this philosophy shaped a culture that treats the body like a machine and sees emotions, intuition, and felt experience as secondary, or even irrelevant. In other words, we stopped living from the neck down and stopped paying attention to our gut and this came with chronically dire consequences.

This blog explores how counselling and hypnotherapy can help you reunite this division, so you can feel whole again.

The Problem with Living in Your Head

Overthinking isn’t just a habit, it’s a nervous system state. Specifically, it’s a form of sympathetic activation, similar to hypervigilance that I explored in the blog last week.

Throughout history, we have glorified the mind. The most amazing innovations have been entirely credited to the wonderful brains that they birthed from. And quietly, the gut instinct has been kept out of the spotlight. We reward logic, speed, and productivity. We downplay the quiet language of the body all the time: sensations, emotions, intuition. This imbalance frequently shows up in therapy rooms. Clients say things like:

· “I can’t switch my brain off”

· “I don’t know what to do”

· “I can’t stop thinking about...”

· “I wish I could go back and change things”

· “What if...”

Understandably, this is exhausting.

Paradoxically, this mental whirlpool makes you feel like you’re engaged, fully involved in wrestling with decisions, but if anything, you feel more disengaged and less present and connected than ever.

How Did the Body Get Left Behind?

This story is different for everyone. Perhaps you grew up in a household where emotions weren’t welcome. Maybe you learned early on that grades and performances earned approval, raising the stock price of your intellect as well as reinforcing your reliance on it. Or perhaps what you were feeling in the stomach: fear, anxiety, unease, felt too overwhelming, so the brain offered a refuge of capability, an oasis of control, which is ironically, an emotional process.

This makes total sense. When we feel unsafe, the mind can step in to manage, control and plan. It is brilliantly adaptive. Interestingly, neuroimaging research shows that when we experience high levels of bodily anxiety, the brain actually increases its top-down control. However, over time, this very habit can disconnect us from the very cues and internal signals that tell us we are safe right now: the breath, heartbeat, softening belly. Human beings are emotional creatures by design. Emotion is the currency of our connection to each other, the foundation of meaning, and a vital part of how we make decisions. This isn’t an attack on the brain because without our brains we would not have gotten very far, evolutionarily speaking. But we have lost that felt, embodied and relational way of existing along the way.

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary wonderfully conceptualises this battleground of intellect against embodiment, although in reality, it is never as simple or as black and white as that (but we need models to help us understand!). His argument, grounded in neuroscience, outlines that the two hemispheres of the brain serve different roles. The left hemisphere is designed to analyse, categorise, reason and sequence (the emissary). In other words, the left hemisphere is analytical, language-based, and concerned with problem-solving tasks, whereas the right hemisphere is responsible for contextual understanding, meaning and embodied awareness (the master). His book offers a sweeping metaphor: that over centuries of Western philosophical change, from the Renaissance to postmodernism, the emissary has slowly overthrown the master; the left hemisphere has been slowly disconnecting itself from the right hemisphere, leaving it to believe that it is the master, cutting off from meaning, meandering entirely in thought, living anchorless.

McGilchrist often comes back to this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in 1908 which captures the risks of becoming over-identified with reason at the expense of everything else:

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Madness, in Chesterton’s view (“madness” used in a culturally different context), originates not from a lack of logic or rationality, but an overreliance on it, to the dismay of other essential human qualities and perspectives. According to McGilchrist, the left hemisphere clings to abstract reason, even when it no longer reflects reality. A person who suffers from psychotic breaks may be hyper-rational in internal logic but totally disconnected from relational and contextual understanding that the right hemisphere is responsible for.

McGilchrist reflects that in our history, on a society-wide and personal level, we consistently value rational and non-emotive ways of thinking over relational and embodied being. He does not call for a pure right-hemisphere mode of being, but instead, a more balanced integration where the right leads, and the left serves (the right still needs structure, categorisation, precision, discernment).

This philosophical imbalance has a bodily cost. In the therapy room, clients may arrive highly articulate but unable to name what they feel. Or they may be outwardly successful but inwardly numb, living in their heads, disconnected from their own felt experience.

Overthinking, in this light, isn’t just a cognitive habit. It’s a symptom of disconnection. Therapy, then, is not about switching off the mind, but reconnecting it to the rest of you. There is no need to fight your thoughts. You have to help them find their rightful place: as one part of a larger, wiser system. Imagine a backlog of pressure: thoughts literally bottlenecked, as if your mind is flooded but the rest of your body is offline. Therapy aims to gently release that valve, so those thoughts can begin to drain into the body, where they can be felt, processed, and finally integrated.

How Counselling and Hypnotherapy Can Help

There’s no shortage of strategies online for managing overthinking. You may have seen practical and helpful CBT-informed tools like scheduling “worry time,” shifting focus to the present, or challenging abstract thoughts with more concrete, helpful questions. These can be very helpful (Emma McAdam’s video is brilliant) especially in moments of acute spiralling.

Unfortunately, many clients I work with tell me “I know about them but they don’t seem to work for me.” It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, or that the tools are bad, it’s often because the mind is trying to apply strategies to itself without involving the rest of the system, and that is especially difficult to achieve without a guide. When overthinking becomes a long-standing pattern, it often has deeper roots that are typically emotional, relational, and physiological. That’s where therapy comes in. Not to replace the tools, but to help you understand why they’re so hard to use, and what you might need to soften or reconnect internally before they can actually work.

In our work together, we might begin by bringing awareness to how your overthinking functions: when it shows up, what it tends to focus on, and what it might be helping you avoid feeling. From there, the invitation isn’t to silence it, but to expand your awareness by including your breath, your posture, your sensations, and gently exploring the emotional undercurrents that may have been pushed aside. It’s about reconnecting with the whole of your experience, not analysing it, but being with it more fully. In other words, we are gradually letting the right hemisphere take lead because it sees more, feels more and connects more. And when it does, the left hemisphere can serve as it was once designed to: supporting presence with clarity, not replacing it with control.

You don’t need to cut off your head. You just need to come home to the rest of you.

If you’re exhausted from overthinking and want to feel more grounded, more present, and more whole, I offer a free 20-minute discovery call. You don’t need to bring anything but your honest self. We’ll explore whether counselling or hypnotherapy could help you reconnect with your body’s wisdom and bring your mind back into balance.

Book a Consultation

References

Boem, F., Greslehner, G.P., Konsman, J.P., & Chiu, L. (2024). Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex. Frontiers in Neuroscience. 17:1172783.

Bouziane, I., Das, M., Friston, K.J., Caballero-Gaudes, C., & Ray, D. (2022). Enhanced top-down sensorimotor processing in somatic anxiety. Translational Psychiatry. 12(295).

Bruning, A.L., Mallya, M.M., & Lewis-Peacock, J.A. (2023). Rumination burdens the updating of working memory. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 85, pp. 1452–1460.

Kearney, B.E., & Lanius, R.A. (2022). The brain-body disconnect: A somatic sensory basis for trauma-related disorders. Frontiers in Neuroscience. 16:1015749.

Chesterton, G.K. (1908). Orthodoxy. London: John Lane.

Correll, J. (2022). Descartes’ Dualism and Its Influence on Our Medical System. SUURJ: Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal. 6(11). Available at: https://scholarworks.seattleu.edu/suurj/vol6/iss1/11. [Accessed: 02 August 2025].

Dunn, B.D., Stefanovitch, I., Evans, D., Oliver, C., Hawkins, A., & Dalgleish, T. (2010). Can you feel the beat? Interoceptive awareness is an interactive function of anxiety- and depression-specific symptom dimensions. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 48(11), pp. 1133-1138.

Foster, B. (2025a). Therapy for anxiety: Beyond labels. Ben Foster Therapy. Available at: https://www.benfostertherapy.com/blogs/therapy-for-anxiety-beyond-labels. [Accessed: 02 August 2025].

Foster, B. (2025b). When You Feel Like You’re Not Enough: How Hypnotherapy Helps Rebuild Self-Worth. Ben Foster Therapy. Available at: https://www.benfostertherapy.com/blogs/how-hypnotherapy-helps-rebuild-self-worth. [Accessed: 02 August 2025].

Foster, B. (2025c). Why Can’t I Relax? Uncovering Hypervigilance and How to Feel Safe. Ben Foster Therapy. Available at: https://www.benfostertherapy.com/blogs/why-cant-i-relax. [Accessed: 02 August 2025].

Inzlicht, M., Bartholow, B.D., & Hirsh, J.B. (2015). Emotional foundations of cognitive control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 19(3), pp. 126-132.

McAdam, E. (2022). 5 CBT Techniques That Work Immediately. [online video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK2LaefZcy8. [Accessed: 02 August 2025].

McGilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary. Yale University Press.

Salomonsson, S., Santoft, F., Lindsäter, E., Ejeby, K., Ingvar, M., Öst, L. G., Lekander, M., Ljótsson, B., & Hedman-Lagerlöf, E. (2019). Predictors of outcome in guided self-help cognitive behavioural therapy for common mental disorders in primary care. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. 49(6), pp. 455–474.

Tang, W., & Kreindler, D. (2017). Supporting Homework Compliance in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Essential Features of Mobile Apps. JMIR Ment Health. 4(2):e20.

How to Stop Overthinking (Without Cutting Off Your Head): Reconnecting Mind, Body and Intuition

Links