How to get out of your head

Escape overthinking. Get out of your head. Honor constant transformation. Raise humility over ego. This week: on presence, action, and financial wisdom.

Feb 07, 2026

February 7th, 2026 - Issue #153 - read online

👋 Welcome to Pursuit—your weekly pause for intentional living, self-discovery, and inner clarity. My name is Amir, and every week I share four carefully chosen ideas to help you design a more fulfilling life.

This week’s reflections:

🧘 Seven steps to escape overthinking
🎯 How to get out of your head
🌊 The seven-year rule
💰 Want less, save more

🧘 Seven steps to escape overthinking

A few weeks ago, because of a recommendation from a dear friend, I started a course called Inner Engineering by Sadhguru. And after even a few sessions sitting down listening to the teachings, I felt a change in my mind and how I see life. And now, when I came back to this piece from Eckhart Tolle on escaping overthinking, I saw the similarities between some of the techniques and approaches that are explained by both of these great men on how to detach yourself from your thinking and mind. Here’s a quick seven steps that you could always remind yourself to escape overthinking.

Step 1: Witness Consciousness

Don’t just “be aware” of thoughts—create deliberate distance by labeling them: “Having a thought about failure” instead of “I’m going to fail.”

Step 2: Pattern Interruption

Tolle recommends a specific technique: When caught in rumination, focus on your hands for 30 seconds. Feel the subtle energy or tingling sensation in your palms. This instantly shifts brain activity from Beta to Alpha waves, breaking thought loops.

Step 3: The Power of Pause

When negative thoughts arise, wait 90 seconds before responding.

Step 4: The Reality Test

Ask: “Is this thought happening in physical reality right now?” Not “Is this thought true?” (which keeps you in thought).

Step 5: Body Anchoring

Instead of general “body awareness,” Tolle recommends feeling your inner energy field: The tingling life-energy inside your hands, feet, and entire body. This creates what neuroscientists call “embodied cognition”—thinking from your whole nervous system.

Step 6: Radical Acceptance

Don’t just “accept what is”—Tolle teaches saying “yes” to the feeling of resistance itself. When you feel yourself fighting reality, accept the fighting. This paradoxical approach dissolves the ego’s oppositional nature at its root.

Step 7: Present Moment Anchoring

Rather than trying to “be present,” Tolle suggests focusing on one sense perception completely: The sound of water, the sensation of breath, the feeling of air on skin. This creates what he calls “portals to presence”—gateways beyond thinking.

He’s revealing that your true identity isn’t your thinking mind at all. You are the awareness behind thoughts—unchanging, peaceful, and whole.

As you practice this protocol, you’ll experience something remarkable: The space between your thoughts grows wider. In that space, you’ll find what you’ve been searching for all along.

🎯 How to get out of your head

High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together: clear thinking, bias to action, and disagreeability.

High agency is like a tricycle. If you remove one of the wheels, it stops working.

The human brain is a question-answering machine. If you ask it: “What’s good in my life?”—it will find answers. If you ask it: “What’s bad in my life?”—it will find answers.

Thoughts feel so real in the moment and then disappear into the memory abyss. Most thoughts aren’t even clear sentences. It’s a series of emotional GIFs, JPEGs and prompts bouncing around consciousness like a random Tumblr page.

Write your thoughts down. Draw the problem. Use a whiteboard. Create a spreadsheet. Talk out loud to a smart person. Go for a walk or run with a specific question.

The act of transforming out of your head to another medium acts like a filtration system, removing the vague mud from your thinking. Each time you transform your thoughts out of your head, keep trying to refine problems and solutions in the simplest, clearest, most specific language possible.

Vague question: What career should I choose?

Specific question: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What’s the gap between my current week and the dream/nightmare week?

🌊 The seven-year rule

The version of you that will exist seven years from now hasn’t formed yet. So why not focus your energy and attention on the present moment?

As you read these words, you are uniquely yourself, different from who you were a moment ago and who you’ll become in the next. By embracing this present version of yourself, you release yourself from the bonds of history while simultaneously doing the greatest possible favor to your future self.

We exist in a perpetual state of transformation: cellular, psychological, and spiritual. When we recognize and honor this constant evolution, we free ourselves to live more fully in the eternal now.

💰 Want less, save more

Happiness with money starts by wanting less. When you learn to be content below your means, you create the same gap others chase by growing their income, only with more control and less stress. A high savings rate is simply lower expenses. Lower expenses make every euro you save stretch further.

Past a certain income, most extra spending sits just beneath the ego. The basics matter. Comfort matters. Beyond that, much of what we buy is signaling. Raise humility and you raise your savings. Define savings as the distance between your income and your ego and you see why many high earners save so little. Peacock instincts turn into an arms race of social proof. People who do well over time tend to care less about what others think. That quiet confidence lets them use money more efficiently.

Saving is more in your control than it feels. Many people say, “My costs are so high I cannot save,” and then repeat the story at every income level. You can spend less if you desire less. You will desire less when you stop outsourcing your self-worth to other people’s opinions.

You also do not need a specific reason to save. Goals like a home, a car, or retirement are great. They are not the only reason to build a cushion. We do not live in a predictable world. Careers shift. Families change. Economies lurch. Saving for its own sake is a form of respect for the future you cannot see yet.

🎵 Music I’m listening to

You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:

🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶

🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments