For 35 years I believed one sentence: I'm not smart enough. I never argued with it. I just built my life around it.

So when I finally decided to sit for my GED at 48, my mind went to work. Too late. Too old. What if you fail and everyone knows? I could think about it for hours. What I could not do was open the book.

That is the sneaky thing about overthinking. It feels like preparing, but it is really a way of not starting.

What finally worked was shrinking the first step until it was too small to argue with. I call it the two-minute start.

Pick the thing you keep circling. Then ask: what is the smallest piece of this I could do in two minutes? Not "study." Just "open the book and read one paragraph." Not "write the report." Just "write the title and one sentence." Set a timer for two minutes and begin.

The rule that makes it work: after two minutes, you are allowed to stop. Really. No guilt, no speech. Most of the time you keep going, because the hard part was never the work, it was the door. But if you stop, you still did something, and tomorrow's door is a little lighter.

Overthinking needs a big, foggy task to feed on. Two minutes is too small to be foggy.

If something has been sitting on your mind for weeks, try it today. Two minutes. That is all you owe it.

Find more tools like this in Stop Overthinking: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8B1VC59