How do I stop overthinking as I overthink all the time and it causes panic attacks

Overthinking is a major cause of anxiety and can lead to panic attacks.  Let's look at anxiety first.  Anxiety in itself is necessary for life.  We all need some anxiety to prepare and function in life.  For example, anxiety causes us to get up and go to work and anxiety would cause you to prepare for a work assignment or school assignment.  Otherwise, you would not go to work or prepare leading to poor life outcomes.  However, unhealthy anxiety can be paralyzing and leads to all sorts of health problems and even panic attacks.  When we face anxiety in our life, we have two choices.  We can choose to face the anxiety or avoid the anxiety.  When we avoid what is causing the anxiety, it temporarily causes a relief of anxiety but it always builds more anxiety toward a similar situation in the future.  Avoidant behaviors over time can cause situations that led to manageable anxiety to have extreme anxiety.  So, the healthiest approach is to learn to manage anxiety. 

Managing anxiety can be done using several methods.  First, we need to be able to self soothe in the moment.  The most common way to self soothe is through mindfulness and grounding exercises.  In grounding exercises, we do activities that focuses on moving our anxious thoughts to our other five senses.  A simple one is 5-4-3-2-1.  In this grounding exercise, we name 5 things that we see, we close our eyes and focus on being able to feel 4 different textures, we keep our eyes closed and focus on 3 things we can hear, we continue with 2 things that we smell, and then 1 thing we can taste.  What makes this and any grounding activity successful is that we are changing our attention from the anxious thoughts to our other 5 senses.   There are many other grounding exercises, from mindful eating, to taking a hot shower, to putting our hands into cold water.  In any grounding exercise, we are putting our focus into our other senses thereby calming our racing thoughts. 

We can also utilize thought blocking techniques to break a series of anxious thoughts.  Visualizing a stop sign in our mind or counting down from 100 in our minds (seeing the numbers) are examples of ways we temporarily break our train of thought.  The other key to fighting our anxiety is to identify patterns of anxious thinking.  You can think of your emotions (in this case anxiety) as the product of your thinking and behaviors.   You can't tell yourself how to feel differently because that does nor work.  So we have to address the negative emotion in the thinking process.  We can learn to identify and challenge our thinking patterns.  Some thinking patterns known to increase anxiety are cognitive distortions.  As the title suggests, these are ways of thinking that are common but distorted.  Examples would include:

• Polarized thinking where we see things in extremes with little room for the grey in between.  We may overgeneralize things and take one single event and project it over wide swaths of our lives.  For example, we make one mistake at work and overgeneralize by saying to ourselves "I always mess up" or "I will never get this right." 
• Catastrophizing is when we take an event to the worst possible outcome.  Say I mess up at work, then I could catastrophize that I will lose my job, be unable to find another job, not be able to pay my rent, and be homeless. 
• Emotional reasoning is where we take how we feel and make that our reality.  I feel bad so I must be bad.   Many times we discount the positive things about us and only see the negative things.  Say I give a speech and get positive feedback from 12 people and negative feedback from 1.  I may just focus on the one criticism and ignore all the positive. 

In our thoughts, we have to look for words that show extremity or expectations in our thinking.  Anxiety words would include should, must, always, never, and every.  Very rarely does something always or never happen.  When we say should statements, we build constant expectations in our lives and are often disappointed or feel that we did not measure up.  In all of these patterns of thinking, we need to learn how to challenge what we say to ourselves.  As we learn to capture our thoughts, we can reframe situations, challenge the validity of what we are thinking, and more logically think through situations.   If we go on autopilot, we tend to just stay in these thoughts and build more and more anxiety. 

Anxiety can come from many sources.  It is common that anxiety comes from  unhelpful beliefs about ourselves.  If I have negative beliefs about myself such as "I'm not good enough" then situations in my life are filtered through that belief system.  Automatic thoughts are produced when we face situations and filter those situations through what I believe about myself, others, and the world.  Therapy helps to identify unhelpful belief systems and start to challenge how you see yourself.   As our beliefs are challenged and proven more unhelpful and untrue, they start to chip away.  As beliefs change, then automatic thoughts change.  Therapy helps you gain the tools necessary to address unhelpful beliefs and thinking patterns.  Therapy can also give you the opportunity to dig deeper into your past and address some of the underlying issues and life experiences that built your belief system.  As such, trauma can be a major cause of anxiety and even panic attacks.  If you have unaddressed trauma, then you can be triggered by external and internal things that remind you of the past traumatic experience.  When you are triggered, the reactivity from the past transfers into the present.  The result can be very strong emotional experiences and even panic attacks.  Therapy helps you to deal with these things so you can have more serenity in the present.