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Mind Under Control: How To Stop Overthinking in 2025
You’ve been there: you get into bed at night, start thinking about your next work task, and soon find yourself analyzing the crushing climate. The outcome? Stress. Anxiety. Insomnia.
But it doesn’t have to be that way in 2025. What if we tell you there are proven techniques to stop overthinking and lead a more peaceful life? Let’s dive into that in this piece.
What Is Overthinking—And Why It Does You No Good
Overthinking is basically being trapped in a loop of thoughts—mostly negative ones. Overthinkers might find themselves constantly analyzing the past or fearing the future. It’s like living in your head all the time instead of actually enjoying your life.
Anxiety is overthinking one’s best friend. When negative thoughts persist, you might feel increasingly stressed unable to make life moves and decisions. Focusing on negativity may also lead to sleep issues.
Let’s look at five tips that will help you beat overthinking.
How To Stop Overthinking: 5 Essential Tips
Note these ideas and try them today—you’ll see how your overthinking loop is decreasing.
1. Try Mindfulness
Meditation is the greatest tool for beating overthinking. It works pretty simple: take five undistracted minutes, close your eyes, and start breathing. Notice your thoughts, feelings, and surrounding noises.
The trick is not to stop your thoughts but to feel at ease.
Going deeper into your practice, you can also try yoga and guided meditations with apps.
2. Get moving
Though not an obvious way to fight overthinking, physical activity can be a perfect way to handle the clutter in your mind. It is not about hitting the gym exactly. A pleasant daily walk in the park, dancing, a good stretch, or a fun sports game with friends—anything you sincerely enjoy would do perfectly.
3. Set Time Limits
Okay, if you want to overthink, just do it. But try to set a specific amount of time for that. Right before you go to bed, take 10 minutes and start overthinking. As weird as that may sound, this practice is set to bring you peace of mind afterward. It’s like an intensive workout for the brain.
Instead of fearing overthinking, allow yourself to feel everything you want to feel. Once you’re done, notice how you feel. After such a practice, your brain will feel lighter. But remember: just 10 minutes a day is enough. Go live your life.
4. Write It Out
A problem put on paper is a problem half-solved. Make journaling a part of your daily routine, like sleeping or eating healthy meals. Take your favorite notebook, make calming tea, and start writing.
What’s bothering you right now? Why? What can you do about it?
Once written, your thoughts wouldn’t seem so daunting. Give it a try—this works.
5. Seek Support
Feeling overwhelmed? Talk to a friend. Call your mother. Chat with your cat. You don’t have to leave all the negative thoughts to yourself and get buried in them. Just share what’s bothering you with your close ones, and you’ll feel better. You can also talk to your therapist if the thoughts become too persistent.
When you have no one to talk to, apps like Liven can become your go-to solution. AI-powered assistants are there for you when you need them most—24/7, without judgment.
6. Practice Positive Affirmations
Insta bloggers trying affirmations often seem too quiet, and that’s for a reason. It’s proven that positive self-talk encourages good mood and makes you more self-reliant. It’s best to do it right before you go to sleep. Just say to yourself: “I am in control of my thoughts,” “I am capable,” “I love and support myself”.
You can also create a dedicated poster for your room with your favourite affirmation to remind yourself occasionally.
The bottom line is that negative thoughts don’t define you, and overthinking happens even to the best of us. With the right coping techniques, you can lead a happier life
An early PET scan after one cycle of chemotherapy may help predict how aggressive breast cancer responds to treatment, a study suggests.
Research led by The Institute of Cancer Research, London and King’s College London suggests that an early scan taken after one cycle of chemotherapy could help predict how well a patient’s cancer will respond to treatment.
The study focused on patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive form of the disease in which cancer cells lack receptors for the hormones oestrogen and progesterone, as well as the HER2 protein.
Patients with TNBC are usually treated with chemotherapy prior to surgery. While many respond well, residual disease at surgery, typically around six months later, is associated with a significantly poorer prognosis. Identifying people sooner who are unlikely to respond remains a major clinical challenge.
The research explored whether using PET imaging shortly after treatment begins, rather than relying only on MRI scans later in the treatment process, could provide earlier insight into how a patient’s cancer is responding. Twenty-two patients were recruited, with fourteen undergoing FDG-PET scans before treatment and after the first cycle of chemotherapy.
The findings, published in Clinical Cancer Research, showed that changes seen on PET scans after just one cycle of chemotherapy were strongly associated with subsequent response, including whether there was no detectable cancer, known as a complete response, by the end of treatment. Importantly, early PET response showed stronger associations with treatment outcomes than standard mid-treatment MRI scans in this study.
Being able to identify patients who are not responding well at an early stage could allow clinicians to adjust treatment sooner or consider alternative approaches. These findings may also support future strategies to better tailor treatment intensity to individual patients.
The study also compared two types of PET tracers, FDG and FLT, to determine which was most suitable. While both met the study’s technical criteria, FDG-PET was selected for further evaluation due to its better image quality, greater consistency and wider use in clinical practice.
The research also explored how imaging changes after just one cycle of chemotherapy relate to the body’s immune response to treatment. Biopsies taken before and after the first cycle of chemotherapy showed that an increase in immune cells within the tumour was strongly associated with both early PET changes and improved treatment outcomes.
The researchers emphasise that these findings now need to be validated in larger studies. Future work will aim to confirm these results in broader patient groups and explore more accessible imaging approaches, such as ultrasound, alongside PET and MRI.
Sheeba Irshad, professor of cancer immunology at King’s College London and lead of the Breast Cancer Now KCL Research Unit, said:
“In patients who had PET scans both before treatment and after the first cycle, we found that this early scan could predict whether they were likely to achieve a complete response by the end of treatment. These findings highlight the potential of early imaging to guide treatment decisions, and now need to be validated in larger, modern clinical trials.”
Andrew Tutt, professor of breast oncology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said:
“Research that helps us determine early who is already benefitting from standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy and who might benefit from clinical trials to find better treatments is vital. This study shows that FDG-PET may have great value in this regard. We hope to be able to design studies that further investigate and validate these findings.”
The study was supported by funding from King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Breast Cancer Now, Cancer Research UK, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity.
We are excited unveil the three finalists competing for one of the Femtech World Awards’ most coveted honours: the Startup of the Year Award, sponsored by Future Fertility.
This award celebrates an early-stage company making a bold impact in women’s health through innovation, vision and execution.
The winner will be announced at our virtual ceremony on 19 June, with the decision made by a representative from category sponsor Future Fertility.
Congratulations to the shortlist and thank you to everyone who entered or nominated.
Startup of the Year Shortlist
Hello Inside is the first women’s health AI company to turn daily metabolic signals into outcomes women feel and healthcare systems reimburse.
Women’s health has long been under-researched, and current AI benchmarks fail on women’s health questions roughly sixty percent of the time.
Hello Inside built the architecture to close that gap.
Across four years and 12,000+ validated metabolic profiles, three in four women improve at least one symptom within ninety days.
They lose four kilograms in three months, moving from overweight into the healthy range. In a clinical study with Alisa Vitti’s Flo Living, 91.9 per cent reduced PMS burden within sixty days.
U-Ploid is an early-stage biotechnology company tackling one of the most fundamental challenges in fertility care: the sharp, age-related decline in egg quality that limits outcomes across IVF and egg freezing.
While much of the field focuses on improving assessment and selection, U-Ploid is developing a first-in-class therapeutic approach designed to improve egg quality itself by addressing the biological causes of age-related chromosomal errors.
Supported by strong preclinical evidence and now advancing into human studies, U-Ploid combines scientific rigour, regulatory discipline and long-term vision to help redefine what is possible in fertility care.
Gestational diabetes is a strong risk factor for future type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal pre-pregnancy weight, according to a study at the University of Gothenburg.
The researchers call for earlier testing and better follow-up.
“Our results show that gestational diabetes functions as a kind of stress test for the body’s ability to manage blood sugar, and identifies women with a greatly increased risk of future type 2 diabetes”, said Jon Edqvist, PhD and affiliated to research at the University of Gothenburg, and operating room nurse at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Gestational diabetes is a special type of diabetes that can affect pregnant women.
The condition is defined as elevated blood sugar levels, without previously known diabetes. Treatment involves self-monitoring of blood sugar, advice on lifestyle habits and, if necessary, medication.
Identifying gestational diabetes is important because the disease increases the risk of complications such as preeclampsia, the need for a cesarean section and high birth weight for the baby.
Those who have had gestational diabetes are also at higher risk of later developing type 2 diabetes.
In the current study, published in eClinicalMedicine, researchers now show that gestational diabetes is a strong indicator of future risk of developing type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal weight before pregnancy.
Elevated risk even with normal weight
The study is based on data from the Medical Birth Registry on just over 1.15 million first-time mothers in Sweden, who gave birth between 1987 and 2019. 16,870 women with confirmed gestational diabetes were compared with age-matched women without the diagnosis. The median follow-up period was nine years.
The results show that women with a BMI of 35 and above, i.e. severe obesity, had an almost tenfold increased risk of developing gestational diabetes compared to women with normal weight.
The risk of subsequent type 2 diabetes also increased with higher BMI, but it was significantly increased even with normal weight, which the researchers describe as particularly worrying.
More follow-up and more studies
The researchers behind the study welcome the recently updated recommendations on gestational diabetes in Sweden, where a higher proportion of pregnant women at increased risk are expected to be offered testing earlier in pregnancy, and if necessary, interventions.
“Diagnostics and care of gestational diabetes have looked very different in different parts of the country,” said Annika Rosengren, professor at the University of Gothenburg.
“There is a need for both improved follow-up after gestational diabetes, and more studies that investigate how such follow-up affects future health and prognosis”
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