How Widening Your View Can Quiet an Overthinking Mind
In this series, Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, offers reflections from her coaching and mindfulness practice on how people discover insight, meaning, and resilience in the changing landscape of modern life. Her perspective is rooted in years of working with people from many cultures and in a driven curiosity that understands human growth as a life in motion.
What if the way out of overthinking isn’t to think differently, but to see differently? A simple mindfulness exercise, a camera, and an upside-down chair taught me that widening my view could quiet my mind. By moving from tight tunnel vision into the broader spaces of light, shadow, and peripheral awareness, we step away from our internal narratives. This subtle shift transforms how we experience reality, proving that our worries are merely passing clouds in an infinitely larger sky.
A simple exercise in looking
During my mindfulness training, I remember an exercise that involved looking at an ordinary object, noticing its shape, color, and position, then gradually moving my attention away from the object to everything around it. I began noticing what was happening along the edges of my vision, the spaces between things, the light and the shadows, and then the negative space. It became just as much a part of what I was seeing as the objects themselves.
The exercise taught me to focus on the smallest detail, then widen my view to take in the whole room before letting my imagination explore what existed beyond my physical field of view. What was behind me, outside the window, beyond the buildings, and further into the landscape? I couldn’t see any of it from where I was sitting, but I could imagine it, and I became fascinated by how much there was to explore simply by changing where I directed my attention.
From tunnel vision to an open mind
I had no idea then how much this exercise would change how I experienced the world. The world I lived in grew larger. I was more conscious of movement on the edges of my vision, of sounds, and of the light falling on objects. I became more aware of the relationships between things, moving from what had usually felt like tunnel vision to seeing a much greater landscape.
What I hadn’t expected was how it would affect my energy and emotional state. As my attention moved outward, I caught myself stepping away from my ruminating mind and the beliefs I had grown accustomed to using to interpret the world. A ruminating mind, I realized, is not a thinking mind.
I expanded my field of vision, learned, and lost myself. It reminded me of when I was a child, discovering the world, absorbed in everything around me, with each small discovery adding to the last. I was looking, noticing, imagining, and learning, and somewhere in that experience, my energy shifted, opening me to new ways of thinking, being, and questioning. I felt a wonderful sense of peace.
Learning to see like an artist
Walking around with a camera became another way of exploring this. I began photographing whatever caught my attention. I remember photographing a bird’s feather lying next to a pole. Seeing them together, I noticed the pole as something solid and fixed, and the feather as something light, once part of a living creature. It made me think about relationships between people and how we interpret what we see when we place two things side by side.
I often remembered something my art teacher at university had told me. A color is a color when it is next to another color. Put red next to purple, and it looks one way. Put the same red next to green, and it looks different, even though nothing about the red itself has changed.
With my camera, I sometimes moved closer, sometimes further away, or changed my position to contain something else in the frame, and the image changed even though everything was still exactly where it had been. I enjoyed playing with this, looking at the spaces between objects and noticing what happened when I focused on the light rather than the object itself.
When I visited a gallery over 20 years ago, a piece by Swiss artist John Armleder caught my attention. He turned a chair upside down and hung it from the ceiling. I was struck by how something so familiar could lose its function and suddenly become something else simply by being presented differently. A chair is a chair but not a chair. Although I recognized it immediately, I found myself looking at its shape, its lines, and the spaces between its legs rather than thinking about sitting on it.
Armleder’s work reminded me of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 presented an ordinary urinal as a work of art titled Fountain. Duchamp did with a urinal what Armleder did with a chair. In both cases, the artist took the step of inviting the viewer to look at an everyday object in a new way.
What I learned during my mindfulness exercise was that I didn’t need to move objects or turn them upside down. All I needed to do was change where I directed my attention, and I could see the same object differently.
The same sky, a different view
I’ve found the same is true of my thoughts. When I begin overthinking a situation at work or in a relationship, I sometimes imagine myself standing on a hill and looking out at the sky. Straight ahead, there is a cloud with a silver lining, while a slight turn of my head reveals a dark cloud moving toward me, and another turn brings a beautiful patch of blue sky into view. I could look at the dark cloud, convince myself a storm was coming, and perhaps even worry about the rain before it started. I might stay fixed on it, never realizing that blue sky was only a slight turn away. Or I could turn toward the blue sky and decide the weather would remain beautiful. Both views are part of the same sky.
Meanwhile, the clouds keep moving, the light keeps changing, and the weather may turn out differently from anything I imagined.
Beyond first impressions
Something similar happens when we interpret situations or other people’s behavior. One detail catches our attention, and we begin imagining what it means or what might happen next. We can become so convinced by our own interpretation that we stop looking for what else might be there, even though a small change in position or a little more information could give us another way to understand what we have seen.
As I learned to look at the world from different vantage points intentionally, I noticed how it changed the way I worked with my clients. I became more aware of how easy it is to focus on one aspect of someone’s story and miss something more revealing. I began to listen more deeply, my questions became more open-ended, and I grew more accepting of what I could not yet understand. Together, my clients and I could explore further, notice connections we might otherwise have missed, and make space for other possibilities to emerge, rather than assuming that what we first saw was the whole picture.
Of course, we need to make judgments and decisions, and I don’t want to spend my life questioning everything. Still, I have become more comfortable with the idea that I can conclude while remaining open to discovering something new. I might look at the sky and decide the weather will probably remain pleasant, leave the house without an umbrella, and accept that I could be wrong.
The freedom to wander
One thing I particularly enjoy is how imagination comes into play when I look beyond what is immediately in front of me. Sometimes my imagination takes me somewhere unexpected, sometimes it makes me laugh, and sometimes I become so absorbed in what I am noticing that I lose track of whatever had been occupying my thoughts.
I don’t need a reason to do this. There is something liberating about looking at the world from a different platform and letting myself discover something new. I can spend a few moments looking at the light peeking through the curtains, the space between two trees, or the movement of musicians in an orchestra, and find myself feeling quite different from how I felt a few minutes earlier.
Seeing for yourself
Taking a moment to focus on an object and then widening your attention to your peripheral vision and the sounds around you, noticing the spaces, the light, and the shadows, can open up something new. Changing your position, seeing it from another angle, or letting your imagination wander beyond what you can physically see is a simple mental exercise that helps make our thinking more flexible. You might notice and enjoy a few moments when your attention is somewhere other than inside your own thoughts.
When I want to step out of my obsessive thinking, I go back to that feather beside the pole, the red beside the purple and green, and the chair turned upside down. I sometimes wonder how much I miss simply because I don’t stop to look. Seeing differently adds another dimension to how I understand the world, where even the space between two things has meaning. It reminds me that there is a whole world outside my head and that my thoughts are just thoughts.
Read more from Elizabeth Ballin
Elizabeth Ballin, Professional Certified Coach
Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, is an International Coaching Federation (ICF)-accredited professional coach and mindfulness practitioner working globally with people and professionals from many backgrounds. She combines emotional insight, cultural intelligence, and practical structure to support meaningful growth. She brings a lifelong multicultural awareness, deepened by twelve years of coaching across more than twenty cultures, which helps her attune to the emotional and practical realities her clients face. Her writing spans themes such as curiosity, creativity, well-being, communication, judgment, and the inner shifts that support meaningful growth in the complexity of modern life.
