Burning Thought Calories

I catch myself regularly getting mentally tense. I have conversations with people I know in my head, I try to explain things to myself in my head, I tell myself to shut up in my head. It's not like I see these people as hallucinations and I don't suffer from multiple personalities. I just have this obsession to solve, to fix, to be right, to understand, to abstract, to be perfect. I re-live old conversations and add in what I think I should have said. I imagine writing letters or giving speeches that would change a persons perspective. I preach these soliloquies that try to prove to myself that I understand an understanding that cannot be expressed in words. The calories I have burned on these thought processes over my lifetime could have fed a small village. I am learning how to stop. I am learning how to recognize, relax, and clear the mind. Helps me fall asleep better at least. Tends to start up early in the morning again. I have difficulty relaxing it during the day. I'm not interested in medicating with mood alteration any longer. I think I need a creative outlet. Yesterday I decided that today was to be dedicated to creativity. The trouble is that I am not proficient enough in any artistic genre to truly make a channel from myself to my work bypassing my eternal critic. Perhaps thought itself is my art. Maybe I am looking at this all wrong and the problem is not the voice but the audience. Speak up rather than shut up? Sometimes at least.