Are you Overthinking?
You might know this pattern well. A problem arrives, a decision gets made, or a difficult conversation ends Yet your mind won’t let it go: it loops around the problem, checks and rechecks the decision, or replays the exchange – again and again. Using a voice inside your head that sounds like yours. Before too long the problem has turned into four problems, the decision replaced by three new decisions, and the conversation into a long list of things you should’ve said but didn’t. Worst case: you might end up with analysis-paralysis, in which you feel overwhelmed by worry.
Friends tell you to stop thinking about it, which is a bit like telling a kettle to stop boiling by staring at the switch. The advice is not wrong so much as beside the point: nobody overthinks on purpose, and nobody has ever stopped by trying harder to stop. In fact, trying to stop often makes things worse – your mind answers with more anxious thoughts about why you might be missing something important.
A small, correctional point: the problem is misnamed. No one person thinks more than any other – every human being has roughly the same number of big thoughts each day (roughly 6,200). What we call ‘overthinking’ relates to over-involvement with certain, specific thoughts – the brain is unable to let them go and keeps looping round them.
How Overthinking Works
In more than three decades of clinic work, overthinking is one of the most common problems I hear about. From the executive worried about a merger, the new mother auditing her own competence at two in the morning, the retired teacher rehearsing an argument that happened four decades. What they share is not a chemical imbalance or a character flaw. It is a mind doing an old job in the wrong century: scanning for threat, generating worries, and predicting disaster if you don’t get it all exactly right.
Three systems in your brain are engaged on that. In FLOAT, the book I published this year, I call these the Threat Detector, the Analyst and the Storyteller. The first generates the feeling of alarm; the second the worries; the third the endless stories about where how it might all turn out.
Why can’t I just stop thinking about it?
Because thinking is precisely the tool your mind reaches for whenever it detects a problem. But when anxiety is present ordinary thinking skills turn into a self-defeating loop. When the Threat detector keeps pressing the alarm button the Analyst tries ever more frantically to find some answers. But each ‘answer’ generates another worry that it isn’t good enough. And so the loop continues.
It is important to understand that the overthinking pattern isn’t created by you. Rather, it is a brain-generated habit grounded in over-sensitivity to threat. If you ask the Analyst to stop over-analysing you are simply giving it a new task: which is to work out why you (it) can’t stop. Which creates another rabbit-hole.
This is the reason willpower fails, since you are using the same system to try to override itself. When overthinking continues most people conclude they lack ‘self-discipline’, which is the wrong diagnosis. The way out is not a better argument with your own thoughts, or with yourself. It is a different relationship to them, which is a slower, less dramatic thing to learn, and considerably more reliable.
Is overthinking the same thing as anxiety?
Closely related, but they are not identical. Anxiety is largely what the Threat Detector produces: a felt sense of danger, often with a racing heart to match. Overthinking is largely the Analyst’s contribution, the mental activity that follows once the alarm has sounded, or sometimes runs ahead of it, trying to head trouble off by working everything out in advance. But, as the previous paragraph describes, these two circuits play off each other – the anxiety fuels the thought loops, while the failure to find final solutions fuels more anxiety.
Why do I overthink even small, unimportant decisions?
Because the system has no dial that turns down for low stakes. A brain built to weigh survival decisions in the wild will apply the same apparatus to a choice of email sign-off, with total sincerity and no sense of the dis-proportion involved. Clients are often embarrassed by this, as though obsessing over an unimportant text message proves them shallow. It proves nothing of the sort. It proves the machinery is running exactly as designed for genuine threats, except it is now applied to relatively trivial problems.
Does overthinking mean there’s something wrong with me?
No, though it is a reasonable question to ask, given how much the self-improvement culture around us encourages it. Overthinking is not a diagnosis and not a character defect; it is closer to a habit of relating to your own thoughts, formed early and reinforced daily by a mind convinced that one more round of analysis will finally deliver certainty. I say this partly from the clinic and partly from experience: I spent a fair portion of my youth treating an unmade decision as an emergency requiring immediate mental resolution, usually at four in the morning, and it took me some years to notice that the emergency was manufactured rather than real.
What’s the difference between useful thinking and overthinking?
Useful thinking ends. It gathers what it needs, reaches a workable conclusion, takes action – and lets the mind move on to something else. Overthinking has no natural stopping point, because its underlying aim was never truly to solve anything; it was to feel certain, and certainty is not on offer, however many more laps you take. One test I sometimes offer clients is this: has this round of thinking produced any new information? If the answer is no, and you are on your fourth or fifth pass, you are no longer thinking. You are looping.
What’s the actual way out of the overthinking loop?
Not by winning the argument with your own mind, which cannot be won, and not by suppressing the thoughts, which tends to make them louder. The way I teach, drawing on acceptance-based approaches and the Float method I describe in the book, starts with noticing the loop as it happens rather than being fully inside it: a shift from thinking to watching yourself think. From there it becomes possible to let a thought finish its sentence without following it down every corridor it offers.
This sits alongside more familiar approaches rather than replacing them. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is very good at catching and challenging the content of specific thoughts; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is good at changing your relationship to them altogether. I draw on both, and on Solution-Focused work when the aim is a practical next step rather than more analysis. None of this happens by force of will in a single session, and I would be doing you no favours if I promised otherwise. It happens through practice, with someone experienced enough to notice when you have quietly gone back to arguing with yourself.
For more advice on overthinking read my new book – Float: Exiting the Anxiety-Stress LoopÂ
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