Overthinking is getting stuck in repetitive thought loops about a problem or a situation in a way that is unproductive and leads to negative emotions like overwhelm, fear, anxiety, and depression. When you’re thinking about something too much, you can’t think about the other things, so your life gets derailed. This is why overthinking is considered a bad thing.
I, however, don’t believe it’s a bad thing. In this article, I’ll explain why the bulk of learning to stop overthinking is changing your negative attitude about it.
Mental resources are precious
Thinking is not free. It takes attention and energy. We’re wired to pay attention to and think about things important to us. Our thinking is biased toward fulfilling and removing obstacles for our critical evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. In other words, we’re likely to devote much of our mental energy to solving these evolutionarily-relevant problems and goals. The mind prioritizes these problems and goals and tends to think less about other, evolutionarily-irrelevant things.
Therefore, it is rational for you to overthink when deciding what career to choose, what diet to follow, and which life partner to choose. The costs of making the wrong choices in these domains are high. So, you’re wired to think long and hard about these things. They’re directly connected to your critical evolutionarily-relevant goals.
On the other hand, you may not give much thought to how many types of rocks there are, for instance. Why would your mind waste its precious resources on such an evolutionarily irrelevant thing? Unless you are a geologist, of course, and your survival depends on knowing all about rocks. Or maybe you’re a hobbyist rock collector. In that case, something probably occurred in your past that made you value rocks more than the average person. Maybe your grandpa was a hobbyist rock collector and taught you all about rocks. You had a special bond with them that you’re now recreating and reliving through your hobby.
The bottom line is: If you’re overthinking something, it’s probably very important to you.
Learning, probability, and overthinking
People often overthink their past mistakes or future worries. We overthink our past to learn from it. One of the basic functions of the mind is to make sense of our experiences and learn from them. If you keep thinking about your past, you likely haven’t fully processed and learned from it. You should thank your mind for the way it makes you overthink your past, ensuring you pay attention to it and learn from it. If you ignored your past and didn’t overthink it, you wouldn’t learn from it. You’d never grow.
Your mind will not cease the overthinking unless the lessons from the past are hammered home. This ‘hammering home’ of the lessons is necessary because they are crucial and will influence your key future decisions.
Just as we overthink past mistakes and get stuck in regret and ‘Only ifs’, we’re also prone to worrying about the future and getting stuck in ‘What ifs’. The mind is designed to imagine the worst-case scenarios. And that’s a good thing because you wouldn’t know what could go wrong if it didn’t. Whenever my mind comes up with worst-case scenarios, I’m impressed by its predictive power. Its ability to take one little negative event that occurs now and extrapolate it to how it can lead to bigger problems in the future.
The mind doesn’t imagine worst-case scenarios because it’s defective, dysfunctional, or has nothing better to do. As mentioned earlier, mental resources are precious. Whenever we devote extra mental resources to something, we do it for a good reason. The mind imagines worst-case scenarios based on probability. Even if a negative event has a low probability of occurring, that’s still some probability and enough probability for the mind to throw you into a spiral of negative and catastrophic thinking.
An example
Say you fail a job interview and think, “What if I never find a job? What if I go homeless?” Your mind isn’t worrying about these things for nothing. Because you just failed to get a job, it thinks there’s a chance of things going from bad to worse, even if that chance is low. The mind follows a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach for important, evolutionarily relevant goals.
It’s better to alert you about the possibility of never getting a job than not alert you at all. If you’re not alerted, you might go broke and never see it coming, significantly risking your survival. When you’re warned, at least you’ll be on guard and likely take preparatory measures to avoid going broke.
The mind doesn’t overthink negative events that have zero probability of occurring. For example, if you never go out in the wild, you have almost zero chance of getting attacked by a wild animal. So you rarely think about it, let alone overthink it.
Overthinking everything
If it seems that you overthink almost everything, you can rest assured that you’re not doing it for nothing. You’re overthinking everything important to you, and that’s okay. It’s possible that you only pay attention to evolutionarily important life goals, ignoring everything else. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how you’re designed to operate. You may have faced back-to-back critical problems, and there’s too much on your mental plate. You have a lot of things to overthink.
Life is complex. Modern technology and information overload have made it even more complicated. Career, relationships, and health are complex areas to master. People dedicate their entire lives and careers to become coaches in these areas. If you overthink everything, it’s probably because you appreciate the complexity of critical life problems.
If it’s worth thinking about, it’s worth overthinking.
Stopping overthinking
I believe that there’s no such thing as overthinking. We don’t suffer as much from overthinking as we do from not thinking enough. How many times do you hear people saying, after they make a mistake, ‘I wish I had thought it through’ or ‘I wish I had considered all the pros and cons’? You hardly ever hear people regretting putting too much thought into something.
If you’re stuck in an overthinking mode right now, here are some strategies to deal with it:
Keep overthinking
If you’re overthinking, keep going.
Here’s the deal: When your mind encounters a serious problem, it has to drop everything and make you focus on that problem. That’s what rumination is, and its function is to help you understand your situation or problem. Because only when you understand the problem thoroughly can you solve it in the best possible way.
You may think I’m equating problem-solving with overthinking. You’re 100% right. I am because they’re the same thing. The clue lies in the fact that we overthink things that are problems, not irrelevant non-problems like rocks. Those who think that overthinking is not the same as problem-solving are engaging in black-and-white thinking. They’re missing the bigger picture—the gray area between the black and the white, the details. To them, if thinking too much is unproductive, it is overthinking. If it is productive, it is problem-solving.
Problem-solving, especially complex problem-solving that triggers overthinking, is often not a linear process. It doesn’t always have a clear beginning, middle, or end. You can’t always solve problems in a structured, rational, and calm way. In truth, solving complex problems involves a lot of unproductive thinking. It consists of a lot of falling flat on your face and having to go back to the problem to understand it better, as many times as required.
You constantly feel you’re going around in circles. You feel stuck most of the time. It’s a myth that problem-solving isn’t driven by uncertainty. Complex problems are inherently uncertain.1Ward, A., Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2003). Can’t quite commit: Rumination and uncertainty. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 29(1), 96-107. It’s a bigger myth that emotions do not drive it.
Say you’re driving and hear a strange sound coming from your car’s engine. You feel fear and panic. You park your car on the side of the road. You rush to check what’s going on under the bonnet. After much inspection and ‘overthinking’, you find that a plug was loose. You fix it and get back in the car. You start the car and begin driving. No more strange sounds. The fear and panic motivated you to solve the problem before you engaged your rational faculties to solve it.
Don’t see overthinking as a problem because it isn’t. Don’t see your negative thoughts and emotions as problems because they aren’t. They’re just doing what they’re designed to do. Negative moods and emotions are effective at pulling our attention inward, allowing us to spin the problem around in our heads to find a solution.2Forgas, J. P. (2011). The strange cognitive benefits of mild dysphoria: On the evolutionary advantages of not being too happy. In Evolution and the Social Mind (pp. 107-124). Psychology Press. Accepting your negative thoughts and emotions will help you develop a positive relationship with them and improve your mental health.3Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of personality and social psychology, 115(6), 1075.
You don’t have to solve the problem on your own. Seek help if you have to. I’m proud of the fact that whenever someone has discussed their problem with me, I’ve never told them, “You’re overthinking it”. That sentence is not only false but also invalidating.
Once you have hope for solving the problem or get close to solving it, your overthinking will cease because it will have served its purpose.
Healthy distractions
Your mind has dropped everything so you can focus on this severe problem you’re trying to solve. Because you’re feeling stuck, you feel pain. To relieve that pain, you’re likely to indulge in unhealthy distractions or coping mechanisms like binge eating, binge-watching TV, substance abuse, excessive gaming, etc. While these activities will make you feel better in the short term, they will make you feel worse in the long term because you’ll have added more problems to your plate.
Healthy distractions, in contrast, make sense when you’re feeling stuck and feel like your thoughts are going nowhere. Taking a walk, cooking, reading, playing a musical instrument, and other similar hobbies give your mind a break, allowing the problem to sink into your subconscious. You might get struck with an insight to solve your problem when doing something completely unrelated. This again shows that problem-solving is not always a structured, goal-directed activity. You can solve problems while not trying to solve problems.
Reassurance
Much of getting rid of overthinking depends on whether or not you’re successfully able to reassure your mind that you’ll solve the problem, even if you don’t immediately solve it. If you keep thinking about your past, your mind needs reassurance that you’ve learned from it. If you keep worrying about the future, your mind needs reassurance that the negative event it’s worrying about won’t happen, or is unlikely to happen, or you’ll do your best to prevent it.
Thankfully, the mind gets reassured with promises. Promising yourself that you won’t let yourself be disrespected like that again. Promising yourself that you won’t eat unhealthy food in the future and avoid getting fat. But what’s even better are solid action plans with accountability systems. Ask yourself:
‘What can I do right now to develop the skill of assertiveness so I’m not disrespected? And to know how to respond when I am?’
‘How will I know I have developed this skill?’
Similarly,
‘What can I do today to ensure a healthy diet? ’
‘How am I going to track this habit?’
Even though these things require a lot of thinking, once you set up these systems, you won’t overthink these problems. Your mind will rest assured that you have a system in place that consistently solves your important life problems.
Mix in some self-compassion, and you’ll do yourself a huge favor. If you make a mistake, pick yourself back up. It’s not as much about staying on the right track as course-correcting as often as required. When these systems become second nature, you won’t have to course-correct as much.
Another way to reassure yourself when you’re only thinking about the negative side of something is to think about the upside of your negative event. You lost your remote job, and it doesn’t feel good. It shouldn’t feel good. You should overthink it and analyze what went wrong so you don’t make the same mistake, assuming you got fired because of an error on your part. So what? You were already feeling isolated working from home. Now you can apply for an office job and meet more of your social connection needs.
Setting aside ‘worry time’ to worry about things later works to reassure your mind that you’ll work on the problem later. However, it only works for mild problems and worries. It won’t work with severe problems. In that case, you must let your overthinking do what it’s designed to do- disrupt your life so you can focus on the critical issue at hand. It's pointless fighting it.
Over-thinker or critical thinker?
When you think too much about something and your thinking goes nowhere, you’re an over-thinker. When you think too much about something and your thinking produces results, you’re thoughtful, genius, and detail-oriented. Shouldn’t we value the mind’s amazing ability to overthink, regardless of outcome?
To illustrate how overthinking can be good for you, I’ll leave you with a real-life story I came across that had a significant impact on me:
So, this guy got diagnosed with a fatal disease. He was given months to live. However, he wasn’t satisfied with the diagnosis. Yes, he was ‘overthinking’ it. He sought a second opinion from another doctor and got the same diagnosis. He wasn’t a doctor, but he was educated and intelligent. He researched everything he could about his symptoms. Despite not being from the medical field, he devoured research papers and books on his symptoms.
The research took him months, but finally, he thought he had a fair idea of what was going on with him. He didn’t believe he had the fatal disease. He found another doctor who had studied his non-fatal condition extensively. Thankfully, the third doctor disagreed with the first two doctors. This guy’s hard work thinking and overthinking a topic he wasn’t even an expert on finally paid off. He got on a treatment program and got better within months.
Imagine when he was mentally stuck during the research, trying to understand his condition, someone telling him:
“Dude, you’re overthinking it. Listen to the doc and prepare for your last rites.”
Luckily, the guy was right in being unsatisfied with the original diagnosis and thinking that he didn’t have a fatal disease. If he wasn’t, and all his hard work and research had amounted to nothing, everyone would think he was overthinking it. Everyone but me, and hopefully you too, now.
