What Happens When You Over-Think

When you overthink, you worry and ruminate over conversations and actions for far
longer than what is helpful. It’s fine to practice some caution when making big
decisions, but overthinking can kick in even when making small, otherwise meaningless
choices. You may want to talk to some one you don’t know at a party, but as soon as the
thought enters your mind, you just can’t help but think about how the situation could
spiral into chaos. What if you walk over and make a fool out of yourself? What if they
don’t like you, and they tell everyone they don’t like you, and now everyone at the party
hates you? It’s incredibly unlikely this will happen, but your brain convinces you it’s
actually the most likely result of a benign action. You begin to obsess over these
extremely negative outcomes, with no space in your head for any potential positive
results.

Because you subconsciously predict bad outcomes over good ones every time,
overthinking encourages you to be more pessimistic. When you worry about what will
happen if you say this or do that, you come up with only negative answers to the
question. Maybe you also think about potential good outcomes, but they seem much less
liklier than the bad ones. In reality, the balance is completely reversed; your mind leaps
right to the worst case scenario, but this is rarely the most likely outcome. It is more
common to achieve a good or at least natural outcome than it is to have your attempt to
leave your comfort zone end in catastrophic failure, but your mind prioritizes the bad
over the good.

How overthinking Impacts your Thoughts

Overthinking gets you stuck in a cycle of worry. These thought patterns make it harder
to view the world in a enlightened light. You jump to conclusions, shooting yourself
down before you even give yourself a chance to try and before anyone else can do it for
you. You have trouble engaging in situations where you cannot be certain of the
outcome. Your thoughts spiral long into the night, which can lead to insomnia.
Everywhere you turn, fear and anxiety is prevalent.

Irrational Expectations
It’s easy to fear the future when you believe that bad outcomes are so much more
common than good ones. Overthinking just reinforces the irrational outcomes your
mind comes up with and throws away the more rational expectations you should set for
yourself. When your thoughts constantly tell you how situations can go from bad to
worse, it is hard not to see every unknown outcome as a potential bomb waiting for you
to cut the wrong wire.

Irrational expectations can also be directed at yourself. You definitely want to avoid
slipping up as you fear the consequences, so you convince yourself that you must act
perfectly at all times. It is important that Even a small mishap could lead to ruin in your
mind. However, no one can really be perfect. When you force expectations of perfection
on yourself, any minor setback feels like a catastrophe. You are much harder on yourself
than you would be if you recognised that everyone makes mistakes and these mistakes
rarely lead to the terrible outcomes you fret.

Anxiety Over unknown variables

It’s natural to be cautious about the the unknown, but overthinking brings this
circumspection to a whole new level. If you can’t be certain about an outcome even after
thinking it over for minutes or even hours, unknown variables become much more
frightning. This can lead you to avoid having new experiences and reject trying new
things just because you are afraid of the possibility of failure.

Insomnia From Circling Thoughts…

It is hard to fall asleep when you are focused on your worries for the next day, or when
you are endlessly trying to dissect an interaction you had earlier. It is sometimes
possible to distract yourself from anxious thoughts during the day, but at night when
there are no distractions, these thoughts return. You can lay awake in bed for hours
replaying something that happened earlier that day or even many years prior. The more
your thoughts keep you up late, the later you end up sleeping in, throwing off your sleep
cycle. Insomnia can lead to constant fatigue and exhaustion as your mind struggles to
function on a lack of sleep and an unstable sleeping schedule.
As an example, consider someone who are afraid of speaking on the phone. They avoid
making phone calls whenever possible, so they never get any experience with it. In their
minds, speaking on the phone only ever leads to anxiety and discomforts, and they don’t
have any good experiences to disprove their worries with. They perpetuate their fear and
keep themselves locked in the worry cycle, never picking up the phone, without an end
in site.

The Worry Cycle

Worry begets more worry because it keeps you from disproving your fears. When you
are so afraid of a possibility that you don’t even make an attempt, you pass by the
opportunity to ease your worries. The longer you go without facing your fears, the bigger
those fears become in your mind, leading you to worry about them even more.

The Physical Affects of Overthinking

Overthinking doesn’t just impact your mentality. It can also affect your physical well-
being. In some cases, this is because your fear drives you away from healthy activities
like exercise and getting sunlight. For example, maybe you fear being judged while
working out in front of others so you avoid the gym, allowing your physical health to
suffer. More commonly, the physical harm comes in the form of increased stress levels.

Rising Stress Levels

Anxiety raises the production of the stress hormone cortisol in your body. It is okay to
have brief, limited periods of stress, like when you have a big test in school or a project
at work and you need a little extra motivation to get your work done. Consistent levels of
stress, on the other hand, can lead to “serious health problems, such as heart disease,
high blood pressure, diabetes, and other illnesses, including mental disorders such as
depression or anxiety”. The long-term stress that overthinking causes is bad for your
heart, and it can lead to health problems that are really worth worrying over.
Your physical and mental health are connected. Anything that harms your mental well-
being puts more strain on your body in the form of stress, and physical pains can worsen
mental distress. In order to live a healthier life, you must reduce both the physical and
mental harm created by overthinking. In order to do so, you must consider what the of
your issue with overthinking is.Chapter 2: Why You Overthink

People are naturally curious about things that are personally relevant to them. We seek
out answers anywhere we can find them, and when we don’t get a clear answer, we tend
to worry over the question in the back of our minds because we aren’t able to let our
curiosity go. Naturally, our own interactions are very personally relevant, so we are
driven to question them and look for answers. When we don’t get these answers, we go
into overthinking mode.

Overthinking occurs because you cannot reach one answer that you are completely
certain of. Anyone can predict the future, and no one can know what is going on inside
someone else’s head. Because you don’t know how the meeting tomorrow is going to
turn out, or you don’t know what that person you spoke to earlier really thinks of you,
your natural need for an answer drives you to keep working the question over in your
mind. Rather than give you a concrete answer and easing your thoughts, you usually just
end up making your fears worse.

A Desire for Certainty

The less you know about something, the harder it is for you to prepare yourself for it.
Part of overthinking is looking for a reasonable answer for your question, but you’re
working with a data set that is severely lacking. You want to know what will happen if
you go to someone and start talking to them, but until you do, you don’t know enough
about them to figure out how they’ll respond. This is especially true if you’re anxiety and
overthinking drives you to avoid conversations with new people, creating a repetitive
cycle.

If you don’t have any experience or information about a situation, you have to consider
all outcomes equally likely, even whether this isn’t really true. The likelihood that the
person you start talking to will be receptive to conversation seems just as likely as the
chance they might decide they hate you and never want to talk to you again. Because you
can’t no anything for sure, and you won’t let the idea of knowing for sure go, you keep
thinking about the situation long after you should have just made a decision.
Observing Over the Past

Overthinking can also manifest in obsessing over the past the same way you try to
predict the future. If you tend to fixate on past events, you have probably made an
otherwise unremarkable event into a big deal in your head. This let’s the little things in
life take up more headspace than they are really worth.

Obsession over past interactions usually comes from a love to read other people. This
can be common for people with low selfesteem. You want to know how you came off and
what other people think of you, but instead off taking their words at face value, you look
for evidence that points to them secretly hating you. Your own self-critical thoughts are
projected onto others. You replay the situation over and over again in your thoughts,
identifying all the times when you messed up, even though the other person has
probably long since forgotten.

A Lack of Experience

People who overthink tend to worry about things they haven’t done in a long time. The
less experience you have with something, or the longer it’s been since you did something
the easier it is to assume things will go poorly. If you had one bad experience that put
you off something forever, your only memory of the thing you’re avoiding is the bad
experience, with no positive or neutral experiences to balance it out. Every time you
think about it you are inclined to believe that things will go just as badly this time. These
fears are rummaged in self-doubt, which holds you back from comforting the things that
scare you.

Self-Doubt

Every situation could have good outcomes and bad outcomes. Self-doubt is what
convinces you that the bad outcomes are more likely than the good ones. When you
doubt yourself, you immediately assume that a situation will end poorly for you, often
before you even let yourself try. The more you hold yourself back from making an
attempt when a new opportunity comes your way, the more you will incarnate these self-
critical beliefs. This leads to the repetition of thoughts such as, “I’m not good enough to
succeed so I shouldn’t even try,” and, “They were just pretending to like me but really
they can’t stand me.” If you give yourself the chance to prove yourself wrong, you will
continue believing these things to be true, which only makes self-doubt worse and leads
to spiralling negative thoughts.

Spiraling Thoughts

The pattern of behaviour that leads to overthinking is as follows: You encounter a

problem, your brain tries to figure out what will happen now that the problem exists,
and you lack the experience to make an informed decision. You start out by making
reasonable predictions, but your thoughts quickly skew negative as a result of self-
doubts and a lake of confidence. Your thoughts speed up and rapidly spiral downwards,
leading you to the worst possible conclusion rather than ones that are actually more
likely.

You may ask yourself, “So what if I spend more time thinking about things than other
people? Doesn’t that just mean I’m cautious?” But over thinking is more than just to be
cautious. Caution helps us avoid mistakes, while overthinking only gets in our way by
preventing us from taking any action at all.

The real danger of overthinking, the thing that seperates it from more productive
thoughts that might otherwise be vindicated caution over an important decision, is that
overthinking doesn’t help you reach a decision. It leads to inaction through a passive
unwillingness to try and actively prevents you from making a decision. Problem-solving
also involves thinking critically about a problem and trying to predict what might
happen if you try different methods, but the difference here is that “problem-solving
involves thinking about a solution. Overthinking involves dwelling on the problem”
(Morin, 2019, para. 9). This is what makes overthinking so harmful. We think about the
problem, not the possible solutions, so we don’t take action and ultimately end up
hurting ourselves more as a result.Chapter 3: Mental Exercises for Overthinking

You know why overthinking is so bad and why you engage in it, but how do you stop?
When you’re thoughts are racing, the first step is to bring them back under control. Find
ways to bring your thoughts to a halt, at which point you can consider if their helpful,
true thoughts, or if they are just the product of pessimistic thinking.

Mental exercises can help you overcome these negative thought patterns and recenter
your thoughts. When you give yourself space to breath, you keep yourself from getting
wrapped up in your spiraling thoughts. From a calmer perspective, it is easier for you to
take a more rational view of the situation and qwell overthinking.

Slow Your Thoughts With Meditation

Meditation is an excellent way to regain feelings of peace and calm in the middle of
worry and fear. Rather than letting you dwell on your concerns, meditation re-directs
your focus towards things you have control over like your breath and your immediate
surroundings. Concentrating on breathing control forces your mind to snap out of it’s
thought spiral and helps you take a step back from the troubling situation.

Meditation is also useful for grounding yourself more firmly. When you overthink, you
lose yourself in the “what ifs” rather than focusing on what is. Meditation directs your
thoughts to what you are experiencing instead of what you might experience. This
reduces the risk of panic that might otherwise overwhelm you.

Focus on your breathing

Breathing is more powerful than most people believe. There is a reason why an sports
coach or personal trainer might direct their trainees to “breathe through the pain”—
breathing takes our mind off the sources of pain and worry in our lives, weather they are
producing physical pain or emotional pain. Breathing also gives you an outlet for your
stress, as you you can imagine your stress leaving your body with each breath and feel
the change in very real time.