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The Belief That Keeps Overthinkers Thinking
Overthinking may be held in place less by how much we think than by what we believe our thinking does for us.
It is late, the day is finally over, and your mind decides now is the time to go back through it. The thing you said in a meeting. The message you sent and the reply that has not come. The decision you made at lunch that seemed fine at the time and now, at midnight, looks like the start of a problem. You run the conversation again, with better lines. Then again.
Most people know this loop. Psychologists have a less dramatic name for it: repetitive negative thinking, an umbrella term for rumination (going over the past, and what our feelings mean) and worry (rehearsing what could go wrong in the future). Researchers define it as thinking that is repetitive, passive or hard to control, and focused on negative content.
The usual advice is some version of “stop overthinking”. It rarely works, and there is a reasonably well-supported explanation for why.
Why “just stop thinking” fails
If overthinking were simply a matter of having too many thoughts, the fix would be to think less. But the people who study it have long suspected the problem sits one level up: not in the thoughts themselves, but…
