[1] You have likely experienced some form of the late-night mental loop: replaying a terse exchange with a classmate, wondering about a loved one’s subtle shift in tone or worrying about a symptom you googled. Overthinking has become a modern buzzword blamed for wrecking everything from your emotional well-being to personal relationships. It is an aimless loop driven by negative, repetitive thoughts that offer no resolution.
[2] “Overthinkers go over and over their negative thoughts and feelings, examining them, questioning them,” wrote the late Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema in Women Who Think Too Much, a landmark book on the subject. Questions lead to more questions, she said, causing negative thoughts to multiply and spread.
[3] Overthinking consists of two elements plus a process. Rumination is the most common form of overthinking; it involves pondering past events in a negative way. For instance, feeling anxious about a conversation in which you might have said the wrong thing to somebody is rumination. Worry, another cause of overthinking, involves obsessing over future events. Both must feature a process called repetitive negative thinking. The negative thoughts keep repeating over and over, are difficult to disengage from, and start to consume all of the thinker’s time and energy.
[4] Unlike constructive problem-solving, overthinking has no clear endpoint. “Overthinking does not lead to solutions or insight,” Nolen-Hoeksema wrote. Instead, she explained, it creates a distorted filter that draws our attention exclusively to what is going wrong in our lives while giving us the false impression that we are gaining clarity. She also wrote that overthinking warps our view of ourselves and our life, and can obscure the fact that things might actually be going quite well.
[5] Overthinking feeds on itself. One way psychologists have explained this is through associative networks. We do not store thoughts and memories as isolated items, but link them together by their meaning, emotion and experience. So, put simply, a thought can bring similar types of thought to mind.
[6] If a thought is negative, it can pull up other negative thoughts, leading to a worsening mood. That bad mood then makes more negative thoughts available, and the process continues. The result is a spiral – the more the mind runs negative thoughts, the more material it finds to keep the loop of negativity going.
[7] There are self-help techniques available. Just realising that you are overthinking – and naming what you are doing as such – is a good start, as labelling something can often distance you from it. Writing down your fears and concerns can be useful, as the writing process can feel like you are giving them away, removing you from them. They can also sometimes appear ridiculous when you see them written down.
[8] Distract yourself from the overthinking process by doing something you enjoy. If you find you simply cannot stop overthinking, schedule a time for it to take place. Many overthinkers find that when that time arrives, their compulsion to overthink disappears.
Source: South China Morning Post, August 15
