Here is the thing nobody mentions about overthinking: the instruction to stop overthinking requires thinking. Specifically, it requires you to monitor your thoughts to check whether you're still overthinking, which means you are still thinking about the thought, which is — well, you see the issue.
"Just stop overthinking" sits alongside "just calm down" and "have you tried not being anxious" in the category of advice that is technically correct and practically useless.
So let's try a different approach.
What overthinking actually is
Overthinking is not primarily a thinking problem. It is an anxiety problem that expresses itself through thought. Your mind is running multiple scenarios, examining every angle, considering every potential outcome — not because it's particularly interested in analysis, but because it's trying to find the one combination of variables that will make the uncertainty stop.
That's the key word: uncertainty. Overthinking is what the anxious mind does with uncertainty. If I can just think this through completely enough, I will have covered all the eventualities. I will be prepared. I will be safe.
The analysis is an attempt at control over something uncontrollable. And because certainty is genuinely not available — about decisions, people, futures, outcomes — the thinking never quite finishes. There's always one more angle that hasn't been covered.
The decision-making version
Overthinking in the context of decisions is particularly sticky. You gather information. Then more information. You weigh the options. You reweigh them. You consult people. Their different opinions create new variables. You weigh those. You consider what you might regret. You consider what you'd tell a friend. You consider what future-you would want. You're still there an hour later having generated an impressive spreadsheet of considerations and moved not one inch closer to the actual decision.
Here's a useful thing to know: research suggests that most decisions benefit from deliberation up to a point, and then from stopping. The additional analysis beyond that point does not improve the decision — it just delays it, and delays tend to have their own costs.
More information after a certain point is not clarity. It is more uncertainty disguised as diligence.
The relationship version
Overthinking in relationships has a specific flavour: reading into things. The tone of a message, the timing of a reply, the particular word choice, the absence of something that was usually there. Your brain runs each data point through the algorithm and generates increasingly elaborate explanations.
The problem is that the algorithm is running almost entirely on internal data. You don't actually know what the text meant. You know what you're afraid it might mean. You're solving a problem using anxiety as your primary source material, which produces anxiety-shaped results.
Overthinking is your brain trying to know things it cannot know. The solution is not more thinking. It is tolerating not knowing.
What helps
Make the smaller decisions faster, deliberately. Not all decisions deserve equal processing time. Training yourself to make small decisions quickly — the lunch, the route, the email response — recalibrates your relationship with uncertainty. You discover, repeatedly, that imperfect decisions survive.
Write it out. Externalising the thought loop onto paper does something that internal deliberation cannot: it shows you the loop. The same sentences tend to appear over and over. This is slightly humbling. It is also useful.
Schedule the worry. If a topic keeps recurring, give it a designated slot — fifteen minutes, taken seriously, then closed. The idea that you can address a thought later removes the urgency that keeps it running on repeat.
Do the thing. Sometimes the overthinking is avoiding the action. The action produces information that all the thinking cannot. Done imperfectly, it still beats pending perfectly.
I'm going to be honest with you: I wrote the first draft of this piece, then thought about it for three days before posting it. Which is its own kind of data.
