Part of some people’s mental health challenges, especially if they struggle with anxiety and/or depression, is an experience referred to sometimes as “overthinking”. Many people struggle with long strings of thoughts about one or many topics that end up effecting their daily lives. Overthinking can make you late for appointments, generate unreasonable anxieties against your own goals, or put a halt in your basic motivation which is sometimes casually referred to as “analysis paralysis”. These habits can chronically effect someone’s quality of life, but they are still just habits. As habits, they can be broken, and new habits built up in their place.
Sometimes thinking in depth about a topic that is important to you can be rewarding and help you plan for the steps necessary to achieve goasl that are important to you. It is when the thinking and planning gets in the way of the doing and the enjoying that it becomes a barrier to your quality of life. So how can one tell when it goes from proactive pondering to perpetual planning? One yardstick one can use would be noticing any increases in anxiety or avoidance feelings. If thinking about all the steps in the entire project or all the things that can go wrong and all these thoughts begin to compound and fuel your anxiety around doing something that you want to do, then this may indicate that you would be more effective in just taking actionable steps first. Then, schedule a set amount of time to plan for the next step before committing to taking that next step. Another way to tell that you may be spending too much time overthinking would be checking in with your sense of accomplishment. Your anxiety may want you to spend a lot of time planning, but eventually you will feel a sense that you wanted you to have made more progress. This is not a judgement but rather your values trying to win against your anxiety. This is when you give your values a leg up in that race and commit to completing your project if the facts suggest that you are ready to do so despite your anxiety or depression trying to convince you that you are not.
Overthinking can also be less about a project and more about ideas or themes in your life. When struggling with overthinking that may not have a clear course of action, it is important to take breaks from strings of thoughts that are distressing by engaging your mind in something else. This can include meditation and mindfulness exercises, activities that evoke different thoughts and feelings, or peaceful distractions. Once we can halt overthinking in its tracks, we need to then be mindful of opportunities we have to break what themes in our lives we find undesirable and commit to that change as effectively as we can.
Overthinking is a common struggle for people of all walks of life. It seems strange that your mind would get into habits that do not serve itself well. Therefore our consciousness is invaluable as a tool we use to keep our thoughts where our values want them to be. If you need help with this, feel free to reach out and make an appointment.