Why do I overthink everything? And why knowing I’m doing it doesn’t make it stop

You send a perfectly ordinary message. Nothing controversial. Nothing particularly important. Just a message. Then, twenty minutes later, you find yourself thinking about it again. Did that sound a bit blunt? Should I have put an x at the end? She normally replies quite quickly. Maybe she’s taken it the wrong way. Perhaps I should send another message.

And suddenly, six words on WhatsApp have somehow acquired their own investigation team.

Or perhaps it isn’t messages for you. It’s decisions. You make one, feel reasonably happy with it, and then reopen the whole thing an hour later. Was that definitely the right choice? What if I’ve missed something? What would somebody else do? So you ask someone what they think. They reassure you. You feel better. For approximately eleven minutes. Then your mind finds a new angle.

If you recognise yourself here, you’ve probably also tried telling yourself to stop overthinking. And I’m going to take a wild guess that it hasn’t been particularly effective. Because if stopping were simply a matter of knowing you were doing it, you’d have stopped a long time ago.

The more useful question is: what is all that thinking trying to do for you?

Overthinking isn’t always about the thing you’re thinking about

When we think about overthinking, it’s easy to assume the problem is simply that we’re thinking too much. But often there’s something else happening underneath. Your mind may be trying to reach certainty. It may be trying to make sure you haven’t made a mistake, predict how somebody will react, prevent something going wrong, work out what somebody meant, or reassure you that the decision you’ve made is definitely the right one.

And there’s a very ordinary reason for that. Our brains naturally pay attention to things that feel important, unresolved or uncertain. When something doesn’t feel settled, going over it again can give us the sense that we’re still doing something useful with it.

Sometimes, of course, we are. Thinking things through is not a problem. Reflecting on a conversation can be useful. Weighing up a decision is sensible. Considering consequences is part of being an adult.

The difficulty comes when thinking something through quietly becomes going round it again and again. You’re no longer finding new information. You’re circling the same information, hoping that one more lap might finally give you the certainty you’re looking for.

And that distinction matters.

Sometimes you’re not looking for an answer. You’re looking for certainty

Imagine you’ve made a decision. You’ve considered the options, you’ve got the information available to you and you’ve chosen. Then comes the thought: But what if I’ve made the wrong decision?

So you go through everything again. Perhaps you ask somebody else what they think. They agree with you and there’s that lovely little moment of relief. Then your mind pipes up with: But what if they’re only agreeing because they don’t want to upset me? And off we go again.

The problem is that many of the things we overthink simply don’t come with the level of certainty our minds would like. You cannot know exactly what somebody else is thinking. You cannot guarantee that a decision will turn out perfectly. You cannot predict every possible outcome, and you cannot always know whether the thing you said landed exactly as you intended.

When we keep thinking because we’re trying to remove every last bit of uncertainty, there may not actually be an answer available that will allow us to stop. That’s also why reassurance can feel wonderful in the moment but not always last. Someone tells you, “Honestly, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” and for a little while your mind settles.

Until it produces another question.

Not every thought needs an answer

This is one of the things I think we forget. A thought appearing in your mind doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem that needs solving.

What if she thinks I’m rude? What if I regret this? What if I should have chosen the other thing? What if something goes wrong?

Our minds are very good at producing questions. They’re not always quite so considerate about whether those questions are actually answerable.

And this is where overthinking can become exhausting, because it can feel as though you have something unfinished hanging over you. You keep returning to it because surely, if you think hard enough, you’ll eventually reach the point where it feels completely settled. Sometimes you will. Sometimes you won’t. Continuing to think isn’t always going to get you any closer.

That doesn’t mean telling yourself, “Right, I’m not thinking about that anymore.” Anyone who has ever tried very hard not to think about something will know how spectacularly well that tends to go.

But it can mean beginning to notice what is happening:

Am I actually solving something here, or am I trying to get certainty?

There’s a difference.

“But I know I overthink, Jody”

This is something people say to me. They already know. They know they replay conversations, second-guess decisions, ask for reassurance and that their mind gets particularly enthusiastic the minute their head hits the pillow.

The frustrating part is: “I know I’m doing it. I just don’t know how to stop.”

And I think that’s an important distinction. Recognising a pattern and understanding what keeps your version of it going are not necessarily the same thing.

For one person, overthinking may be closely tied to wanting to get things right. For somebody else, it might be worrying about disappointing people. Someone else may find uncertainty particularly uncomfortable, while another person has gradually stopped trusting their own judgement and looks to other people for reassurance before they can feel settled.

On the surface, they may all say, “I overthink everything.” Underneath, we may be looking at quite different things.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m wary of very generic advice about overthinking. You are unlikely to be helped enormously by someone on the internet telling you to “just let it go.” I suspect if you could just let it go, you probably would have done that already.

When overthinking starts affecting ordinary life

Overthinking doesn’t have to look dramatic to take up an enormous amount of space. Sometimes it’s simply tiring. You’re trying to watch television, but half your attention is still on a conversation from earlier. You wake at 3am and apparently that is the ideal moment to reconsider something that happened in 2019. You make a decision and then spend longer questioning the decision than you did making it.

Sometimes you avoid doing something because you’ve thought through so many possible outcomes that staying where you are suddenly feels easier. Or you keep asking other people what they think until eventually you’re not entirely sure what you think anymore.

That can gradually affect confidence too. If every decision gets reopened, every conversation gets examined and every uncomfortable feeling is treated as evidence that perhaps you’ve got something wrong, trusting yourself can become harder. Not because you’re incapable of making good decisions, but because you rarely allow a decision to simply be a decision.

What this can look like in real life

One of my clients, Stuart, came to me experiencing anxiety and overthinking. After our work together, he described sleeping better, having a clearer mind and his day-to-day life feeling more manageable.

That is Stuart’s experience, not a promise of what somebody else will experience. But I think it’s worth sharing because overthinking can become so normal that people sometimes forget it is something they’re allowed to ask for support with. You don’t have to wait until it becomes unbearable, and you don’t need to arrive knowing exactly why you do it. That is part of what we can explore.

Sometimes another person can hear something in the way you describe your experience that is difficult to spot when you’ve been going round it inside your own head. And sometimes the useful question isn’t, “How do I make myself stop thinking?”

It’s:

“What am I hoping all this thinking will give me?”

Certainty? Reassurance? Permission? Confidence that you’ve got it right? Protection from somebody being disappointed?

Once you begin to understand that, the conversation becomes much more useful than simply telling yourself to stop.

Something to notice this week

I’m deliberately not going to give you seven tips for stopping overthinking. Partly because I don’t think another list of things you should be doing is necessarily what you need.

Instead, try noticing one thing. The next time you realise you’ve returned to the same decision, conversation or worry again, ask yourself:

Am I actually solving something here, or am I trying to get certainty?

You don’t need to force yourself to stop, and you don’t need to judge yourself for doing it. Just notice the answer. Because sometimes understanding what the thinking is trying to achieve tells you much more than simply noticing that you think a lot.

If you’re tired of spending so much time in your own head

If you’ve recognised yourself in this, you probably don’t need another person telling you to “stop overthinking.” You may already know you’re doing it. The more useful question may be what keeps it going for you.

That’s something we can look at together. When I work with someone 1-to-1, we’re not trying to squeeze their experience into a generic explanation of overthinking. We can look at what happens for you: when it shows up, what seems to trigger it, what you find yourself doing and what you’d like to be different.

I can’t promise what that work will look like for you or what the outcome will be, but you don’t need to have all the answers before you ask for support.

And please don’t turn contacting me into another decision you need to spend three weeks overthinking.

You don’t need a perfectly worded message. You don’t need to explain your entire life. You don’t even need to know exactly what you want to say.

If you’re tired of trying to work it all out in your own head, get in touch and we can arrange a conversation.

Jx