Overthinking: What does it mean?

Causes of Overthinking

There are many causes that lead to overthinking, and here are some of them:

• Fear of the future.
• Fear of failure.
• Excessive concern about society’s perception and fear of it.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
• Excessive perfectionism and self-criticism.
• Negative past experiences, overthinking missed opportunities, decisions, and regret.
• Inability to slow down the race of fears and vague thoughts, not to understand the wisdom behind them or find solutions, but rather drowning in thinking and overanalyzing.

Solutions to Overcome Overthinking

There are many ways to overcome overthinking, including the following:

• Recognize that overthinking causes a real psychological crisis

To overcome overthinking, you must first recognize that it causes a real problem and crisis, and identify the actual causes leading to it by carefully observing the signs. For example, lack of sleep caused by anxiety and stress resulting from overthinking, and noticing how this affects your mental and physical health until a strong desire arises within you to recover from this psychological and physical exhaustion. Then, set a weekly or daily plan that keeps you busy from thinking about the past or future, such as exercising regularly and focusing your effort on making correct decisions and building healthy successful relationships.

• Meditation

Meditation in its many forms is one of the good solutions for treating overthinking. It can involve silence and self-reflection, listening to your inner voice, completely separating your brain from thoughts at that moment. It’s good to set aside a certain time weekly, for example, to disconnect from phone, friends, and work, and just relax with yourself.

• Distinguishing between fleeting negative thoughts and persistent negative thoughts

Having negative thoughts occasionally is natural, but their repetition and persistence in all situations and applying them to every event indicates a flaw in thinking. Therefore, they should be immediately replaced with more positive and healthy thoughts. Focus less on the problems themselves and more on finding proper solutions. You can also diagnose the bad thoughts by writing them down and honestly discussing them with yourself. Over time, following this strategy in thinking and problem-solving will train your mind to adopt it as a basic automatic pattern.

• Reading before sleep

Reading is a healthy method to deal with overthinking, especially reading before sleep. You can read any book you like even if you don’t fully concentrate on it; the main goal is to distract your mind from excessive thinking and prevent it from exhausting you.