Typical patterns of overthinking

We've all been there. Caught up in spirals of thoughts, and can't break free. Starting to feel more and more stressed and drained by it. Yet, we can't stop. In a previous blog post we explored how an overthinking spiral plays out: in our minds and body. Because it is never just a 'thinking problem', our negative, ruminating thoughts are also impacting our physical wellbeing. Before we can truly understand how we can stop it, let's explore what are the usual patterns of overthinking.

What is overthinking and why is it unhelpful?

Overthinking is the repetitive and prolonged focus on one’s thoughts in a way that is unproductive, emotionally distressing, and interferes with effective decision-making or action. Let's break this down:

• Repetitive: you keep circling and circling around the same thought

• Prolonged: it takes up a considerable time of your day

• Unproductive: it doesn't bring any resolution on its own

• Emotional distress: through the spirals negative emotions, stress, anger or shame takes over

• Interference with decision-making or action: it's just playing on repeat, keeping you away from taking action

Ultimately, overthinking is leading to being stuck in our minds accompanied by negative emotions and no real positive outcome.

What are the typical patterns of overthinking?

Overthinking may feel similar to everyone, but it certainly can manifest in different ways in each person. By understanding your overthinking patterns you may notice them sooner and may stop them before they take over your mind.

Time

Overthinking gets you trapped in time other than the present moment. When you are in the present moment, you are focused on the here and now, the conversation you are just having, the movie you are just watching, the blog you are just writing. Your attention is likely directed to that activity you are doing right now and your thoughts are flowing. Perhaps you still sense a bit of your environment, e.g. the fresh air coming from the open window or hearing a dog barking somewhere in the neighborhood. Overall you have a sense of focus, productivity and control of your surroundings. But when overthinking takes over, something changes. You are no longer in the present moment, your attention drifts to the scenario and keeps playing on repeat. When you drift from present, you can either end up focusing on:

• Past event. We call this rumination. A negative experience plays on repeat. We relive the situation over and over again with all the negative emotions associated with it, whether it's shame, unfairness, guilt or anger. Sometimes, our mind would go into the 'should haves', what should I have done differently or better. But the moment's passed, we no longer can do anything different in that situation. Ultimately, rumination fuels our negative emotions especially around failure.

• Future event. We call this worry. Usually intrusive thoughts take over of a scenario that never happened, but 'could happen'. For example, imagining that we have to make a presentation at work and we say something stupid so everyone laughs at us. Or we imagine there will be a family tragedy and we feel anxious about it's impact on us. We experience fear, stress, sadness. We may think about how we would deal with the situation, but this situation may never happen and even if it could, it may not happen exactly the way we imagined, so we can't really prepare for it either.

Standards

Overthinking is feeding on our expectations towards ourselves. We likely set high standards for ourselves, and when we feel we can't quite meet them, we start to get anxious and go into the spirals in our effort to understand it all and figure out corrective actions. Overthinking is often connected to our efforts to appear good, competent, socially appropriate, spotless. Naturally, it is driven by our fear of failure, judgement and insecurity. We just want to meet expectations and when that doesn't happen, we start spiraling. These expectations can be:

• Internal: we set high expectations towards ourselves and are in general overly self-aware and self-critical. We overanalyze our reactions or go round and round about how we can perfect ourselves. It's usually paired with perfectionistic tendencies.

• External: we want to meet the expectations we imagine others have towards us. We prefer to avoid conflict or do whatever to prevent a socially awkward situation. When we end up in such, we keep analyzing the situation, blame ourselves for our 'wrong' behaviour or imagine all the ways someone could get upset with us.

Dealing with decisions

One of the key elements of overthinking is decision paralysis or delayed action. We keep running, but only in our thoughts, not in our actions. By doing that we lose the opportunity to resolve a situation or refocus ourselves to the present moment. Internalizing concerns also leads to inflexibility to change perspectives or ask for help which further pulls us into the spiral. Overthinking may impact our decision making process in two ways:

• Paralysis: we stay in our thoughts while not getting any closer to 'what can I do next?" leading to a situation where you're like constantly rewatching a movie and staying put on the couch. We avoid making any commitments in our fear to worsen the situation, nevertheless we feel very intensely the negative emotions associated with the overthinking spiral.

• Unstable: we may come up with ways forward, but often we are afraid to fully commit or regret them later leading to another thought spiral. We may also wait too long to take action, or keep going back and forth about it. Even though we tried to do something we don't feel any relief.

Our overthinking patterns are certainly unique to ourselves and rooted in our unique experiences and insecurities. Nevertheless, we likely experience a combination of the above patterns as our typical and usual way of ending up in overthinking sprials.

By noticing and acknowledging our patterns we can understand more of the underlying needs, and insecurities we carry. Spotting these patterns can help us examine them closer and start questioning them. By doing so we can shake the overthinking spiral and break free from it.