The Pitfalls of Overthinking

Most of us know the feeling. You chew on something for so long that a simple matter turns into a knot you can't untangle. Few things drain a person or stir up anxiety like taking a task that should be straightforward and dragging it through round after round of second-guessing. What follows is a look at how to push back against that habit, and how working on yourself can loosen its grip.

You have likely run across Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, which has become a popular label and sits right behind Attention Deficit Disorder as a thing people like to diagnose in themselves. There is an old joke that OCD really ought to be spelled CDO, because then the letters would sit in proper alphabetical order. The condition shows up as obsessions and compulsions. Put plainly, it is perfectionism taken to an extreme.

Social anxiety and that same perfectionism also mark Asperger's, a developmental disorder. Asperger's is a higher functioning point on the Autism Spectrum, and it tends to come with weak social skills. Underneath it sits a shortage of emotional maturity, low confidence, and low self-worth. You tend to reach that conclusion only after picking up some grounding in psychology and deciding to do real work on yourself.

Overthinking, though, is not reserved for anyone carrying a diagnosis. Nearly every human being has wrestled with it, label or no label. At bottom it comes from driving ourselves too hard toward a goal. We do that because, somewhere down deep, we feel we are not enough. So we lean on our jobs or our schoolwork to make up the difference, since that is where the hours of our days go.

What overanalyzing hands us in return is a kind of despair that locks us up. In an economy that keeps shifting underfoot, a person who refuses to grow risks falling behind a market that waits for no one. Push that far enough and someone can end up genuinely impaired, living on disability for good.

Drug and alcohol addiction usually trace back to mental illness of some kind, and most mental illness traces back to anxiety, to letting fear run the show. OCD is one shape anxiety takes. Rather than erupting into a panic attack, the person feels compelled to grind harder. The irony is that the harder grind slows the work down instead of speeding it up.

Try thinking of OCD in reverse. You set out to finish something, but part of the drive is filling a hole, because you never really sat with yourself or came to know yourself the way deeper personal work makes possible. You want to do well, and you do badly, because you strain for it. So one way out of overthinking is simply to stop straining. Don't rush, even when the boss insists on it.

Here is the strange part: ease off and you get more done. Letting yourself relax instead of forcing the pace frees you up to move quicker and finish more, with less effort spent. The pressure was the drag the whole time.

There is another culprit worth mentioning, and it is the phrase "critical thinking skills" that got drilled into so many of us in school. We all need to sharpen how we think to some degree. Still, you have to ask whether teaching critical thinking is quietly teaching people to overthink. Common Core math might be the clearest case of this in schools right now.

As with anything, moderation does the trick, and balance grows out of a steady commitment to working on yourself. Everyone has common sense, yet push too hard on raw intellect and you can smother that common sense and come off looking a little foolish. That just feeds the old sense of inadequacy, until a person learns to build themselves up and refuse it.