Overthinking is different for everyone. And it can be everything from what to wear to whether or not you should marry the person you’re with. For some people, it’s a rare event that happens once in a while.

For others, it’s a more common occurrence that they experience on a regular basis. And sometimes it might only occur during certain situations, such as social interactions, while other times it might affect multiple or perhaps even all areas of a person’s life. It’s been different for me depending on where I am in my life.

Overthinking

When I felt stuck at an unfulfilling job, I would overthink the past, going over the decisions that I had made that had led me to where I now was. I would ask myself if I should have studied something else at university. I would question how things would have been having I moved somewhere else or surrounded myself with a different group of people.

And I would also overthink the future, I would see images in my head of myself five or ten years down the line, still sitting in the same chair. And I would be terrified, wondering if it was too late to change paths, worrying about where I would end up.

What will happen if I stay? What will happen if I leave? What if I leave and regret it? What if I stay and regret it? And it got to a point where those questions were present throughout the day, every day, and they went on for months.

Now, many of those questions were valid questions, but what came apparent to me was that I wasn’t what I call productively overthinking the situation, but rather I was what I call unproductively overthinking the situation. And that’s an important yet often difficult distinction to make. And it’s one that I’m still learning how to identify.

How To Stop Overthinking

Now, whenever I’ve gone through periods of overthinking in life, I’ve tried to find ways to stop it by googling things like how do I stop overthinking? And finding advice like letting go of the past and learning to control your emotions.

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But it never worked for me. And not because the advice was necessarily bad, but rather because I think I had a difficult time buying into the whole stop doing this kind of mindset. I guess I don’t really believe that you can just stop your thoughts, but rather that you can learn how to deal with them.

How To Deal With Overthinking

So rather than just telling myself that I need to stop overthinking, overall, I tell myself that I don’t need to stop, but that instead, I can learn how to distinguish between productive and unproductive overthinking and of course, aim at focusing my attention on the former rather than the latter.

Productive V/s Unproductive Thinking

Now, what do I mean by productive versus unproductive thinking?

So, productive thinking is thinking about something with the intention of finding something of value, whether that’s a solution, a new perspective, or an important lesson that needs to be learned. And not just with the intention, but also actively seeking it. Unproductive, overthinking, on the other hand, is going past that point. It’s where you go from a state of necessary reflection to a state of unnecessary dwelling.

It’s when you spend your time digging deeper and deeper into a hole that leads nowhere but back to where you started. And so it can continue for who knows how long.
How To Go From Unproductive To Productive

Now, one of the reasons why distinguishing between the two can be difficult is because sometimes we tell ourselves that spending a lot of time thinking about something will assure that we go through every single possible scenario and every single possible outcome and therefore come to the best possible conclusion or solution or the truest answers.

When in reality, it’s not necessarily about how much time we spend thinking about something, but rather how we spend that time. Now, how does one go from unproductive to productive thoughts?

For me, there’s been mainly two things being honest with myself and being accepting of those truths.

Emotional Avoidance

There was this psychological research, that showed that one of the main causes of many psychological problems was the habit of emotional avoidance. Yet it’s something that we do all the time. When I felt like my job wasn’t fulfilling, I didn’t want to be honest about that with myself at first, so I tried to suppress my emotions. And there can be a lot of reasons why we’re not honest with ourselves.

You know, perhaps we’re avoiding something, maybe we’re ashamed or regretful or fearful, and nobody wants to feel those things. So we lie to ourselves because we’re scared of what might come out of the truth. And we would rather be comfortable, even if we know that sooner or later the kettle is going to boil over and that we’re going to have to deal with the mess it’s going to cause.

Honesty takes courage because it means that despite fear, you step out of your comfort zone and expose yourself to unexplored territory and you’re going to have to face a certain level of uncertainty that might come with that. Some sort of action is needed to deal with the risk.

The Power Of Now

As Ecker Tolley wrote in his book The Power of Now, any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. Even if it’s a mistake, learning from it is still beneficial. This way, you don’t end up repeating the same mistake over and over again. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Long story short, I eventually chose to be honest with myself and say that I don’t feel fulfilled here. And it threw me right into the loop of overthinking.

And I chose to try to deal with it the best way that I know how, which is through writing. So I would go over the thoughts one by one, trying to categorize them into helpful or not helpful, and I would start with the loudest ones and ask myself questions like is this focusing on the problem or a solution? Does this have the potential of making my situation better or worse? And is this important? Now, the point of doing this is to work your way through the noise and to try to get rid of as much of it as you can.

Noise is any thought that wastes your mental energy by putting you down or distracting you from what you should be focusing on, which is any thought that could bring any sort of clarity to your situation. Now, I cannot tell you exactly how to distinguish between productive and unproductive thoughts, partly because I myself struggle with that, and partly because it depends on your situation and what it is that you’re dealing with. But I think that as you start going over your thoughts, it’ll become easier and easier to navigate.

How To Distinguish Productive And Unproductive Thoughts

Now, perhaps you will end up realizing that out of all of those thoughts, there is only one that truly matters to you. Or perhaps you’ll end up realizing that there is more than one.

Whatever you end up realizing, it’s a piece of information that you didn’t have before, and hopefully, you will make good use of it. Now, look, I still find myself getting lost in a whirlwind of thoughts that leave me nowhere.

How To Avoid Overthinking

I still find myself overthinking the silliest of things. You know, I’m not a Zen master, and I’m okay with that, you know, as long as it’s not doing any damage to my mental health. I’m terrible at picking what to eat at restaurants.

If there are more than ten items on the menu, it’s no longer going to be lunch, because we will be there till dinnertime. And if you can relate to that, one piece of advice that I have is to check the menu before going to the restaurant. I almost always do that.