Among my many talents is overthinking.
Almost Olympic level. It’s one of the habits left over from burnout that I haven’t quite knocked out. If you want the life sucked out of an idea – just let me mull it over.
I do believe that overthinking habits is a habit that can lead you to burnout. Or, if you weren’t an overthinker prior to burnout, you became one in the throes of it.
Overthinking can come from a variety of places – trauma, anxiety, stress, depression, being raised by overthinkers.
My overthinking is a product of my perfectionism that still gets in my way when I want – or even need to – accomplish something.
Before I tell you how burnout turns you into an overthinker or exacerbates overthinking that is already in progress, let’s explore what overthinking is and why it happens to us.
Are you burned out? Take this quiz to find out and what to do next!
Don’t Worry, Overthink Instead?
If you are a chronic worrier, it’s not the same thing as being an overthinker. But, you can be a worrier and an overthinker.
What’s the difference? A worrier worries about something that may happen, while an overthinker obsessively thinks about something that has already happened.
Overthinking is when you think about something too much, for too long. You ruminate on the same thought patterns that make you feel trapped. Overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want.
When we overthink, we get trapped in a cycle that we feel is nearly impossible to escape. It’s starts with ruminating on a problem, that leads us to feel like we are wasting our time, which stresses us out, and finally leaves us unable to make logical decisions.
Overthinkers go around and around on this wheel and the only ways to stop are being forced to take action, or they miss their opportunity to act. Otherwise, the overthinking just continues.
Why Are You So In To Overthinking?
According to clinical psychologist Nick Wignall, there are seven psychological reasons you overthink. Wignall says that the initial cause of overthinking is different than the reason(s) we maintain it.
- Reason #1: Childhood Learning – For many, their habit of overthinking developed in childhood. It was developed because, at the time, it was the only way to deal with scary, difficult experiences.
- Reason #2: An Illusion of Control – We hate feeling helpless and watching others suffer. Since we can’t help – ourselves or someone else – we turn to thinking because it feels helpful. It gives us something to do. So we end up ruminating and worrying. This provides an illusion of control and keeps our helplessness at bay.
- Reason #3: An Illusion of Certainty: The other things humans can’t stand? Uncertainty. We feel more confident when we know what is going to happen. We are often so anxious about our feelings of uncertainty that we resort to denial or pretending things are more predictable than they actually are. This keeps us stuck in problem-solving mode, which makes us feel like we’ll find a solution if we think about it long and hard enough.
- Reason #4: Perfectionism – Perfectionists have a hard time moving forward when we don’t feel we or our product is perfect. So, perfectionists end up overthinking to distract ourselves from that less than perfect feeling we have about our work. Which means, we have convinced ourselves that there is more we need to work on and more we need to think about.
- Reason #5: Secondary Gain – If you keep overthinking, it’s because you are getting something out of it. There is some benefit that keeps you in a cycle of overthinking. What you are getting out of it might be the ability to procrastinate or avoid decisions or because overthinking leads to sympathy from others.
- Reason #6: Overgeneralization – Thinking is a tool and if you are good at thinking, you believe in its rewards. However, just because a lot of thinking works in one area of our lives, we assume it will work in others.
- Reason #7: Fear of Conflict – Most humans have a fear of conflict. So we come up with many ways to avoid. If the overthinker feels that conflict is dangerous, we will spend a lot of time and mental energy coming up with ways to avoid it. Which leads to a lot of mental gymnastics and excuses. An excessive fear of conflict leads to a lot of unnecessary thinking. Oddly enough, avoiding external conflict usually leads to internal conflict – otherwise known as overthinking.
What Does Overthinking Have to Do With Burnout?
When you’re in burnout, you are doing a lot of useless thinking and worrying. Your brain is in overdrive because it is often overwhelmed and confused. You can’t stop thinking about the things that are stressing you out.
Overthinking is very stressful and it makes you feel trapped in your circumstances. And, true to the definition of overthinking you learned earlier, your overthinking in burnout gets in the way of doing or getting what you want.
This also gets me back to an earlier statement that the initial cause of our overthinking is usually different than why we end up maintaining it.
For those of us who burnout, we end up in burnout because we never learned how to successfully manage our stress. We cobbled together a bunch of coping mechanisms that hid things for a while – until they stopped working, too. So, for those who were not overthinkers prior to burning out, they become one because overthinking feels like the only way you can control all of the problems before you that you can’t seem to solve.
This is part of the reason so many of us feel indecisive and our decision-making skills seem to crumble. If we don’t stop thinking about a problem, or we procrastinate making a decision, we are far less likely to fail or make the wrong decision. Again.
Can You Fix This?
There is no “cure” for overthinking. It is a habit that you learn how to manage so that it has less of an effect on your day and your decisions. I’ve also noticed it lessens with less stress.
I am going to share the three solutions that my clients have used to successfully learn how to manage their overthinking.
Solution #1: Learn how to release unwanted thoughts: It’s near impossible to suppress unwanted thoughts. And, trying to may make their power even worse.
Instead of trying to control of manage these unwanted thoughts, release them instead. There are two ways my clients found to be helpful.
Set a timer for 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes think about all of the triggers and problems that lead you to overthink. Make a list of them on paper. Sometimes the act of writing something down to relieve your mind of thinking is enough of a stress relief. Writing it down tells your brain it no longer needs to find a place to store this information. That’s what the trusty piece of paper will do.
If writing it down doesn’t feel like enough of a relief, take that piece of paper with your list and crumple it up into a ball. Then, throw it in a trash can. (Or recycling bin.) The physical act of “throwing away” your problems can help you feel like your worrying and thoughts are gone because you have physically and visually watched them disappear.
Solution #2: The “I Will” Method – For those of us who tend to dwell on our past and our failures, this can be a particularly difficult trigger of overthinking to kick.
It is particularly painful because we still have to do things that we may not have been successful at before or don’t do very well. Here is another problem with overthinking: it doesn’t make a lot of room for positive thoughts. So, we have to force those positive thoughts and previous successes to the surface.
The “I Will” Method begins with you thinking about and listing all of the successes you’ve had in the past. All of the job promotions, growing your family, earning an award, winning a race – all of them that you can think of. The idea here is that you have done a lot of things in the past well, had some victories, and been rewarded for your great work.
Sometimes, we get stuck in an overthinking loop because we are worried we will fail to live up to expectations that got us that promotion or allowed us to come in first in a race. You get caught up in the “what if’s.”
What if my ideas aren’t creative enough?
What if I give the wrong answer or make a bad decision?
What if this script flops?
You will get rid of those “what ifs,” if you realize this is a different opportunity than the one on your list. And to make that mindset shift, replace “what if” with “I will.” Vocalizing the “I will” statement will make it more impactful. Think of it as a pep talk.
I will come up with creative ideas.
I will provide amazing answers and make great decisions.
I will write a script that helps people make a change.
Solution #3: Parkinson’s Law – Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Basically, if you give yourself a week to finish a task that could be completed in a day, you will take the whole week to finish it. In terms of overthinking, if we give ourselves too much time to think or complete a goal, we will delay our decision-making.
The solution to this is Parkinson’s Deadline – “work shrinks so as to meet the deadline when it’s due.”
I have always told people if they want me to get something done – give me a deadline. If not, I will overthink and procrastinate. I also know I work better on a deadline. But, I have to be careful not to take on deadlines that I know I can’t meet and that the deadline won’t cause me more stress.
If you found this interesting, don’t overthink it. Act on it.
