Do you ever lie awake replaying a conversation, going over what was said and what it might have meant? You’re not alone, and nothing is wrong with you. Overthinking is one of the most common things a human mind does.
In this episode, I talk about why overthinking feels so productive while it’s happening, and why the advice to just stop thinking about it so rarely works. We look at what’s going on underneath the loop, and at how your body responds to the scenarios your mind creates.
Then I walk you through three ways to get out of the loop. The first one doesn’t start with your thoughts at all. If you’re tired of losing sleep over things you can’t stop replaying, this episode will give you something you can use tonight.
What you will learn in this episode
- Why overthinking feels like problem-solving, and why the advice to just stop doesn’t reach it.
- The difference between overthinking and the intentional thinking that moves your life forward.
- What the research shows about rumination and your ability to find solutions.
- Why a scenario you imagine can feel true, and what your body has to do with it.
- Three ways to break the loop, including one question that gets underneath the worry.
Research referenced in this episode
- Lyubomirsky, S., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1995). Effects of self-focused rumination on negative thinking and interpersonal problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(1), 176-190.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400-424.
- Holmes, E. A., & Mathews, A. (2005). Mental imagery and emotion: A special relationship? Emotion, 5(4), 489-497.
- Holmes, E. A., & Mathews, A. (2010). Mental imagery in emotion and emotional disorders. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(3), 349-362.
Transcript
Overthinking doesn’t feel like a problem while you’re doing it. It feels like you’re just about to figure something important out. But this is actually one of the most pesky little thought traps that steals our joy. This is Leadership Parenting, How to Stop Overthinking.
Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I’m happy to talk with you today about something really important, something that often causes us a lot of stress and pain and sleepless nights, and that is overthinking. Do you ever get into bed at the end of a long day, and instead of sleeping, you’re replaying something in your mind?
Maybe it was a few words that your teenager said in the car. Maybe it was the look on another mom’s face at pickup. Maybe it was the way your own voice sounded when you answered your child at dinner, and now you’re running it back, playing it over and over, listening to your tone, deciding what it means about you, what it means about your relationship.
And you’re probably not new to the concept of overthinking. Maybe someone has even suggested to you that you think too much about this stuff and that you should stop. And you tell yourself that you’re going to stop. You’ve heard the advice. You’ve probably given the advice to someone. And then, if you’re like me, a few minutes later, you’re still going over that thing in your head.
Well, here’s the part I want to talk about today, because I think it’s the piece that gets missed. We’re not lying there in bed doing nothing when we’re overthinking. It actually feels like we’re solving a problem. We’re working on something. It feels like that thinking is getting us somewhere, and that’s exactly why that advice doesn’t usually touch it.
I was talking to a friend the other day who told me she’d spent three days on a four-minute conversation. Three days. It was a conversation with her adult daughter, and it hadn’t even been a fight. Her daughter had said something when they were together, something a little bit clipped, a little bit short, and had a little look on her face as they were saying goodbye, and that was the whole thing.
But for three days, my friend had been going back through it. What she’d said, what her daughter had said, what her tone had been, what her daughter’s face looked like when she said it. And then she started thinking about all the things that it could mean, and all the things she should have done or should have said or shouldn’t have said. And then she’d run a version where it meant that her daughter was shutting her out, and that she had missed signs of that, and that maybe she had done some other things wrong, and she didn’t know how she was going to talk to her daughter about it.
And when she told me about all of this, it came out like a flood, and she was apologetic. She said, “I know this is ridiculous, but I haven’t told anybody and it’s been keeping me up at night.” And I said, “I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. I think you’ve been trying to solve something that you’re worried about.”
And you’re not the only one that does this. Overthinking is one of the most common thinking processes that humans do. So let’s name what it is exactly, because I think naming it changes how we work with it.
Overthinking is when we replay a situation, the words, the moment, whatever that is, over and over, and then start to run possible scenarios, outcomes, reasons. We see it from our side, we see it from their side, and then we start to fill in gaps and create versions of what happened, deciding what people must have been thinking based on maybe a facial expression. All of this is coming from a very brief memory that’s in the middle of a swirl of thoughts on a loop.
And we do a lot of mind reading or fortune telling. These are all cognitive distortions, by the way, or what we call thinking traps, because our brain starts to try to figure out what’s going on inside somebody else’s head, and we’re working from very few details, and they’re not even always accurate in our memory.
Now, here’s the difference between overthinking and thinking, and I want to be careful with this one, because I’m not asking you to stop thinking about your life. Thinking is powerful. Thinking is what gets us from here to there, helps us put plans together, and follow through on them. But I’m going to call that intentional thinking. It has a purpose. It’s constructive. You take ownership of something, you decide something, and then you close the loop.
Overthinking is usually reactive. It’s responding to something that feels just a little bit threatening or causes us to be on alert. It stirs up a lot of feelings. It wears us out, and nothing usually gets decided.
Here’s what surprised me when I first learned it. Rumination, which is the clinical word for this kind of looping and overthinking, actually makes problem-solving worse, not better. The researchers who’ve spent the most time on this found that people who are deep in rumination come up with fewer solutions, and they feel less able to act on the ones they do come up with. So the thing that feels like preparation is quietly taking options away from us.
So if we can’t find a good answer at 11 o’clock at night, it’s not because we haven’t thought about it enough. It’s because we’ve been thinking about it this particular way for far too long.
So if it’s not working, why does our mind keep doing it? Because it feels like we have an unfinished problem that we’re trying to solve. Something happened, it didn’t come to a close, we don’t have enough information, and our mind wants it closed. So it goes back and tries to build endings out of our thinking, and thinking just isn’t built to do that, at least not in this situation.
Underneath that unfinished feeling, there’s usually one of a few things going on. See if any of these happen for you. Sometimes we’re trying to have a do-over. Something happened that we weren’t comfortable with, and we’re trying to go back and run it again the way we wished it had happened. Sometimes we’re defending ourselves, either from something that somebody else might be thinking about us, or from our own criticism, which is usually the harder of the two.
Sometimes we’re looking for connection, and the replaying is trying to help us work out whether we’re still okay in our relationship with someone. I think that was my friend. Whether her daughter was mad at her, or whether she was in trouble, or whether all of a sudden she wasn’t going to have a relationship with her at all. She felt a threat to that connection, and she really wanted to protect it.
And sometimes I think we’re just very tuned in to other people. We read the room quickly. We can catch a shift in someone’s voice or a look on their face, and that sensitivity is a gift, but it also gives our mind an enormous amount of material to work with, especially when we don’t have all the details in front of us.
Now, here’s the part I most want you to understand. When you imagine a scenario, your body is going to respond to that imagined version. It’s going to give you a sensation in your body.
When I first trained in psychology and in understanding how the mind and body work, we didn’t talk a whole lot about the body. We spent a lot of time learning about how the mind works, how thinking works, what feelings are, and the body just kind of came along for the ride. But in the last few decades, so much more has opened up to us in understanding the connection between our thoughts, our feelings, and the sensations of those feelings in our body. And the most interesting thing to think about is that I really wonder if we can have an emotion without feeling it in our body.
I was having this conversation with a friend the other day about sadness. Are you really sad, deeply in the middle of sadness, if you don’t feel it in your body? Now, I know there’s a possibility of being numb to things because they’re so overwhelming. I get that. But we were talking about my dog that died. I’m sad that my dog died, but right this minute, I don’t feel sadness in my body. Now, if I started talking about her a lot, and I started to remember, and maybe pulled up a picture of her and started telling stories, I would probably start to feel that sadness increase. But do you know how I would know it was increasing? By how my body felt.
So think about how your body is part of the equation. When you imagine a scenario, you get an image in your mind, and that creates a feeling. And the way you know you have that feeling is by how it feels in your body. Your chest might tighten, your face might get warm, your heart might pick up its beat, and then your brain does something quite reasonable and completely unhelpful with all that information. It can notice you’re having a physical reaction and treat that reaction as evidence that the thing you’re imagining is either true or dangerous, and a cause for you to feel all those feelings.
So you picture your daughter pulling away from you, and your stomach drops, and the dropped stomach becomes proof, not just that you’re imagining something, but that the actual thing could be happening.
Researchers who study mental imagery describe it as an amplifier for emotion. A picture in your mind moves your body so much more than the same idea does in words. So the more clearly you picture something, the more real it feels, and the more real it feels, the more your mind wants to go over it again and again, because it feels necessary.
Now, this can go both ways, by the way. You can have pictures in your mind that are warm and peaceful and safe and beautiful, and your body will respond to those in the same way. That’s the power of our mind, our feelings, and our body. We don’t talk about them as separate pieces anymore, and I don’t want you to think of them that way either. When you’re overthinking something, you’re trapped in that part of your whole mind-body process, which is why I want to help you get untrapped, get unstuck, and get out of overthinking. Three ways, in fact, today.
The first one I want to talk about has nothing to do with the thinking going on in your mind. It has to do with your body. When you notice you’re overthinking, I want you to put your hand on the place where you’re feeling it in your body. Wherever it is, your chest, your throat, your jaw, your stomach, just put your hand there and notice how it feels.
Your body is responding to whatever is going on in your mind, not necessarily to what’s happening right now in the room you’re in. It’s happening in response to your thoughts. And I think that’s so important, because we tend to treat overthinking as something that’s kind of innocent. It’s just going on quietly in the background, and it feels productive, but it isn’t. What’s happening is your body is going through a stress response while you’re lying there calmly in bed, or maybe not so calmly. It’s doing something very real in your body, and we want to give it that attention.
And the way you’re going to do that is to ground yourself where you actually are. Use your body to do that. Use your five senses. Listen to the sounds in the room. Look around and notice the colors. Feel the floor or the couch or the bed beneath your body. You’re helping your body know where it really is. You’re bringing your mind to match where your body is, which is most likely somewhere safe.
If you’re in the middle of an argument with your child and you’re worried about the connection, then you’re going to be present there. But remember, this is usually happening while we’re driving somewhere, or we’re home safely in bed. The conflict, or the thing we’re worried about, isn’t happening right then. The scenario we’re playing out is happening in the future, or it’s something we’re trying to figure out. It’s not happening right now.
I want you to go to right now. Get in your body. It’s kind of a weird phrase, right? Be in your body. Well, where else can you be? Of course I’m in my body. But I think it means your awareness. Be in your body, aware of your moment right now, paying attention to where you’re feeling it in your body, instead of where your mind has been telling you to go, which is to the worry thought, to the spin.
Then give your attention to something that needs it. Now, when you’re trying to go to sleep, I don’t know if that perfectly applies. But you know what you can do? You can give your attention to the alphabet. You can go through every letter of the alphabet and think of a flower for every letter, or a dessert for every letter, or a friend whose name starts with A, and then B, and then C. It’s a little mind trick we use sometimes when people are having a hard time with racing thoughts, to put your attention on something that’s safe, or at least not threatening.
Sometimes we say, “Go do something mindless, like fold laundry.” But I don’t know about you, when I’m folding laundry or doing something mindless, that’s exactly when my brain goes to that loop around something I’m worried about, to overthinking it, to ruminating on it. That’s the part we usually get wrong. Anything we do on autopilot is exactly when your mind doesn’t have to pay attention to what’s going on, so it goes back to the worry loop.
So pick something that requires you to be present. Have a conversation with someone. Read a book where you have to follow the plot. Do something that has steps. Your attention can only be in one place, and overthinking needs your attention to stay looping. That’s why we want you to pay attention to what’s going on in your body and where you are right now. That’s our first help.
The second tool comes out of a framework I teach called LIFT. If you’ve been with me a while, you’ve heard me talk about LIFT. It’s four steps for working with thoughts that just won’t leave us alone. L is to label what you’re experiencing. “I’m noticing that I’m anxious.” Remember, how do you know that? “I’m noticing my body is tense.” So you’re just going to label what you notice. I is to inquire with curiosity instead of judgment. “I wonder what’s happening right now. What’s going on?” F is to focus on something grounding. We just talked about this: your breath, your feet, the sounds around you. And T is to turn toward something supportive, something that’s loving and helpful. A phone call, slow breaths, whatever brings you back to yourself.
I walked through all four of those in episode 119, and if you haven’t heard that episode, please go back and look for it. But today, I want us to focus on the I, inquire. And I want you to ask a different question than the one you would usually ask. Not “Is this thought true?” or “Is this thought helpful?” Those are great questions, but oftentimes when we’re overthinking, it’s really hard to get to them.
The question I want you to ask is, what am I really afraid of? Because the truth is, you’re looping on something because of the threat that’s present there. If there weren’t anything threatening, you wouldn’t feel compelled to think about it over and over again. So I want you to identify the threat.
Think about it. Do you ever overthink something really non-threatening, something really positive, like a great dinner you had with a friend? I don’t think we would call that overthinking. If you have a lot of thoughts about it, you might be savoring it. That might be the thing you put your attention on as you’re trying to go to sleep, because it’s going to create feelings of connection and safety. And how are you going to know that? By how it feels in your body. Peaceful, calm, warm. I feel good. My heart rate is down. My breathing is calm.
It’s the same mechanism, except your thoughts aren’t looping on something threatening. Overthinking is probably a loop on something that creates a threat response in you. So we’re going to call out the threat response. The I in LIFT is, I’m going to inquire. What is it in this rumination that I’m really afraid of?
This is an audacious thing to do in the face of overthinking, because overthinking wants you to wring your hands and rock back and forth and go through scenario after scenario and almost run from it. That’s our response to it. But we’re going to turn around and face the monster directly and say, “Okay, what is it I’m really afraid of?” And then we’re going to wait for the answer. And there’s always going to be one, or else you’re not overthinking it. You’re not in a worry loop.
I did this with my friend. I said, “Okay, if you could nail down one thing underneath all of that spinning and worrying and all those scenarios, one thing that you’re really afraid of, what is it?” And she said, “I’m afraid that I’m losing my relationship with her.” She had several versions of that. She doesn’t need me anymore, or I did something to hurt her feelings. But the bottom of it was that she was losing her relationship. That was the thing her brain kept trying to gnaw on and figure out.
And we want to be able to attend to that, because sometimes we do notice elements of things that are threatening, and I don’t think we should be so afraid of calling that up and then making some decisions about what we’re going to do about it. Because the truth is, you can’t control other people. Even if you’re worried about what they think about you, you can’t control that. If someone decides they don’t want to be your friend anymore, you can’t control that. And you might have some sadness about that.
But overthinking won’t allow that to be named and answered, because it feels too scary. And so it just loops and worries and frets and loops. If it were productive, that would be fine. But the bottom line is that it’s not productive. We want to be able to find out what the fear is, what the threat is, and then answer it. Sometimes that’s a conversation with the person. Sometimes it’s coming to a place where you’re clear that you aren’t going to be able to please everyone, and that might be a sadness you have, but it’s not something you’re willing to suffer over night after night after night. It might be that you made a mistake and you need to repair it.
I think our goal is to not be afraid of what we’re feeling and the things we need to make changes around. We want to have enough self-compassion that we can hold space for ourselves to not be perfect, to not be everybody’s favorite, and to know we’re going to be okay, that we can learn from mistakes if we made one.
So pay attention to how you can find the thread you’re looping on, and name it. Sometimes it helps to just write it down and then walk through the things you could possibly do about it. We’re going to have a meeting, me and the paper and my mind, and we’re going to come up with a plan, because this looping is not working.
The third thing I want to share with you comes from how I think about overthinking: it’s our mind looking for an ending to a scenario. So we want to give it a real ending. If we’re guessing what someone is thinking, let’s ask them plainly. “Hey, you seemed a little off in the car. Is everything okay?” That one sentence ends more three-day loops than any amount of thinking will. If we owe someone an apology, let’s just go make it.
If we made a mistake and we’re replaying it over and over again, and we think we’ve figured out after the hundredth time where we went wrong and what we’d like to do differently, then let’s file that away, chalk it up to being human, and move forward. We can have remorse for things, repair, and move on. Apologize, move on. And if there’s nothing to ask and nothing to repair, then we can decide to move on anyway. You’re allowed to close a thought process by deciding that it’s closed.
I think when we say out loud some of the things we’re worried about, it can help us see this loop. Now, if you’re like me, there are times that I’m overthinking, and I’ll say that to my husband, and he’ll say, “You’re overthinking it.” And I’m like, “I know.” But I can be fiercely protective of that overthinking process, because it feels kind of good to feel like you’re solving a problem. It’s like scratching an itch, but the problem is that itch never goes away, and we’re just trying to solve it over and over again.
So notice when this is happening. Pick something you can do, whether that’s checking in with your body, or inquiring about the threat at the center of this overthinking loop, and ask what’s one thing you can do to close the loop. To say, “I’m going to do this, and then we’re going to be done.”
That’s a bit of boundary-setting happening inside our minds. We talk about boundaries a lot, about setting them for other people and with other people, what we’re going to do if something happens or doesn’t happen. But we rarely talk about setting boundaries inside our mind. That’s where I think boundaries have the most power in our lives. Sometimes we just have to say, “You know what? That is not a helpful thought process, and I’m not going to engage in it. I’m going to put my attention somewhere else.” That’s a superpower we have as human thinkers, and the better we get at it, the happier and more peaceful we’re going to feel. We want to cut our overthinking cycles that last three days, three months, three years down to a very short process.
You can handle those feelings. Did you know that all of our feelings are meant to spur us on to action? That’s how our human brains and bodies work. That’s how thoughts and feelings work with our bodies to get us to do things. When we’re afraid, we’ve detected danger or a threat, and we feel it in our body. It makes us want to do something, run away or fight, all so that we’re safe.
Feelings are information that prepare us to act. So when we get caught up in overthinking, we’re not acting. It’s like there’s a skip in the recording, and we’re just replaying and replaying with no action. That’s why I want you to take some action, even if it’s to say, “I’m no longer going to participate in this loop.” It takes a little practice. But it’s so satisfying when you can call it what it is and direct your attention to something more helpful. It’s such a great feeling to know that you can take care of yourself that way.
So as you go into this week, notice your thinking patterns. If they’re helpful to you, let them be. Enjoy them. If they’re not helpful to you, how will you know? By how you feel in your body, by how it keeps you from doing the things you want to do, or makes you do things to protect yourself when you don’t see any danger around you. It’s all happening in the thought process in your mind.
Pick one of these things. Notice where this is sitting in your body. Ask yourself what you’re actually afraid of. Or take one small action that closes the loop and puts a boundary around that thinking, so you can move on and live your beautiful life.
Next week, we’re going to stay with this concept and put the focus on how this might happen with your kids. Because this is a human tendency, not just a grown-up one. Kids do it too, and a seven-year-old might be lying in bed going over and over what happened at recess the same way we go over things in our lives. And school age is a great time to teach our kids what to do with this.
It’s worth taking a little time to learn these skills, opening up your life to so much more freedom and resilience. I love spending time with you. I’ll talk to you next week. Take care.