Overthinking: why thoughts don't calm you down, but shake you up even more

In a sense, overthinking is not a love of clarity, but a fear of uncertainty. The mind seems to promise: if we think a little more, scroll through all the scenarios a little more, review every detail again, then finally there will be a safe moment where everything will become obvious. But such a moment usually does not come. On the contrary, the more a person spins in his thoughts, the stronger the internal noise grows.

The problem here is not only the number of opinions, but the quality of contact with them. When a person falls into overthinking, he ceases to be an observer and becomes a hostage of a continuous internal montage. Each new thought is presented as extremely important, when in reality it only feeds the same cycle. Hence the exhaustion, and irritation, and the strange feeling that after an hour of thinking, the clarity did not increase by a single gram.

That is why compassionate attention is much more useful here than another attempt to "think better". She does not fight thoughts directly. She changes her attitude towards them. A person begins to notice: here I went in a circle again, this thought does not open a new angle, but only repeats an old fear, now I need not another mental circle, but a pause, a body, a breath, a change of scene, a little space.

Attention in this topic does not mean passivity. It means to stop confusing endless thinking with the real work of thinking. Sometimes the smartest step is not to continue the analysis, but to recognize in time that the mind has not solved the problem for a long time, but only keeps it in circulation.

Overthinking will not disappear forever after one epiphany. But as soon as a person begins to distinguish between thinking and mental skidding, he has a chance to reclaim his mind as an ally, and not as an endless echo chamber from which it is impossible to get out.