Why Do I Overthink Everything?

Your mind is whirring, you can’t stop the thoughts going round and round in your head.  Fearing a negative outcome, imagining the worst.  

Maybe you’ve sent a message to someone and you didn’t hear back.  You were comfortable with what you sent, but now you’re starting to get cold sweats, you’re re-reading it over and again, analysing every word and wondering whether you’ve upset the person, or somehow made yourself look bad.  If you can’t see anything wrong with the message, you then start to wonder about other times you may have got something wrong in their eyes.

Perhaps you’ve made a decision in your business, the outcome you hoped for hasn’t happened yet and you are starting to second guess whether you’ve done the right thing and wondering whether it’s too late to back-track.  All sorts of connotations revolve round in your mind and it’s become impossible to know what is the “right” thing to do.

Or perhaps you have an event coming up and you are imagining every possible scenario, with the worst of those going round and round in your head.  You’re already planning what you will do if any of them happen.

Whether it’s a scenario like the above that plays out, or some other version of overthinking, the reasoning is usually pretty similar.  A part of you (not the rational adult part) feels exposed and unsafe.  This part of you doesn’t trust that everything will be okay.  This part of you is (for want of a better word) “triggered” and your body is now releasing cortisol.  The stress response feels very real and your automatic reaction to it, is to try to figure out how to protect yourself from this exposure.

This is a learnt pattern.  The overthinking, the trigger, the cortisol and stress response. Your body and brain have done them so many times since childhood that it’s probably a fairly familiar pattern by now.  THIS is why you overthink everything now, it’s become a pattern that your system runs on repeat.  Like a computer, programmed to perform a specific function.

The deeper questions are: Why do you run this type of pattern?  And, of course; how do you stop?

This is the work that I do with my clients.  Through exploration we are able to identify where their patterns originate from and seeing them in this light provides the start of relief from them in the day to day moments.  When you can start to see that you aren’t actually feeling stressed about whether David in accounts thought your email was a bit abrupt, you’re really running a programme created by pain from the past.  You’ve worked hard over so many years to try to protect yourself from experiencing that pain again, that it has now become a pain of its own kind.  When you can see that truth, you stop worrying about that email and about David, and find a fresh perspective on it.

To stop overthinking from arising in the first place, there is a three part process:

1. Learning to understand the root of it, as described above.
2. Feeling held and supported as you come to these realisations.  Much of the experience of over thinking is in relation to what other people may think, so having a compassionate human in your corner soothes your nervous system and helps you to learn to trust your new perspectives as they come through.
3. Learning how to rewire your brain and your neurochemistry to create a different experience in these kind of environments is the final factor.  This involves a combination of calming the system (teaching it that it’s safe to be in a more rested state, rather than on the look-out for danger) and inputting new information for it to reference in future.

This is possible, but it’s not something that gets talked about.  Most people are wondering about how to solve the problem at the surface layer.  Wondering whether to send another email.  Rather than finding their reaction interesting.  Seeing their reaction as evidence that there is something beneath this layer that needs excavating.  Bringing whatever is below the surface into the light, so it can begin to heal.

This work is deeply enlightening and a little uncomfortable, but the overall experience is a revolution of self!  Of being able to leave old habits and pain behind.  If you are curious about this revolution and would like to chat through whether it is something I can help you with, please book a discovery call, or contact me.