I admire squirrels for how they think. When they want a nut, they make a plan, pause for a second, and then take action. If they fail, they think for a moment and try again. No overthinking. Because when things become too difficult, they simply walk away and come back later when their mind is relaxed again.
How I envy them...
It took me many years to manage to get out of my head. It’s a place I liked to be in so much. When I was all in my mind, I felt somewhat in control. It also allowed me to make sense of the world around me that often made no sense at all.
But like many INFJs and very sensitive people, I used my mind as an escape from feelings that were too painful and often undesired. Like when I was called too sensitive, told I was making things up, and whatnot.
Excessive thinking prepared me for all the worst-case scenarios. Though most of them never happened, some did. And that’s the point when being all in my head turned out to be overall quite beneficial.
Whenever unpleasant feelings surged, I found a way to reason myself out of them. And the more I did this, the more I disconnected myself from my emotional world.
I mean, I always felt kind of empty and not belonging. Like I was somehow different. I thought that’s just how things are. Also, it wasn’t exactly painful. Just strange...
I am telling you all this because overthinking often isn’t so obvious for people who are all in their heads. It often only starts to become visible when we wake up at 3 am at night with our thoughts spinning like a vortex ending in a dark hole.
That’s when we get an idea of how busy our brain is and what overthinking in its extreme form feels like. Powerless and exhausted, we feel.
If only we could see it coming earlier... but for that we would have needed a better connection to our emotional world.
Of course there are also milder forms of overthinking.
I remember when I researched for hours which toaster to buy, the model for 25 EUR or the one for 32 EUR?
Sounds like a simple decision. For me, it was not. And the same was true for so many other things. I wasn’t really aware of how much mental energy I wasted that way but wondered why I often felt tired and exhausted.
Perfectionism is one of those things you also tend to not see for what it truly is as an overthinker. In my mind, I just wanted to do a decent job, or study just enough to make sure I don’t fail the exam.
From the outside, of course, the story looked different, as I now understand. People often called me an overthinker, an overly rational person, as if this was a problem. Well, it was. But I was unable to see it for a very long time. Because I was functioning so well with it.
And once I finally became aware of it I tried to solve it like any other problem I had. With my mind...
The problem is that you can’t think yourself out of overthinking.
So, how to stop overthinking?