You’ve concluded you’re an overthinker. You lie there at night running the same five minutes on a loop, what you should have said, what that look on their face actually meant, what you’ll say if it comes up again. Your therapist has probably even confirmed it. Yes, you overthink. Let’s work on that.
I’d push back on the diagnosis. You don’t have an overthinking problem. You have an underfeeling problem.
Real thinking lands somewhere. You turn a problem over, you reach a conclusion, even a difficult one, and you’re done. Next time I’ll handle it differently. Full stop. What you’re doing at 2am isn’t that. It’s a loop with no exit built into it, one scenario spinning into another interpretation spinning into a third, endlessly, going nowhere on purpose. That isn’t thinking. It’s avoidance, wearing a thinking costume.
Here’s what it’s avoiding. Underneath every one of those loops is a feeling you’d rather not have. Shame. Rejection. That specific, unpleasant sensation of feeling small, or powerless, or like a child again. The loop exists to keep you circling around that feeling rather than landing in it, because landing in it, even briefly, feels unbearable. Analysing it feels productive. Feeling it feels like falling.
The problem is the strategy doesn’t work. It just makes things worse, because the feeling never actually gets processed, only postponed, which means it’s still there tomorrow night, and the night after that, waiting for you to run the loop again.
Getting out isn’t more analysis. It’s the opposite. It’s naming the actual feeling underneath the noise and letting yourself have it, briefly, on purpose. I’m feeling rejected. I’m feeling ashamed of how that went. That’s it. And oddly, feelings are rarely as frightening as the loop tells you they’ll be. We’re afraid of them mostly because we don’t know what to do with them once they arrive, not because they’re actually unbearable once you let them land.
Once you’ve named it, you can do something useful with it. Is this feeling proportionate to what actually happened. Is it valid. Sometimes it absolutely is, and the honest move is just to feel sad, or hurt, and let that run its course rather than intellectualising it into oblivion. Sometimes it’s an old feeling wearing a new situation’s clothes, and once you spot that, it tends to loosen its grip considerably.
Try this the next time you catch yourself spiralling over an unopened bill, an unresolved argument, a moment you can’t stop replaying. Stop narrating it. Just say, out loud if you need to, this feels sick, this feels frightening, this feels like shame. Then take the actual next step. Open the letter. Send the message. Whatever the one real action is. Action tends to end the loop far faster than another lap of analysis ever will.
Ban the words could have and should have from your vocabulary. They’re not thinking. They’re the loop’s favourite disguise. Feel the thing underneath them instead, and watch how quickly the noise runs out of a reason to keep going.
