From what to have for lunch and which colour to paint your bedroom to the side-eye you’re 99% certain your boss gave you, overthinking is an epidemic – and it’s harming your health goals. Here’s how to think your way out of it
As Laura Andrews types her PIN into the card reader, she feels an overwhelming sense of relief. Her body relaxes, her mind clears and she breathes an audible sigh. For the first time in months, the 40-year-old creative strategist and business owner from East Yorkshire is able to see things clearly, calmly. The van salesman laughs; most customers aren’t so eager to hand over their cash, he says. But Laura isn’t just buying the camper van in which she and her family intend to explore the UK and make lifelong memories. She’s putting an end to six months of her own incessant, exhausting deliberation. Laura is, by her own admission, an overthinker.
From Angela Chase’s interior monologues in My So-Called Life to nearly every song on Taylor Swift’s Midnights, it doesn’t take long to land on instances of overthinking in pop culture. That the term has made its way from niche self-development vocab to meme fodder in recent years makes sense; we’ve had a lot to think about. Is it an easy way to communicate the overwhelming feelings that characterise the average working week in the WhatsApp age? Perhaps. But experts argue that the term is doing a lot of heavy lifting, masking a smorgasbord of psychological symptoms from irrational worry to catastrophising. So why are we all going overboard?
Mental load
For one, the term is something of an anomaly; there’s no clinical definition. While it’s a close cousin of the well-studied psychological concept of ‘cognitive overload’ – defined as experiencing too many stimuli for your brain to process at once – it’s not the same thing. What the experts WH interviewed agree on is that it involves thinking about situations to an unhelpful degree. ‘To put too much time into thinking about or analysing [something] in a way that is more harmful than helpful’ is how the Merriam-Webster dictionary puts it, while Anne Bogel, author of Don’t Overthink It, broadly defines it as ‘times when we lavish mental energy on things that don’t deserve it; thinking in a way that’s repetitive, unhealthy and unhelpful’.
This rings true for Laura. ‘I knew deep down that buying the van was what I wanted to do. We’d saved the money; it would be an amazing experience for our family and my husband was all in,’ she says. ‘But despite that, my default was to wait, to seek external approval, to have the same thoughts and questions going round in my head. “Would I live to regret it? Was this a responsible way to spend the money? Would it be safer to have the cash in the bank? What would other people think
