How to Stop Overthinking Everything

Overthinking 

 

by

• Melody Wilding

February 10, 2021 

 

 

 

 Photo by Saffu on Unsplash

As a product lead at a major technology company, Terence’s job is to make decisions. How should the team prioritize features to develop? Who should be staffed on projects? When should products launch? Hundreds of choices drive the vision, strategy, and direction for each product Terence oversees.

While Terence loved his job, making so many decisions caused him a lot of stress. He would waste hours in unproductive mental loops — analyzing variables to make the “right” choices. He would worry about the future and imagine all the ways a launch could go wrong. Then, he would beat himself up for squandering valuable time and energy deliberating instead of taking action. In other words, his thoughtfulness, which was typically a strength, often led him to overthink situations.

Terence is what I like to call a sensitive striver — a high-achiever who processes the world more deeply than others. Studies show that sensitive people have more active brain circuitry and neurochemicals in areas related to mental processing. This means their minds not only take in more information, but also process that information in a more complex way. Sensitive strivers like Terence are often applauded for the way they explore angles and nuance. But at the same time, they are also more susceptible to stress and overwhelm.

Deliberation is an admirable and essential leadership quality that undoubtedly produces better outcomes. But for Terence and others like him, there comes a point in decision making where helpful contemplation turns into overthinking. If you can relate, here are five ways to stop the cycle of thinking too much and drive towards better, faster decisions.

1. Put aside perfectionism

Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift, effective decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking. For example, perfectionism can lead you to believe that if you don’t make the “correct” choice (as if there is only one right option), then you are a failure. Or that you must know everything, anticipate every eventuality, and have a thorough plan in place before making a move. Trying to weigh every possible outcome and consideration is paralyzing.

To curb this tendency, ask yourself questions like:

• Which decision will have the biggest positive impact on my top priorities?
• Of all the possible people I could please or displease, which one or two people do I least want to disappoint?
• What is one thing I could do today that would bring me closer to my goal?
• Based on what I know and the information I have at this moment, what’s the best next step?

After all, it’s much easier to wrap your head around and take action towards a single next step rather than trying to project months or years into the future.

2. Right-size the problem 

Some decisions are worth mulling over, while others are not. Before you make a call, write down what goals, priorities, or people in your life will be impacted. This will help you differentiate between what’s meaningful and what’s not worth obsessing over.

Likewise, if you’re worried about the prospect of a decision bombing, try the 10/10/10 test. When the prospect of falling flat on your face seizes you, think about how you’ll feel about the decision 10 weeks, 10 months, or 10 years from now? It’s likely that the choice will be inconsequential or that you won’t even remember it was a big deal. Your answers can help you put things in perspective and rally the motivation you need to take action.

3. Leverage the underestimated power of intuition

Intuition works like a mental pattern matching game. The brain considers a situation, quickly assesses all your experiences, and then makes the best decision given the context. This automatic process is faster than rational thought, which means intuition is a necessary decision-making tool when time is short and traditional data is not available. In fact, research shows that pairing intuition with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, and more accurate decisions and gives you more confidence in your choices than relying on intellect alone. In one study, car buyers who used only careful analysis were ultimately happy with their purchases about a quarter of the time. Meanwhile, those who made intuitive purchases were happy 60 percent of the time. That’s because relying on rapid cognition, or thin-slicing, allows the brain to make wise decisions without overthinking.

Terence, the product lead I mentioned earlier, was so intrigued by the idea of making decisions from his gut that he planned a “Day of Disinhibition” during which he followed his own intuition about everything he said and did for twenty-four hours. The result? Going with his gut gave him the courage to stop censoring himself and make tough calls, even when he knew it might upset some stakeholders. “It wasn’t just what I got done, but how I got it done, how quickly, and how I felt about it,” he later told me, “It put me in the best frame of mind to deal with whatever is in front of me,” he said. Try the “Day of Disinhibition” experiment for yourself, or simply set aside a few minutes today and list three to five times you trusted your gut in and whether the outcome was favorable.

4. Limit the drain of decision fatigue 

You make hundreds of decisions a day — from what to eat for breakfast to how to respond to an email — and each depletes your mental and emotional resources. You’re more likely to overthink when you’re drained, so the more you can eliminate minor decisions, the more energy you’ll have for ones that really matter.

Create routines and rituals to conserve your brainpower, like a weekly meal plan or capsule wardrobe. Similarly, look for opportunities to eliminate certain decisions altogether, such as by instituting best practices and standardized protocols, delegating, or removing yourself from meetings.

5. Construct creative constraints

You may be familiar with Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to the time we allow it. Put simply, if you give yourself one month to create a presentation, it will take you one full month to finish it. But if you only had a week, you’d finish the same presentation in a shorter time.

I’ve observed a similar principle among sensitive strivers — that overthinking expands to the time we allow it. In other words, if you give yourself one week to worry about something that is actually a one-hour task, you will waste an inordinate amount of time and energy.

You can curb this tendency by creating accountability through creative constraints. For example, determine a date or time by which you’ll make a choice. Put it in your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, or even contact the person who is waiting for your decision and let them know when they can expect to hear from you. A favorite practice of my clients is “worry time,” which involves earmarking a short period of the day to constructively problem solve.

Above all, remember that your mental depth gives you a major competitive advantage. Once you learn to keep overthinking in check, you’ll be able to harness your sensitivity for the superpower that it can be.

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 How well eight-year-olds score on a test of thinking skills may be a predictor of how they will perform on tests of thinking and memory skills when they are 70 years old, according to a study published in the October 30, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study also found that education level and socioeconomic status were also predictors of thinking and memory performance. Socioeconomic status was determined by people’s occupation at age 53.

Learning Is a Learned Behavior. Here’s How to Get Better at It

How To Learn

Pocket Worthy

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Stories to fuel your mind.

Sure, getting better at something takes practice. But what does practice involve and how do we truly develop expertise?

Harvard Business Review |

• Ulrich Boser

Photo by cintascotch/Getty Images

Many people mistakenly believe that the ability to learn is a matter of intelligence. For them, learning is an immutable trait like eye color, simply luck of the genetic draw. People are born learners, or they’re not, the thinking goes. So why bother getting better at it? 

And that’s why many people tend to approach the topic of learning without much focus. They don’t think much about how they will develop an area of mastery. They use phrases like “practice makes perfect” without really considering the learning strategy at play. It’s a remarkably ill-defined expression, after all. Does practice mean repeating the same skill over and over again? Does practice require feedback? Should practice be hard? Or should it be fun?

A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better. 

Here’s one example of a study that shows how learning strategies can be more important than raw smarts when it comes to gaining expertise. Marcel Veenman has found that people who closely track their thinking will outscore others who have sky-high IQ levels when it comes to learning something new. His research suggests that in terms of developing mastery, focusing on how we understand is some 15 percentage points more important than innate intelligence. 

Here are three practical ways to build your learning skills, based on research. 

Organize Your Goals Effective learning often boils down to a type of project management. In order to develop an area of expertise, we first have to set achievable goals about what we want to learn. Then we have to develop strategies to help us reach those goals. 

A targeted approach to learning helps us cope with all the nagging feelings associated with gaining expertise: Am I good enough? Will I fail? What if I’m wrong? Isn’t there something else that I’d rather be doing?

While some self-carping is normal, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura says these sorts of negative emotions can quickly rob us of our ability to learn something new. Plus, we’re more committed if we develop a plan with clear objectives. The research is overwhelming on this point. Studies consistently show that people with clear goals outperform people with vague aspirations like “do a good job.” By setting targets, people can manage their feelings more easily and achieve progress with their learning

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Think About Thinking Metacognition is crucial to the talent of learning. Psychologists define metacognition as “thinking about thinking,” and broadly speaking, metacognition is about being more inspective about how you know what you know. It’s a matter of asking ourselves questions like: Do I really get this idea? Could I explain it to a friend? What are my goals? Do I need more background knowledge? Or do I need more practice?

Metacognition comes easily to many trained experts. When a specialist works through an issue, they’ll often think a lot about how the problem is framed. They’ll often have a good sense of whether or not their answer seems reasonable. 

The key, it turns out, is not to leave this sort of “thinking about thinking” to the experts. When it comes to learning, one of the biggest issues is that people don’t engage in metacognition enough. They don’t stop to ask themselves if they really get a skill or concept. 

The issue, then, is not that something goes in one ear and out the other. The issue is that individuals don’t dwell on the dwelling. They don’t push themselves to really think about their thinking

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Reflect on Your Learning There is something of a contradiction in learning. It turns out that we need to let go of our learning in order to understand our learning. For example, when we step away from a problem, we often learn more about a problem. Get into a discussion with a colleague, for instance, and often your best arguments arrive while you’re washing the dishes later. Read a software manual and a good amount of your comprehension can come after you shut the pages. 

In short, learning benefits from reflection. This type of reflection requires a moment of calm. Maybe we’re quietly writing an essay in a corner — or talking to ourselves as we’re in the shower. But it usually takes a bit of cognitive quiet, a moment of silent introspection, for us to engage in any sort of focused deliberation. 

Sleep is a fascinating example of this idea. It’s possible that we tidy up our knowledge while we’re napping or sleeping deeply. One recent study shows a good evening of shut-eye can reduce practice time by 50%. 

The idea of cognitive quiet also helps explain why it’s so difficult to gain skills when we’re stressed or angry or lonely. When feelings surge through our brain, we can’t deliberate and reflect. Sure, in some sort of dramatic, high-stakes situations, we might be able to learn something basic like remember a phone number. But for us to gain any sort of understanding, there needs to be some state of mental ease. 

The good news from all of this — for individuals and for companies looking to help their employees be their best — is that learning is a learned behavior. Being a quick study doesn’t mean you’re the smartest person in the room. It’s that you’ve learned how to learn. By deliberately organizing your learning goals, thinking about your thinking, and reflecting on your learning at opportune times, you can become a better study, too. 

Ulrich Boser is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he also founded and runs the science of learning initiative. He’s the author of Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything.

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