Note: This article is based on the blog and therapist Pia Callesen, in which she talks about dealing with overthinking.
You are desperately trying to find a solution or meaning. Ideas float around but in vain, and unfortunately, solutions rarely come to your mind.
In my daily work as a clinical metacognitive psychologist, I've encountered many people who are trying to find meaning or answers, or they are trying to make the right decision, or they spend most of their waking hours meticulously searching their minds for solutions. Ironically, in the process of discovering this way of moving forward in life, they are heading to a dead end.
When we spend a lot of time analyzing our problems and dilemmas, we often end up being more confused than we were in the beginning. Moreover, overthinking permanently can lead to a wide range of symptoms, such as insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and loss of energy, which, in turn, often leads to more worries about the person's symptoms, thus creating a vicious cycle of overthinking. In some cases, this eventually leads to chronic anxiety or frustration.
Behaviors caused by overthinking
When overthinking and related symptoms escalate and become intolerable, it is usual for us to look for ways to calm down. Many popular strategies seem logical or useful. However, research has shown that they may unintentionally cause more harm than good, and they usually lead to more overthinking. You may recognize some of them in your behavior:
1. Permanent caution against threats
There is nothing wrong with using this strategy if you feel that you are in control of it, but it can quickly backfire; take health concerns, for example. If this is a way to reduce your anxiety, you will start checking yourself or the people you care about excessively for signs of illness. Detecting this threat will only increase feelings of danger and more health concerns.
Another example: Worrying about people loving you and trying to figure out how they think of you will inadvertently lead to isolation, anxiety, lack of interaction, and an inability to enjoy their company.
2. Looking for answers and reassurances
It is perfectly normal to seek the approval and acceptance of the people close to you and to search for answers on how to deal better.
However, if you get to a point where you rely on these strategies to calm yourself and ease your anxiety, you are on a slippery slope. For example, some of my clients spend several hours a day searching Google in hopes of finding reassurance or at least an explanation for their disappointment.
However, this strategy often leads to more concerns. A Google search for symptoms that are relatively common yields a wide variety of search results, including diagnoses you might not have thought of.
3. Over-planning
There is no problem with moderate levels of planning. It is very healthy to keep a calendar or take notes for yourself. However, some people plan their lives down to the smallest detail, and this can become problematic.
In addition to being time-consuming, excessive planning has other adverse effects, such as exacerbating fears. For example, doing careful planning is trying to anticipate all the things that are likely to go into a plan and how those events might actually be dealt with if they did occur, and then start the worrying process.
Others plan meticulously because they think that if they do not, they will not be able to deal with emergency events, and this leads to excessive anxiety when planning is not possible or when unexpected events occur.
Aside from these unhelpful strategies, there is another underlying factor that can make overthinking permanent. It is your beliefs about thinking, and the term "metacognitive" in "metacognitive therapy" - the clinical approach I use - refers to thinking about thinking.
When my clients begin metacognitive therapy, many are convinced they have no control over their thought processes. Many of them are convinced that their thoughts appear and automatically attract their attention and that they cannot control whether they develop into hour-long ruminations about how bad things are now or catastrophic fears of bad things that may happen in the future.
I have some good news: You don't have to live with an excess of anxiety. It is a persistent myth that overthinking is an innate trait, like eye color or crooked toes, and this means that it cannot be changed and that you have to live with it easily.
Adrian Wells, the clinical psychologist at the University of Manchester who founded metacognitive therapy, discovered that overthinking. That is, anxiety and rumination are acquired strategies that we choose consciously or unconsciously to try and deal with our complicated feelings and thoughts. It is not a fixed feature; rather it is a habit we acquire, and we can learn to change it if we want to.
For the first ten years of my clinical psychiatry practice, I worked on traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches that we need to spend time with our thoughts and beliefs to challenge them and transform them into more realistic versions.
And when I was introduced to metacognitive therapy, in which the focus is on making your thoughts so easily ignored (which Wills jokingly calls "lazy therapy"), it is fundamentally changed my understanding of mental illness.
In 2020, Wells and colleagues published the results of a large randomized trial of 174 clients with depression. We found that those in metacognitive therapy benefited more than those assigned to receive CBT (74% met formal criteria for post-treatment recovery versus 52% of those in the CBT group, and this was maintained to much follow-up).
Besides my work with clients and the experiences of other therapists using metacognitive therapy, this finding has convinced me that the cause of mental illness is not our negative thoughts themselves, so the solution is not to spend more time on them. On the contrary, the cause of mental illness is the large amount of time we spend thinking about our negative thoughts. So, the solution is to spend less time thinking about it.
This realization created a huge wave of thoughts in my mind. For years, through cognitive behavioral therapy, I have helped my clients spend more time on their negative thoughts. But what if there were better ways I could help them?
Many of my clients have indeed felt that cognitive behavioral therapy has helped them (and it sure does for many), but I no longer think it's the best approach. Over the past ten years, I have completely changed my methods, using metacognitive therapy exclusively to help people think less and thus cope better with their mental health issues.
Whether you worry about what you want or suffer from an anxiety disorder or depression, metacognitive strategies can help you reduce the overthinking that contributes to your symptoms. Metacognitive therapy is about discovering that you can choose whether or not to engage with a thought, regardless of its content or the feelings it evokes.
In the next section, I'll teach you some of the steps I use in metacognitive therapy to help my clients slow down their thinking and let you know that overthinking is not something that happens to us in vain. Rather, it is under our control.
What should be done?
1. Recognize and allow stimulating thoughts
It is estimated that the human brain produces thousands of separate thoughts, associations, and memories every day. Most of these things are meaningless, they come and go without our noticing.
However, some ideas grab our attention. These thoughts are referred to in metacognitive therapy as "stimulating thoughts," and if you pay enough attention to them, they can trigger an explosion of physical sensations and feelings and countless connections.
Some motivational thoughts can activate warmth and joy about an upcoming exciting project, meeting a friend, or a vacation you're looking forward to. These types of stimulating thoughts are certainly not a problem, but they nonetheless activate a long chain of other thoughts that can develop into fears or ruminations.
Fears are usually formed from hypothetical scenarios and begin with "what if..." statements such as: "What if I make the wrong decision?" or "What if they don't like me?" or "What if I get sick?" and so on. On the other hand, typical rumination begins with thoughts about what, why, and how: “What is wrong with me?” or "Why do I feel this way?" or "How can I get better?".
You can liken these ideas to trains in a crowded train station, and there are always departures to a wide range of different destinations. Each train represents an idea or a series of ideas, for example, the thought, "What if they don't like me?" You reach the mental railway platform. You can "catch up" with the idea, and you'll quickly notice many others joining in: "I won't be able to handle it if they don't like me", "Maybe then, I shouldn't go." Or you can dismiss the idea, and it's like letting the train pass you by and go back to whatever you were doing.
When you don't spend energy on an idea, you will either find that it will remain on the platform for later or that it will easily pass you by. Therefore, it is not the triggering thought that confuses you and exposes you to various unpleasant symptoms, nor the amount of stimulating thoughts you have (everyone has them).
Problems arise if you ride on every train continuously. That is, if you start analyzing thoughts and get caught up in anxiety or excessive rumination. Then, it is as if you are adding more and more carriages to the train, one after the other, the train becomes heavier and slower and eventually has trouble crossing the lowest hill.
The same goes for your triggering thoughts. The more time you spend on those thoughts, the slower and heavier they feel.
2. Know what you can and cannot control
If you are accustomed to uncritically riding most trains, which means being constantly immersed in stimulating thoughts, starting to worry and meditate for long periods, you are well on your way to developing an unhealthy lifestyle. If you repeat this pattern repeatedly, you may feel as if it is happening automatically, and you believe - understandably - that it is beyond your control.
It's true. The stimulating thoughts themselves are completely automatic. You don't have any say in which trains will reach your brain station. However, you do have a choice about which trains you take. You can choose whether or not you want to engage with a stimulating thought. You can control whether you 'answer' the idea or follow it up with more questions.
In an attempt to understand this differently, not in terms of trains. You can imagine your thoughts as someone calling you on the phone, and you don't decide if the phone rings, who calls, or when he calls. Unfortunately, in this case, the phone is not one that you can turn off, but you choose whether to answer the phone, leave it to ring and return your attention to what you were doing.
The phone may be loud and annoying and attract your attention, but what happens if you leave it? It will stop ringing eventually. Thoughts and phones differ, but this metaphor is key in metacognitive therapy. and stimulating thoughts are indeed beyond your control, but you can control whether or not you deal with them.
Thoughts are, in principle, ephemeral, although you may not see them that way. So, ask yourself how many thoughts you had yesterday that you can remember today. Honestly, out of the thousands of thoughts I've had, I'm not sure I can remember 10.
Why is that? Because most of the thoughts that come to us and pass away almost instantly. We give them no special attention. We leave them and go back to whatever we were doing. Even though you may not be aware of it, you are able to choose not to engage in conversation with your thoughts, just as you can ignore a phone that keeps ringing.
3. Put off worries and rumination until later
Many chronic overthinkers struggle to change their belief that their thoughts are controllable, and they may still not be convinced. One way to challenge your beliefs further is to discover if you can put off worrying and ruminating. I recommend that clients use "worry/rumination time." It must be a specific time of the day. From seven-thirty until eight in the evening, for example, you allow yourselves to worry and ruminate freely.
In this way, when stimulating thoughts or feelings come up during the day, for example, when you feel the need to assess your health or think about what your friends think of you, defer these thoughts to your scheduled “worry/rumination time” (you can say to yourself: “I will deal with this later"). This specific time is also helpful for any planning or reassurance you need, but there is a note that you should pay attention to. That is, you should avoid scheduling worry time an hour or two before you go to bed, especially if you are prone to insomnia or other problems sleep difficulties.
Using a specific time for worrying and ruminating serves several functions. First, it is an experience that challenges the belief that worry and rumination are uncontrollable. Most of my clients have found that when dedicating themselves to this experience, it is possible to put off worrying or ruminating. While this sounds like a challenging goal, you do it daily without realizing it.
For example, whenever you notice an alarming newspaper headline on your way to work and start to worry but then remember that you are in a hurry, you turn your attention back to going to work, which means that you control your thoughts. Or perhaps you are sitting in a café with a friend, and you hear a conversation at another table that brings up disturbing memories. You decide to redirect your attention back to your conversation with your friend. Once again, you are in control of your thoughts.
In the same way, you can learn to consciously ignore your inner stimulating thoughts, and then experience the feeling that you have a choice as to whether you choose to engage with them or not.
The second function of setting a time to "worry/ruminate" is a way of discovering that stimulating thoughts are ephemeral and ever-changing. For example, ideas that seemed so relevant and important in the morning will seem less, so when you get to that “worry/rumination” time later in the day, you may even discover that you can't remember some of the thoughts that triggered you. Also, all feelings, positive or negative, are usually fleeting if we tolerate them and allow them.
Not all thoughts go away forever when you put off processing them, and some thoughts are about important issues that need to be addressed. Regardless, most of my clients find it far more beneficial to have these issues dealt with within a specific time of day rather than endlessly problem-solving as you try to deal with your daily responsibilities.
Ultimately, while it may seem obvious, "worry/rumination" time is a way to reduce and contain the amount of time you spend worrying and ruminating. As I explained earlier, stimulating thoughts themselves do not cause unpleasant symptoms, nor does the amount of these stimulating thoughts.
Rather, it is the time we spend engaging in these thoughts, the rumination and worry, that weighs us down. By setting aside a specific amount of time for worrying and rumination, you are more likely to feel in control and prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed.
4. Avoid evading stimulating thoughts, and practice focusing
For people who suffer from the stress of overthinking, it is very easy to become intimidated by their stimulating thoughts. After all, if you feel that you are at the mercy of these thoughts, you may be tempted to avoid them in the first place.
Unfortunately, this is not so useless, it is counterproductive as well. Avoiding stimulating situations seriously impairs your life, and however successful you are at avoiding situations that trigger stimulating thoughts, you won't get a chance to practice letting go of those thoughts. After all, you can't learn to ride a bike without a bike.
Based on the above, and if you feel ready, I recommend that you set yourself daily challenges that involve stimulating thoughts and that you practice not facing them until the designated worry time is reached. This will help you become more adept at ignoring your stimulating thoughts and realize that you control your fears and ruminations. You won't succeed every time, but - like learning to ride a bike - you need to get up every time you fall and keep riding until you get the hang of it.
Some people struggle to develop this skill. In this case, we use metacognitive therapy (attention training) to help clients realize their ability to shift their attention regardless of internal input, such as stimulating thoughts, external input, as external pressures. I usually ask my clients to do the following 10-minute workout. Perhaps reading this will inspire you to try it out for yourself:
- Play three or more environmental sounds, such as crowds, birdsong, chatter from a nearby radio or television, children playing, construction work, etc. And you have to find where these ambient sounds are going. It helps if some of your chosen sounds are closer and louder while others are farther away and softer.
- Of the three or more sounds you have chosen, practice paying attention to one for about 10 seconds (you can use a digital timer to help you) and allow the other sounds to fade into the background. After 10 seconds, shift your focus to another of your chosen sounds.
- Repeat the exercise after two minutes, but switch faster between sounds. Now, focus on each sound for only two to four seconds per sound.
- This exercise aims to become accustomed to switching your attention and to be good at it. When you feel more confident, you can use a recording of a stimulating thought in the exercise and practice shifting your attention away from the sound of that thought.
There is another exercise you can try that I use in my clinic, which is the windowpane exercise, which makes it abundantly clear that your attention is in your control, no matter what stimulating thoughts are in your head.
I write one or two stimulating thoughts in removable ink on the window. For example, "What if I fail my driving test?" or “What if I find myself boring?” Then, I ask my client to practice looking through the words to notice the scene behind them; the trees, the sky, the buildings, and other scenes beyond the window, and then I ask them to turn their attention again to the words, and again to the details of the scene. The purpose here is to familiarize clients with the sense that we can control our attention.
And if you try this, you will find that while the written thoughts remain in view, you can control whether you focus on them or let them fade away and enjoy the world outside instead.
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