What to think when you're overthinking
My imagination is my best and worst quality.
Show me a problem, and I’ll come up with a million different approaches to find the solution. Give me a thought, and I’ll think it into a huge idea. But present me with a few choices, and I’ll drive myself into a panic attacks working through all the pros and cons and semi-pros and semi-cons before making a decision.
I overthink everything. And I overthink about overthinking. And then I get overwhelmed and shut down and end up talk myself out of everything.
But I’m learning to recognize the signs of when I’m getting lost in my own head. And before I reach the Point of No Return, I now try to remind myself a few things:
I tell myself this after any embarrassing situation or if I’m facing a potentially anxiety-inducing activity. Psychologists call it “Spotlight Syndrome,” I call it “humans taking themselves way too seriously pt. 12538.” All of us work so hard at pretending to have it together, and we’re all deathly afraid of being found out. So when we trip or say something stupid or attempt to do something totally unfamiliar, all we can think about is how everyone else will be looking at us and judging us and forming opinions about the value of our existence from this one thingandholyshiticanticanticant.
Well GET OVER YOURSELF. THAT’S YOUR EGO TALKING. Unfortunately, I'm not as important to anyone else as they are to themselves. And that’s why I should never think twice about messing up or embarrassing myself. Because the chances are, no one else has either noticed, or really cares.
This is an absolutely terrifying thought. But also utterly freeing. Whenever I find myself caught in my feels, or worried about whether or not something will make me happy or not, or whether something I did or said will change the way others see me, this one sentence gives me complete power back over my emotions. Because it doesn’t mean that no one else in the world can make me happy. It means that no one else is allowed to take my happiness away from me.
And there’s nothing more liberating than the notion that I need to wait for anyone else to do the things that make me feel content.
You can spend hours thinking about how others interpreted what you said or what you did. Or you can own what you said or did and move on.
You can waste days analyzing someone’s actions trying to decipher their “real” intentions. Or you can let actions speak for themselves.
You can wait months trying to find the “perfect time” to start a project or make the right decision. Or you can start the ball rolling and figure it out as you go.
Because honestly, that perfect time will never come. And those people will think and feel what they think and feel regardless of what you do. And if you spend all your time and energy trying to control or understand how others feel or think, you will spend your entire life simply reacting to the whims of others, and not making any proactive decisions for yourself.
The French have a perfect phrase for this sentiment of overthinking: L'esprit de l'escalier, or “staircase wit.” Only when you’re walking down the staircase after an argument do you come up with the one retort that could have been the Mother of All Retorts. Sure, you could have said this one thing and the situation would have changed. Or maybe if you hadn’t done that one thing everything would be different. But what’s done is done. Every time I catch myself analyzing my own actions in a past situation, I say it to myself: what’s done is fucking done. And the only thing I can change now, is how I move forward.
Personally, this thought has the biggest impact on me. Because personally, my biggest flaw is my indecision. My fear of making the wrong choice leads to hesitation, rumination, hyper-evaluation, and basically every other negative “-ation” that exists. If I can remove the notion that there is one straight “right” path for my existence, I free myself from the fear that any choice could be the one to potentially lead me astray.
I’m starting to understand, there is simply a beginning and an ending in life. And everything in the middle is completely up to me. But the only way to move forward is to keep making decisions, and to stick to it them the best I can. Mistakes can always be fixed. But lessons can never be unlearned. And thinking about situations is simply running in place. You have to make choices and own them and learn from them. Because if you’re not doing your best to grow, you’re simply letting yourself die.