Overcoming overthinking

Four Stoic strategies to overcome overthinking

“Be water, my friend.”

Throw a small pebble gently in a still pond. You will see the water forming ripples around the pebble, and soon, the pond will be still again. Throw a large rock with great force. This time, the water forms wider ripples and takes longer to settle. Depending on whether the stone is large or small, whether it hits the water with greater or lesser force, the ripples will form and then settle down. Water never reacts to force any more than necessary.

Most of us are not like water. We overthink and overreact. Someone throws a small pebble in our mental pond, and it creates wide ripples in our minds that never seem to settle. We use enormous mental energy to deal with a simple problem and don’t really solve it. All we do is hurt ourselves in the process. It is like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. We miss the fly and drop the sledgehammer on our foot. Small inconveniences irritate us. Newspaper headlines make us worry too much. TikTok “influencers” may make us want things we didn’t even know existed the day before. We take a careless comment by someone as a major insult. We worry for hours about a ‘negative’ comment made by our boss. We are depressed about the injustices that surround us.

Often, it seems there is no way out. Whatever we do results in overthinking. We give money to a homeless person. Immediately, we start thinking, “Maybe he is a drug addict. Or a conman. I shouldn’t have given the money to him.” The next time, we pass a homeless person without helping him. We start the overthinking cycle again: “I shouldn’t have passed him by without helping him. After all, it would have been easy for me to give him some money.” If we buy a dress, we wonder if it is really necessary. If we don’t buy it, we wonder if we should have. If we buy stuff on sale, we worry about having spent money on things we didn’t really need. We feel upset if we don’t buy because we passed up an opportunity.

In everything we do, there are endless opportunities to overthink. Most of us immediately take the opportunities and spend our time overthinking. We spend our time unproductively overthinking rather than living a vibrant life.

What can we do about it? Here are four Stoic strategies to overcome overthinking:

1. Draw on your resources

We overthink because we feel trapped and have no way out. We start to overthink. Our minds go through a stage of self-pity. “Why did this happen to me?” or “I should have handled the situation differently.” In essence, we feel trapped by what happened, and there seems to be no way out. But this is seldom true. Instead of thinking such thoughts, if we turn our attention to what we can do now about it, we may find that we didn’t lack resources; we just didn’t look for them. Here’s Epictetus mocking our tendency to find fault instead of finding resources to solve the problem.

“Yes, but my nose is running.”

What have you hands for, then, slave? Is it not that you may wipe your nose? […]

And how much better it would be for you to wipe your nose than to find fault!

- Epictetus, Discourses, 2.14

Finding fault in something and blaming someone for it leads to overthinking. Finding resources to solve our problem makes it go away. If you think you have bought something overpriced, return it rather than overthinking it: “Why are the prices so high?” “I bought something that’s not worth the price I paid for it.”

Why overthink something when you have the resources to reverse your decision?

2. Look for the solution

Sometimes, we don’t even have to look for resources to deal with a situation. The solution is obvious. Yet, we start overthinking by diverting our attention to the problem instead of the solution. Instead of accepting the solution right before us, we go in different directions with an agitated mind.

Is the cucumber bitter? Throw it out. Are their briars in your path? Go around them. That’s enough. Don’t add, “Why are such things in the world?” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.50

If the restaurant is noisy, go to a quieter one. If things are too pricey, buy them on sale or go to a discount store. There are no satisfactory answers to questions like why a restaurant is noisy or why things are pricey. We can overthink questions like these forever or simply find an alternative and get on with our lives.

Why overthink about something when you can make it go away quickly?

3. Let go of unsolvable problems

You did something, but it went wrong. Now, you can’t stop thinking about it. Your job interview did not go well, and now you are going over in your mind the various ways you should have handled your interview. You unintentionally insulted someone, and now you are trying to correct yourself mentally over and over again. A stranger was rude to you, and you can’t stop thinking about it. What is common in all such situations? You are overthinking and making yourself miserable without solving any problem because there is no way to solve it.

If you think you can control things over which you have no control, then you will be hindered and disturbed. You will start complaining and become a fault-finding person. - Epictetus, Encheiridion, 1

If you are overthinking a situation about which you can do nothing, the only thing this will lead to is more overthinking. You can’t get rid of overthinking by overthinking. Anytime you find yourself overthinking about an unsolvable problem, realize that you can’t solve the problem by overthinking because you are only feeding it.

Why feed overthinking by overthinking?

4. Don’t replay solved problems in your mind

A peculiar tendency of humans is to overthink problems that are no longer present. You were about to get into an accident but didn’t. Yet you go through this scene over and over in your mind days after the incident. You even replay your fright at that time. You had a bad childhood. Now you are an adult, and yet you can’t stop replaying your childhood long after it’s over. You indulge your overthinking. Even animals don’t do that.

Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.- Seneca, Moral Letters, 13

Whenever your mind wanders into watching movies of the past—whether it happened twenty seconds or twenty years ago—and starts overthinking, ask yourself, “It’s over. Why am I overthinking instead of being happy that it is over?

Why overthink a problem that doesn’t exist anymore?

A return to stillness

Once you look at your overthinking and see that you have the resources to solve it, or the solution is obvious, not solvable, or already solved, you will see that overthinking is a useless activity and serves no purpose. So, as soon as possible, return to stillness—just like the pond water that returns to stillness after being disturbed.

Be water, my friend. - Bruce Lee

By all means, let’s think. But not overthink.

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