Are You Overthinking It

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.

- VICTORIA JOY

As Laura Andrews types her PIN into the speed point machine, she feels an overwhelming sense of relief. For the first time in months, the 40-year-old creative strategist and entrepreneur is able to see things clearly and 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 go roadtripping 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. The term 'overthinking' has made its way from niche self-development vocab to meme fodder in recent years. 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 agree on is that it involves thinking about situations to an unhelpful degree. Anne Bogel, author of Don't Overthink It, broadly defines overthinking as "times when we lavish mental energy on things that don't deserve it; thinking in a way that's repetitive, unhealthy and unhelpful."