You've been thinking about it for an hour. Maybe a week. You'd say you're working it out, and you may be right. Or you may have been going around the same ground for most of that time, and not noticed when it changed.
Thinking something through and overthinking it can feel exactly the same from the inside. The difference shows up in what the thinking is doing.
Thinking is not the problem
I'd start with this, because a lot of people end up suspicious of their own mind. Thinking things through is useful. Weighing a decision, planning a difficult conversation, working out what to do about money: that's your mind doing its job.
So the aim isn't to think less. It's to know which kind of thinking you're in the middle of.
What problem-solving tends to look like
Problem-solving moves you toward something useful. You land on a decision, or a next step, or a clearer picture than you had. New information comes in, or you see the situation from a different angle. There's a sense of getting somewhere, even if you're not there yet.
What overthinking tends to look like
Overthinking keeps you revisiting something even when there's nothing more to resolve right now. The signs are different:
- You're going over the same material you've already been through, and nothing new is arriving.
- The question keeps changing shape ("what if I'd said...", "what if it goes wrong...") without getting closer to an answer.
- You finish a round of thinking and don't feel any more settled than when you started.
- You keep needing one more round, just to be sure.
None of that means you're doing something wrong. It tells you the thinking has stopped doing a job.
The part people miss
In my experience, a lot of what feels like problem-solving is really an attempt to feel something: certain, reassured, prepared, or that it's all going to be okay.
You can think about a decision for hours and quietly be after the feeling of being sure, and that isn't something more analysis can always give you. That doesn't make the thinking foolish. It's a sensible thing to try. It just means another round may not deliver what you're actually looking for. I wrote about why this happens at night in how to stop overthinking at night.
It's also why you can do everything useful, make the decision, take the next step, and still find your mind going back to it. The thinking has done its job, but the pattern carries on anyway. That isn't a lack of willpower, and it's not something you can simply decide to switch off.
One question to ask
The next time you're mid-thought, try asking:
"What would another round of thinking give me that the last one didn't?"
If there's a real answer (a decision I can make, a step I can take, a fact I can find out), that's problem-solving. Write the next step down and when you'll do it.
If the honest answer is "I'm not sure, I just want to feel better about it," that's useful to know. It tells you the thinking is after a feeling now, not an answer. You don't have to force anything. Noticing the difference is enough to start with.
Where my work fits
Sometimes people come to me having already thought through a situation from every possible angle. They've spent a great deal of time trying to understand it or think their way through it. They don't necessarily need another explanation or more advice. What we can explore is what keeps drawing them back into that thinking, what they're trying to experience through it, and whether there's another way to respond.
If you can see yourself in this, the next step is a Clarity Call. It's a free, relaxed 20-minute conversation, online, where you tell me what's been going on in your own words and we see whether working together makes sense. There's no pressure to book anything.
My work is coaching, not medical treatment or therapy.