Mental Health | Overthinking | Advice

Confessions of an Overthinker

What it’s like to be one and how to face it

Tell me if you’ve felt this. Faced with a normal situation, a thousand scenarios cross your mind. As if your brain had a mind of its own and analyzed them all by itself.

You feel drained and tired. Your brain doesn’t obey you. It continues to process all the scenarios, and you don’t have a say.

If you have felt this, as I have, then hello, fellow overthinker.

Although creating multiple scenarios fascinates me, when my anxiety joins the party, I’m overwhelmed.

Overthinking is a vortex that is hard to get out of

You get into a complete and complex vortex of thoughts. And each one of them has so much power and so much force that it feels real. When anxiety joins with overthinking, it enhances all the horrible feelings.

I remember coming home late. I was sure my parents and sisters would be home by then.

When I opened the door, they were not.

My brain raced with the worst reasons for my family’s absence.

Did something happen to them on the way home? Did someone hurt them?

The explanation “they are late”, the most probable one, seemed to have little impact at that moment. Because we become slaves to our thoughts and emotions.

When you’re overthinking, you can’t pretend that nothing is going on

I, at least, can’t. The moment my mind begins to overthink, my facial expression becomes locked and serious.

I can’t pretend that nothing is going on. That causes some problems in my social life.

Everyone ends up noticing that something is wrong with me, that my head is somewhere else.

And this generates incomprehension. Especially when you deal with people who don’t have the slightest notion of what is a mental illness.

These are people that “solve” anxiety by “taking it easy” and solve overthinking by “not thinking.”

Sure.

But is there a solution?

As I have said in other articles, none of my advice is to be taken as scientific or medical. Everything I try to convey in my texts are tools that I have experienced and have had a positive impact on me.

Thus, none of this advice invalidates seeking professional help. I have attended a psychologist and I believe it has given a boost to all the other tools I have used.

When I’m overthinking, I redirect those thoughts to my passion

In my case, it’s writing, as I’ve said around here before.

I try to channel all that torrent of information of overthinking into my stories and my characters.

I gain control over my thoughts from the moment I transfer them to a sheet of paper and manipulate them at my pleasure.

I know that with writing it is easier, theoretically, to do this.

But I firmly believe that any passion we dedicate ourselves to can help us get out of a vortex of overthinking.

You will say to me: but César, I don’t have a passion.

This is a good time to look for one. That’s a conversation for another article, but I’ll say for now that, to find our passion we have to test ourselves, push ourselves to the limit, expose ourselves to different and multiple different activities, looking for the one that makes us… feel.

To help with my overthinking, I talk to someone I trust

I know it is difficult to find a person with whom we feel comfortable exposing everything we are going through.

But it is essential to have one.

Someone to whom we can tell that we are going through times of such pressure that all scenarios cross our minds.

And someone who can hear this without judging us, without devaluing our feelings and our struggle.

It might even be someone who doesn’t understand 100% how we feel, probably because they have never felt something similar.

But it doesn’t have to have happened. It’s enough that they understand us and are available to listen to us.

Because putting into words what we feel, especially out loud, has a powerful impact on us.

If only because it also allows us to create a distance from our thoughts. Because it allows reasoning to start slowly taking hold of us again. That reasoning can take the data from our overthinking session and reduce them to the insignificance they deserve because they are not real.

The secret, across all the tools and all the methods that we can use, is precisely that: to regain the connection to reality.

To realize that reality differs from most of all these scenarios we imagine.

To realize that when we get into that vortex of thoughts, we are steadily moving away from the notion of reality.

We are progressively moving away from the notion of chance, giving emotional force to the less likely. And we are running away from the present, looking for a future that doesn’t yet exist and living as if it does.

In conclusion

Overthinking is a real problem. I’m still trying to figure out what relationship it has with my anxiety, whether it is cause or consequence. Either way, it puts me into a whirlpool of thoughts and scenarios that is very difficult to get out of.

It prevents me from demonstrating anything other than that, anything other than all this that I’m feeling. My face gets locked, my expression closed, and that creates incomprehension in others.

But I have learned that I can control all this by channeling these thoughts into my passion — writing — while talking to someone I trust is essential.

• What about you, dear overthinker? What tools do you use to control this flood of thoughts?
• Have you felt any of these things I’ve talked about?
• Let’s talk about it in the comments. I want to learn from you.

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