The Hidden Cost of Overthinking

You’re replaying a conversation from yesterday for the tenth time. Was your tone off? Did you sound too eager? Should you have said less, or in a different way? The person you were talking to has likely moved on, but your mind hasn’t. It’s still churning, looping, looking for certainty, safety, or closure. You hope to reach some clarity, but the more you think, the more you stir up emotion, and the more your thinking mind tries to make sense of the feelings it helped create.

Overthinking is often dismissed as a bad habit or personality quirk. But beneath the surface, it serves a purpose. There’s a reason we get caught in these loops, and understanding them helps us shift our relationship with thought. In moments of discomfort, the brain scans the body, draws on memory, and predicts what’s happening or what might go wrong next. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes this as the brain’s attempt to reduce uncertainty by creating meaning through prediction based on past experience (Feldman Barrett, 2017).

In this light, overthinking becomes a form of sense-making. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense: Uncomfortable feelings could signal danger, requiring immediate interpretation and response. The mind attempts to restore control in the face of perceived threat but often ends up reinforcing the discomfort it’s trying to resolve.

The Safety Logic Behind Overthinking

In therapeutic work, I often see that overthinking arises from an unconscious narrative: “If I can just figure this out, I’ll feel better.” But the nature of that thinking—the shape, tone, and focus—is influenced by the state of the body. We often assume our thoughts are objective, neutral reflections of external reality. But they’re not. They’re deeply influenced by our physiology in the moment.

One well-known study of Israeli parole judges found that the likelihood of granting parole was lowest just before lunch (around 10 percent) and highest shortly after lunch (around 65 percent). The researchers concluded: A hungry brain is a grumpy brain (Danziger, Levav, & Avnaim-Pesso, 2011). In other words, cognitive decisions are not made in isolation—they are shaped by our internal state.

In this way, overthinking functions as a kind of emotional shield, a strategy to avoid or control uncomfortable feelings. Cognitive models of anxiety similarly describe worry as a means of staying in the abstract to avoid fully feeling what's beneath (Borkovec et al., 2004).

The irony is that while the mind loops to reduce uncertainty, the act of looping often intensifies it. Research shows that intolerance of uncertainty is a major factor in worry and excessive mental activity (Dugas et al., 1998). When we don’t feel secure within, the mind compensates by trying to solve everything externally.

Source: DALL·E / OpenAI, 2025.

The Dangers of Trying to Think Our Way to Safety

Though it feels productive, overthinking often delivers the opposite of what it promises. Rumination—repetitive, negative, and self-focused thought—is strongly associated with anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000; Watkins, 2008).

Physiologically, it activates the stress response. I’ve noticed that clients experiencing intense mental loops often struggle with sleep, digestion, and physical tension. The body bears the weight of the mind’s effort to control.

Over time, this erodes self-trust. When we’re constantly second-guessing or trying to outthink our emotions, we become disconnected from the deeper signals of clarity, insight, and instinct that reside within us.

Thoughts Reflect State, Not Truth

A major shift occurs when people begin to see thoughts not as facts, but as reflections of inner state. When we’re fatigued or dysregulated, thoughts tend to be more catastrophic, self-critical, or confused. Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2001) suggests that our physiological state determines how we perceive safety and threat. Thought content follows.

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In practice, I’ve observed this again and again: When people reconnect with their body through somatic practices, their thoughts change. Clarity returns not because we solved the thought, but because the state that produced it has shifted.

From Controlling Thoughts to Relating Differently to Them

Many people try to overcome overthinking by replacing one thought with another. But I’ve found that the more we try to control the mind, the more entangled we become in it.

A more helpful shift is in how we relate to thoughts, not by suppressing or challenging them, but by being the observer of them. When we recognise thoughts as mental events rather than truths, we create space. We become less identified with the content and more attuned to the context.

This shift, from identification to observation, creates a pause. And in that pause, we can return to the body, to breath, to the here and now. Clients often describe this as feeling “like themselves again,” less scattered, more grounded.

Reconnecting With the Body, Reclaiming Clarity

In my experience, overthinking begins to dissolve not through reasoning, but through reconnection: to the body, to breath, to intuitive inner signals. Anyone who’s tried meditation knows we can’t control what thoughts arise, but we can choose where to place attention.

A colleague once described thoughts as trains pulling through a station. My extension to that metaphor is this: When we jump on a train, the sounds, the smells, and the views from the window are all determined by that train and its destination. If we board a thought, we will be taken on a ride, and thinking is just that—a ride, not reality. The lesson is this: Be mindful of what trains you board.

Sometimes, all it takes is placing attention on the breath or the sensations in the body. These small acts of attunement can break the loop—not because the thoughts disappear, but because we return to something more stable than mind.

Interoceptive awareness—the ability to sense internal bodily states—has been linked with improved emotional regulation and reduced rumination (Füstös et al., 2013). In practice, this awareness often marks a turning point: people shift from analysing to sensing, from control to trust.

Trusting the Inner Signal

What surprises many people is that when they stop trying to think their way out, clarity often emerges. What felt like confusion was simply the noise of an overwhelmed system.

From this quieter place, choices become clearer. Communication becomes cleaner. Even difficult situations feel less overwhelming—not because the outer changed, but because the inner relationship did.

We don’t overcome overthinking by outsmarting the mind. We outgrow it by returning to a deeper intelligence within—one that doesn’t loop, fix, or force. It already knows.