Overthinking steals a life you haven’t lived yet

There is a different kind of exhaustion that comes from living inside situations that you haven’t experienced yet.

You converse in your head before conversing with your lips. You picture your life falling apart before it has even been built. You replay a past conversation like a song stuck on repeat, and prepare answers to questions that nobody asked, creating 101 entire futures that you probably wouldn’t want to live out in real life. Nothing has happened, and yet somehow, you’ve already survived it.

Welcome to the quiet cruelty of overthinking. The unproductive cognitive loop where the brain replays the mistakes of the past and catastrophizes the future, without reaching any resolution whatsoever. It makes you experience the pain of negative possibilities as though they were facts, when in reality, they are nothing more than just a fragment of your imagination. What’s concerning is that most people are aware of the overthinking, aware that they want to break free from it, but aren’t aware of where to start.

This might be you. If it is, the first thing to remember is – it’s not your fault. Scientifically speaking, your brain actually does this to protect you. It is evolutionarily wired to prioritise survival over happiness. The amygdala (the part of the brain that processes emotions and threat responses) treats uncertainty as a physical threat and sends out signals of panic. The prefrontal cortex then works overtime to predict every possible outcome of the situation at hand. The human brain, as big and beautiful as it is, still struggles to distinguish between helpful problem-solving and unhelpful worrying, because it sometimes mistakenly views rumination as a safety strategy. This is why you may often find yourself stuck in a loop of false control.

Long story short, it’s a survival mechanism that goes into overdrive in its search for certainty. Certainty, the anchor. There is one tiny issue when trying to think your way into certainty, though. Certainty doesn’t exist.

Life is the most unpredictable thing there is. And while you’re in your head, prepping for every possible future there is, you don’t realize that you’re not living the one that’s happening in the present. What’s more, is that you’re not living a happy one either.

Think about how many times you’ve thought your way out of a potentially beneficial situation, because the overthinking got to you. Here are a few examples to put things into perspective:

• “I want to apply for this opportunity, but what if they think I’m not qualified enough?”
• “I want to tell someone how I feel, but what if they don’t feel the same way?”
• “I want to start a new project, but what if it fails?”

These imaginary consequences are loud enough to stop us from achieving a vast number of things, which is honestly pretty concerning when you think about it. Why?  Because thinking about life does NOT mean you live it.

Overthinking tends to make the worst-case scenarios live rent-free in our heads, while making the positive ones seem like some far-off fantasy. Maybe we should start rethinking that arrangement. The world around us is not set in stone and is actually completely malleable. Your thoughts drive you to carry out different actions. Your actions result in you living out different experiences. The sum of your experiences will then affect how you think the overall quality of your life is. So, if you’re going to overthink, flip the switch and do it positively by thinking in your favour. What if tomorrow is one of the best days you’ve ever had? What if your future a year from now has everything you’ve wanted? What if it all goes right for you? I understand that sometimes, positive thinking is easier said than done, but the more you engage in it, the more likely it will feel natural to you.

Let me also say that thinking ahead is, of course, not inherently bad, because some decisions we make in life do deserve significant consideration. Planning could potentially make complex issues easier to deal with, and anxiety can also alert us to genuine problems that could emerge. You have the right to want clarity – especially living in a world that barely gives us breadcrumbs of it. And this also isn’t about choosing between being completely reckless and blindly optimistic.  It’s about learning to stop guaranteeing life in your head before agreeing to participate in it first. Because life has never, nor will it ever, come with guarantees. So, sometimes, the best thing you can learn to do is learn to let go, because not everything we come across is meant to be understood. Learn to let things exist without assigning a meaning to them. Learn how to deal with whatever life decides to throw at you, because you may not be able to control the outcome, but you can control the way you react to that outcome. The more confident you are about this, the more the made-up catastrophes gradually start to become insignificant. Let life surprise you a bit, because it can be way more than you give it credit for. And besides, whether you like it or not, the future is inevitable and will show up sooner or later. So, sometimes, when the overthinking takes over, remember that you deserve more than understanding. You deserve peace.