At a glance
The thinking promises to settle the matter, and that promise is what keeps you going round. It is a habit doing a job, and the job is to hold a feeling at a distance while you look busy. This article shows what the habit protects and the change in your questions that lets thinking finish.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- Angles without answers. When a client tells me they have looked at something from every angle, I ask how many of those angles were questions anybody could answer.
- The feeling clears the thinking. The circling loosens once the feeling underneath it has somewhere to go, and in my experience that happens in the room rather than in your head at 2am.
- Responsible too early. Among the clients who circle hardest, I keep meeting people who were made responsible early on for how everybody around them felt.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
What is overthinking, actually?
Overthinking runs in 2 directions: backwards as rumination, forwards as worry.
- The word has no clinical definition. Researchers study it as repetitive negative thinking, which is the term you will meet if you go looking at the evidence yourself.
- Rumination chews. Why did I say that, why am I like this, what does it mean about me.
- Worry rehearses. What if it goes wrong, what if they leave, what if I fail to cope.
- It damages the thing it promises to fix. Rumination deepens low mood and interferes with your ability to solve the problem you are turning over1. That second part is worth sitting with: the activity that feels most like problem solving is the one found to get in its way.
- It is treated as a habit rather than a decision. The research puts habit near the front of how rumination starts and keeps going, and describes a process that runs across anxiety, low mood and broken sleep rather than belonging to one diagnosis2.
Why does overthinking feel like solving something?
Overthinking has the exact shape of work, so nothing in the experience tells you whether you are moving or circling.
You are concentrating. You are being serious. You are turning the problem over from a side you had not tried. Everything about the activity reports progress, which is why you grant it another half hour at midnight, and another after that.
The difference sits in the question rather than in the effort. Why am I so bad at this has no finishing line: no answer would settle it, and every answer invites another round. What do I say to her on Thursday finishes. So does which of these 2 options am I taking. In my clinical judgement the things you have circled for years are not really questions. They are feelings that have found a form you are more comfortable holding, and thinking harder will never close them.
What is your overthinking protecting you from?
The habit survives because it pays you, and what it pays is distance from a feeling.
This is my clinical judgement rather than a research finding, so test it against your own experience. Notice what happens when the thinking stops for a moment. Something arrives in the body first: a drop in the stomach, a tightness across the chest, a restlessness that wants the thinking back. Only afterwards do you work out what it was about.
- Control. While you are still thinking, the matter stays open and nothing has been accepted yet.
- Preparation. Rehearsing every version of a conversation feels like getting ready, and getting ready feels like safety.
- Distance. Thinking about a loss stands in for grieving it. Analysing a relationship stands in for saying the thing you are afraid to say.
- The question that finds it. Ask what you would have to feel if the thinking stopped for an hour. The answer arrives fast, and it is the real subject.
In couples this carries on privately long after the room has gone quiet, each of you re-arguing a conversation the other believes is finished. It is one of the quieter ways conflict in relationships keeps itself alive.
Why does telling yourself to stop not work?
By the time you notice you are doing it the habit is already running, so instruction arrives too late to be the lever.
- Night removes the competition. Work, people and errands break the loop up during the day. At 1am nothing does, which makes the thoughts louder and no more true.
- Sleep runs both ways. The thinking keeps you awake, and a short night leaves you less able to steer it the next day.
- Stopping is the wrong instruction. Telling yourself not to think about something keeps the subject in the room. What shifts it is a different question, or a different route out for the feeling.
- When the loop is about one person. With a partner who runs warm and then distant, the circling is you decoding signals, and no amount of decoding supplies information you do not have. That belongs in a conversation with them, and it helps to understand why your partner runs hot and cold.
Thinking that arrives alongside lost sleep, lost appetite and lost pleasure is part of something wider, and in my judgement a technique aimed at the thinking alone will not reach it.
How do you stop overthinking?
You change the kind of question the thinking asks, and you give the feeling underneath it somewhere to go.
- Change the grammar. Catch every why and turn it into a what or a when. Why do I always do this becomes what will I do differently on Thursday. Keep that up for a week, which is my suggestion for noticing the pattern and not a clinical threshold.
- Put it on paper with a time attached. At night, write the thought down and name when you will look at it. That makes it an appointment rather than something happening now.
- Ask for the right kind of help. Work aimed specifically at repetitive negative thinking reduces it more than more general approaches do3. Those were mostly short structured courses, so read it as evidence that the target matters rather than as a verdict on any one method.
- Find the feeling. I work from Psychosynthesis, which puts the emphasis on what the thinking is standing in front of. Once that feeling has another route out, the circling has less work to do.
- Decide, or say it. Behind most long-running loops I meet there is a decision not made or a sentence not said, and one more round of thinking reaches neither.
There are 2 situations where this is not enough. When the feeling underneath the thinking is one you cannot get to on your own, the questions get rewritten and the circling continues, and that needs another person in the room. When the thinking sits inside months of broken sleep and flattened pleasure, something wider is running it, and the questions are not the place to start. Telling those 2 apart from inside is hard, and it is worth doing before you conclude that the habit is simply who you are.
Questions people ask
Is this worth therapy, or should I try an app first?
Therapy earns its place once the thinking has survived everything sensible you have already tried alone. The evidence favours work aimed at the thinking habit itself, which is a fair thing to ask a therapist about before you book.
What happens in a first session if I overthink everything?
The first session goes to finding out what the thinking is standing in front of, rather than to techniques. Most of my clients arrive with the content of the loop and leave having noticed its shape.
What kind of therapy should I look for?
Look for work that goes directly at the thinking habit, because that focus does more than a general approach. I work from Psychosynthesis and put the emphasis on the feeling underneath, which is a different route to the same place.
Will talking about it make me think about it even more?
That is a reasonable worry, and the difference is that a session moves towards the feeling rather than around it. If you leave more wound up than you arrived week after week, say so, because that is information about the work.
How long does this take?
I will not give you a number, because the honest answer depends on what the thinking is protecting and how long it has held that job. What to expect early is a clearer view of the pattern rather than a silent head.
If your mind will not switch off however hard you try, I work with the worry underneath the thinking in overthinking therapy.
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Sources
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E. and Lyubomirsky, S., Rethinking rumination, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008
- Watkins, E. R. and Roberts, H., Reflecting on rumination: consequences, causes, mechanisms and treatment of rumination, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2020
- Stenzel, K. L., Keller, J., Kirchner, L., Rief, W. and Berg, M., Efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy in treating repetitive negative thinking, rumination, and worry: a transdiagnostic meta-analysis, Psychological Medicine, 2025
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
