Overthinking is repeated thinking that has stopped adding useful understanding or helping you decide, while continuing to occupy your attention.
It can look diligent. After all, you’re still working on the problem.
Except the same evidence has now received its fourteenth hearing.
What has changed since the last time you thought this through?
New information? A clearer question? A decision you can make?
Or another imagined conversation ending at the same uncertainty?
The guided seven-day book Seduce My Mind, part of the Sensual Hero’s Journey, explores your relationship with thoughts that become convincing and difficult to leave alone. The question isn’t how to stop thinking altogether. It’s how to recognise when thought has become a way of postponing a feeling, an action or the fact that you don’t know yet.
Sometimes you need to ask someone. Sometimes to make a choice. Sometimes to have dinner while an answer takes its time.
Rumination looks at a related repetitive pattern. Uncertainty asks what remains possible when more thought can’t supply the missing information.
Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap worksheets (PDF), accompanying The Happiness Trap, includes ways to explore your relationship with thoughts. It offers another approach to noticing mental activity without making every sentence in your head a command.