Overthinking is a hobby of mine. I often don’t realize it’s happening. I think I’m being intentional, thinking through all the options, possible outcomes, pitfalls, and weighing costs against benefits.
That’s helpful if I am trying to make a decision which requires that level of attention. It’s disabling when I’m trying to figure out what I want to do next., or in trivial things like what to wear.
When I look back through my journals, the days I identify as being great days weren’t the ones I spent a lot of time thinking. They were the days I was doing something, the ones where I was taking action after making a decision.
Over the years my approach to thinking has become similar to how I view painkillers: I prefer the minimum effective dose to get the desired result.
Anything beyond that is waste and in many cases, harmful or even addictive.
When my mind starts spinning on a topic or goal, and the energy builds upon itself, it feels great at the start. I get the cocktail of endorphins that feels like I’m making progress even though I’m just sitting there. My thoughts can loop indefinitely because they have nowhere to land: A half-formed idea, a worry, a line I wanted to write. It returns again and again, hunting for a place to land, and until it finds one, it keeps circling.
I now use a simple rule to interrupt this infinite thinking loop:
As soon as I have a thought that doesn’t feel good, I make a decision to do one small thing.
Because until I do one small thing, I don’t have any feedback grounded in reality. It’s just my thoughts competing and feeding off each other.
I use negative feelings as my trigger instead of positive ones because I want to make my decisions and take action from empowered states, not fearful or low energy states. So I take a small action that puts me back into an empowered state and will generate evidence I can evaluate.
Once I’ve taken action and have some feedback, then I can proceed to think through things, leading to the next action, more feedback, forming a new, healthier loop.
I recently launched an application and caught myself overthinking how I wanted to position it in the marketplace. I was reviewing competitors and the various feature sets when I had a thought: “What if I don’t get more sign-ups?”
That obviously didn’t feel good or empowering, so I asked myself what was one small action I could take to get more sign-ups and decided to ask the current subscribers what they liked about the product, what problems it solved for them, and what they think it’s missing.
Using that feedback, I was able to create a marketing campaign that shows how the app solves a common problem for people. And the feedback I received was slightly different from the way I was describing the problem and solution, so the language was more direct and would allow me to reach a more specific sector of the market, and therefore help more people.
Overthinking stalls you. Decisions move you.
I want to do the minimum thinking required to reach my goals. Not because I’m lazy or don’t want to think. If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me and can’t help but think. The goal is to use our thinking to build an intentional life, not to overthink and feel stuck.
So the next time you find yourself overthinking something and thoughts creep in that don’t feel good, stop and ask, “What’s the smallest action I could take to address this issue?”
Then take that action, look at the results you get, and repeat. The results you get are just feedback, not failure, even if they aren’t what you desired or expected.
But you can take more action from feedback than you ever could from excessive thinking.
Reply to this and tell me what action you took and what you learned.
Until next week,
Kevin