Overthinking the Thinking

“You are overthinking”. How many times have you heard or said it?

I am sure plenty of times.

Recently, on the same day, I said these exact words to someone and someone else returned the favour within a span of a few hours. On another occasion, I was told I was overthinking simple logistics, only to be told later that my ‘over’ thinking about the same logistics was actually very wise. Similar trivial conversations have happened in all of our lives: same person, same subject, same amount of thinking, completely opposite evaluations depending on how things turned out.

If we google overthinking, we would get all these search results: Google’s own definition, some self-help or psychology pointers, and thousands of online resources and videos addressing ‘how to stop overthinking’.

A quick search through the DSM-5 turns up no entry for overthinking. When psychologists study problematic patterns of thought, they look at specific constructs like rumination, worry, or repetitive negative thinking. There are scientifically studied forms of problematic repetitive thought, but ‘overthinking’ is not itself a specific scientific construct.

For convenience, let’s just say the apparently obvious: like any natural variation in almost all characteristics across life, some of us think a lot, some of us very little, and some of us like to pretend that they don’t waste time on something as mediocre as thinking.

The Pedestal

And then there is a masterpiece, Rodin’s The Thinker, in a museum.

He sits on his plinth, chin on his fist, lost in thought. Nobody walks past the sculpture and tells him he is overthinking or delaying execution.

Rodin originally conceived the figure as Dante sitting atop The Gates of Hell, looking down at the inferno while mentally wrestling with his composition. But when the figure is seen as a standalone sculpture, the context of the inferno can take a back seat, and the calm, noble posture takes over.

That is what a pedestal does. It tells us in advance that this specific thinking has already been judged valuable. 

So where is the line? The line for people who think because they are human, and not because they are ‘thought leaders’?

The Inconvenient Truth

Let’s simplify the question: when is thinking a problem? And for whom? And on the other side, when is it useful? And to whom?

Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate, looked at this through cognitive limits and what he called bounded rationality. Real human decision-making is constrained by limited information, limited time, and limited cognitive capacity. Instead of assuming people can search through every possible alternative to a mathematically perfect answer, Simon showed that people often ‘satisfice’. That is, they stop searching when they find an option that is good enough for the purpose.

Barry Schwartz later studied two categories of decision-makers: maximizers, who exhaustively seek the best possible option, and satisficers, who settle once their criteria are met. Two people can look at the exact same decision and have completely different stopping points.

Continuing to analyse carries a real cost. Every extra minute of thinking consumes time, attention, cognitive energy, and the patience of the group.

Economists like Xavier Gabaix and his colleagues tested this. When acquiring information carries an explicit cost in time or money, people adopt stopping rules because additional information isn’t worth what it costs to acquire.

So deciding that another hour of calculation isn’t worth the cost is an economic trade-off. But that is not the same thing as saying that the person doing the thinking has a defective trait.

The Thing We Call Overthinking

So when we casually say ‘you are just overthinking’, what are we actually judging? The volume of thoughts? The time running down? The delay in taking action? Or the discomfort of the other person being unable to hold their own convenient assumptions?

There are situations where repetitive, unproductive thinking can become a recognised psychological phenomenon. That is not the topic we are discussing within this article. Here I am talking about the day-to-day, mundane, personal, interpersonal, or formal settings kind of overthinking, and its more elite cousins.

When we casually say ‘you are just overthinking’, it neatly shifts the focus from the actual subject within the thinking to the defects within the thinker.

We aren’t saying that the other person’s argument has a logical flaw. We are saying the person’s thinking itself is a problem.

It can be a convenient way to shift the discussion from the thing being considered to the person considering it, intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes the person may really be stuck. But other times, the issue may be the inconvenience, discomfort, or assumptions of the listener, or simply the fact that time is running out in the situation.

And yet, some types of thinking are considered valuable enough to be taught. There are courses, workshops, degrees, books, coaches and consultants teaching people how to think critically, analytically, strategically, laterally, systematically, creatively, and better. We pay people to teach us how to make decisions, solve problems, question assumptions and even think about our own thinking.

So thinking is apparently something we can learn, practise, improve and pay good money for. And yet, in everyday life, there is always someone ready to tell us that we are doing too much of it.

The People Who Get Paid to Think

When organisations want to think about what could go wrong, they have names for it: Pre-Mortems, Red Teaming, Scenario Planning, Stress Testing. We give the thinking a method, a name, and a place in the process.

A pre-mortem, associated with psychologist Gary Klein, asks a team to imagine that a project has already failed and then work backward to figure out what might have gone wrong. Red-team approaches similarly give people the explicit role of challenging plans, questioning assumptions, and looking for weaknesses.

Once this kind of thinking has a recognised method and a place in an organisation, we call it risk management. Without that structure, the same questioning can look like overthinking or making things complicated.

And then we reach the peak of the industry: Thought Leadership.

In the business context, thought leadership is not merely about having thoughts. It is about packaging ideas so they are considered authoritative, useful, and valuable enough for others to pay attention to.

Organisations spend fortunes demonstrating their thinking. They publish white papers, draw proprietary 2×2 matrices, and deliver inspirational keynotes. Thinking is hailed as visionary genius the moment it comes with corporate branding and an invoice.

The slide deck gets the pedestal.

Forks vs. Circles

Can we actually tell the difference between useful depth and unhelpful thought paralysis?

Psychologist Julius Kuhl’s Action Control Theory gives us one way to look at this. He distinguished between state orientation, where a person can remain caught up in a problem or its consequences, and action orientation, where attention is directed towards implementation and moving forward.

Both can look like thinking from the outside. But they may not be doing the same thing. One keeps returning to the same problem. The other is trying to work out what to do next.

Like circles and forks. A circle takes you back to the same place. A fork gives you somewhere to go.

So Where Is the Line?

It may be impossible to quantify the value of thinking. No one can practically count the number of thoughts, and even the time spent deliberating does not tell us whether the thinking was useful. Good decision-making is not always a game of fastest finger first in everyday life.

The word ‘overthinking’ is one blanket term we use for several very different situations. It could actually be a repetitive, unproductive loop that someone is genuinely struggling to exit. But it might just as well be a thinker with a higher evidence threshold than the person next to them. It could be that thinking beyond a certain point is costing more time than the decision is worth. Or it could also be that someone has raised an inconvenient truth that the next person doesn’t want to deal with.

The next time someone tells you that you are overthinking, don’t rush to doubt your mind. Maybe ask yourself a simpler question: am I actually getting somewhere with this, or am I just going around the same thing again?

And if we are the ones who pride ourselves on never wasting time thinking, perhaps we should ask ourselves: what makes us so certain that there was nothing there worth examining?

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– Uttara

Sources

Ehring, T., & Watkins, E. R. (2008). Repetitive Negative Thinking as a Transdiagnostic Process. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 1(3), 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1521/ijct.2008.1.3.192

Gabaix, X., Laibson, D., Moloche, G., & Weinberg, S. (2006). Costly Information Acquisition: Experimental Analysis of a Boundedly Rational Model. American Economic Review, 96(4), 1043–1068. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.96.4.1043

Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18–19.

Kuhl, J., & Goschke, T. (1994). A theory of action control: Mental subsystems, modes of control, and volitional conflict resolution strategies. In J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann (Eds.), Volition and Personality: Action Versus State Orientation (pp. 93–124). Hogrefe & Huber.

Musée Rodin. The Thinker. Musée Rodin, Paris.

Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178

Simon, H. A. (1955). A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884852