More often, people refer to “overthinking” when they mean “blowing a thought out of proportion” or something like that. What if this happens, what if that happens, like that.
In my opinion, that’s not really the problem here. The problem originates from the qualitative perspective—what kind of thing is being enlarged in the first place. It matters what kind of problem exists, because not everything explodes violently when expanded. People are also not interested in everything, and even our own brains do not really interpret every single simulation activity as “blowing out of proportion”.
The problem is not with just “overthinking”—it is with the types of thoughts that linger. I once read a quote that says something like,
“Overthinking is just a word invented by people who don’t think enough.”
While I do not agree in full, I also do not disagree in full. As someone from that same overthinking population, it is our default programming, and that is our fuel for the most part of our lives. To put it better, we just have a higher tolerance on the mental burden of thinking. Or better yet, we naturally prefer roaming over the abstract world rather than sensory data. That is our “normal”—it is not “over”-thinking at all. And even if it is, overthinking is not exactly what the problem is.
I am wary of people who use the word “overthinking”. I need more context. I may be wrong, but in my experience, people use “overthinking” so generically. Most of the times, people remark or even complain when “overthinkers” “think too much, simulating abnormal possibilities that will not really happen, or dwelling too much about the past, boxing in reasons and rationalizing everything”.
Dude, for some people, those are normal human functions. They are not incidents, but rather default programming.
The thing is, what most people sees as “overthinking” is just surface-level. Different people have different levels of analysis on things before they accept something as true or important, or otherwise reject the information. Just because Person A analyzes “harder” than Person B does not mean Person A is overthinking and Person B is normal. Both of them can be normal using their own standards.
When it comes to the topic of “overthinking”, those brain activities are not the real problem here.
When our minds pull us apart from our grip of the real world, that is where the problem starts. Sometimes our tunnel vision drives us to finish something, thinking that it is the absolute/urgent/greatest-good goal. Even that is not the problem. When we forget to improve our lives—forgoing sleep, skipping meals, ruminating over a problem without asking for help, disconnecting from people, materializing the demons in our head—that is the problem.
Because of mental overload, new information has nowhere to go. Our brains have a natural judgment that new information are important because they are current, relevant and purposeful—new information come to us for a reason. They should take priority. So, they either push themselves in or steal the parking space of existing knowledge. They either become squished and depreciated even before they are used as expected, or the basic human functions get kicked out of place.
Probably the most dangerous impact of mental overload is when the thoughts have nowhere to go, no spare pore to squish into, nothing to replace or kick out—so they manifest in the real world instead. If they happen to be demons, then demons are manifested—who knows what could happen.
I do not know how to end this blog post properly. I guess I will just end it like this.
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