You’re Overthinking the Overthinking
You spent valuable time thinking about what you want to do. You probably made some decisions or reached a conclusion. And now you’re thinking about how good that thinking was.
You’re circling back around. You’re questioning things you were OK with yesterday. You’re finding new angles to worry about. At some point the thinking stops being completely useful and starts to become overthinking. It turns into all you do, it becomes the whole agenda. And the frustrating part is that more thinking doesn’t help. It just gives the thinking more to work with.
The thought isn’t the problem.
Most thinking that contributes to being stuck follows a pattern. It presents itself as necessary. It tells you that you need to figure this out before you can move. That the conditions must be right. That you must feel ready.
These thoughts present themselves as facts. They are not facts. They are habits of thinking that feel like facts because they are familiar. Sometimes they even feel like they are keeping you safe.
A useful thing to notice: the thought is not the same as the truth. It is just a thought. And it is not the only thing available to you right now.
Engaging with it keeps it central.
The instinct is to argue with the thought. Prove it wrong. Work out whether it is true or not. That keeps the thought on the agenda. You are now in a conversation with it and that conversation does not have a natural ending.
There is another option. Notice the thought is there. Acknowledge it. And look past it for a moment. Not to dismiss it. Just to ask what else is true right now.
Because alongside the thinking, there is almost always something that can move. A next step that exists regardless of whether the thinking is resolved. Something small, something obvious, something that was probably there all along.
One thing worth trying.
Notice the thought. Acknowledge it. Thank it even, because it is doing a job. It is trying to protect you from something and that is worth recognising.
Then find something tangible you can actually do. Not to prove or disprove the thinking. Just something real. Something that moves things. It might be small. It might feel insignificant. But doing it changes something regardless of what the thinking says about it.
If it turns out the thinking was right, that is still useful. You have learned something real. You have moved the thinking along a step. That counts. That is progress.
Progress is not just doing the whole thing. Progress is anything that changes where you are. And there is almost always something available that does that, even when the thinking suggests otherwise.
Clarity tends to come after doing something, not before. The next tangible step is almost always closer than the thinking made it seem.
If you recognise yourself in this, Find Your Stuck is a good place to start. It takes about five minutes and helps you see what is actually in the way, in your own words, at your own pace.