3 Types of Overthinking—and How to Overcome Them

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1:06And our brains weren't built for this. When there is ambiguity, when there are problems happening, our mind wants to solve that. And that's where overthinking comes in. So there are three general types of overthinking. I discuss all of this in my HBR article. The first is rumination. When you are stuck in the past and you're replaying situations, you may be replaying that conversation you had at work or that slip up you made in a meeting. You just see it happening over and over in your head. Rumination really comes down to unproductive worry. So a counterintuitive strategy you can use to deal with this is actually setting aside worry time.

1:46Keep it fairly short so you keep this time contained, but this is your pre-assigned time to worry away. Your goal with that is to separate during that time what is something that is within my control versus not. The worries that are within your control, that's where you try to find solutions around them. Do You need to have a follow-up conversation or send an email or update your process so a mistake doesn't happen again. And for the ones that you can't control, that gives you the opportunity to process what happened, to work on mentally and emotionally letting it go. Maybe you imagine it as a leaf floating down a river or a balloon that you pop in your head.

2:27All of that allows you to make sure that your worry is not consuming all of your time, that it has somewhere to go. And then on the opposite end of that, you have future tripping when you're worried about things that haven't even happened yet. You may find yourself trying to prepare for every possible permutation or situation that could happen, trying to cover all of your bases. There's one tool that I love for this. I call it worst case, best case, most likely. What if my absolute worst fears come to be? How would I deal with that? What would I do? and you realize that actually I could probably deal with anything that would happen.

3:08Best case, what could be the upside here that I'm not considering? And then think about the middle of those two. What's most likely? Because that's probably the reality. The last one is overanalyzing. So if rumination and future tripping are based on time, overanalyzing is based on depth. When you just go too deep into the minutia and the details and you can't see your way out of that. You want to think about what are my key decision criteria? Instead of trying to optimize for everything, because if you optimize for everything, you're optimizing for nothing. Think about what is the one or two key criteria that I want to try for.

3:46For more on this, go to hbr.org.