Why You Keep Overthinking Everything & How To Stop!

It's midnight and you should be asleep. Instead, you're lying there mentally replaying a conversation from three days ago, rewriting what you should have said and imagining how it might have been different. In the middle of it all, you’re wondering what's wrong with you that you just can't let it go.

Welcome to overthinking. And if this sounds familiar, you are not alone.

You’re not broken, it's a pattern

One of the first things I say to clients who describe themselves as "overthinkers" is that ‘overthinking isn't who you are. It's something you do’. More importantly, it's something you learned to do for a reason.

For many people, overthinking developed as a way of staying safe. If you could anticipate every possible outcome, prepare for every criticism, and think your way around every problem before it happened then you could stay one step ahead. You could avoid getting it wrong, being criticised and you could protect yourself.

The problem is the brain doesn't know when to stop. What started as a coping mechanism becomes a default setting. And what once felt like being prepared starts to feel like being trapped. When the overthinking starts impacting your life and those around you, then it’s time to stop the spiral and do something about it. Your job is to truly acknowledge it's a problem and take control of it, not let it keep controlling you. You can move into a ‘recovering overthinker’!

What's Driving It

In my experience of working with clients, overthinking rarely exists in isolation. It tends to show up alongside a few familiar companions:

People pleasing and boundaries. If you're constantly worried about how others perceive you, your brain will work overtime trying to manage every variable. What did she mean by that? Did I say the wrong thing? Are they annoyed with me?

If you always say ‘yes’ so you don’t upset anyone, then you are not respecting your own boundaries, which eventually leads to resentment. It’s actually better to say no sometimes and set realistic expectations than always saying yes, which can leave others trying to figure out what they’ve done wrong when you get pouty. Others don’t know about your internal struggle because you’ve never had the conversation.

Perfectionism. The belief that there's a ‘right’ answer or a ‘perfect’ way out there somewhere, and if you just think hard enough or long enough, you'll find it. But you won't, because perfectionism moves the goalposts. It’s always one step ahead, and you can never truly reach what you’re looking for. You may think you’ve got the right answer or created the perfect event, only to find you start picking holes in it, or others don’t respond as you expect them to. “Why don’t they agree or love it or see the hard work?’ Others don’t know your expectations and how could they if you never shared them?

Low self-trust. When you don't trust your own judgement, overthinking or being reliant on others become substitutes for your decisions about what matters to you. You go round and round, not because you don't know the answer, but because you don't trust yourself to act on it. You then get stuck in another companion Procrastination.

If you don’t actually trust your own judgement, you can’t make decisions, and stay in a cycle of stuckness, of wanting to start or finish something, and not getting there. You get in your own way.

Fear of getting it wrong. Underneath most overthinking is a core fear, an old story that keeps you from making decisions, trying new things and not taking risks. The fear that making the wrong choice will have consequences you can't come back from. So not deciding feels safer than making a ‘wrong’ decision. Staying with what is familiar feels easier than creating the change you really want. Fear keeps you stuck.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The irony of overthinking Thinking about decisions helps you make choices. When it comes to overthinking research consistently shows it does the opposite. Psychologists who study rumination (like Susan Nolen-Hoeksema) have found it impairs problem-solving rather than improving it, which is the opposite of what most overthinkers believe they're achieving.

The more you ruminate, the less clearly you think. Your brain gets stuck in a loop, processing the same information over and over without reaching a new conclusion. You become more anxious, less decisive, and further away from the clarity you were looking for in the first place.

You're not just dealing with the original problem anymore, you're also dealing with the exhaustion of having thought about it for three hours.

So How Do You Actually Stop Overthinking Everything?

There's no quick fix to overthinking. If overthinking is a deeply ingrained pattern, it won't disappear overnight. But there are things that genuinely help, and I work on these with clients regularly.

1. Notice it without judgment The first step is to recognise when you're stuck in the loop. Not criticising yourself for it, just noticing. ‘I'm overthinking this.’ That moment of awareness creates a gap between you and the thought, and that gap is where change can begin.

2. Ask yourself ‘Is this helpful thinking or overthinking?’ There's a difference between productive reflection, working through a problem to reach a decision, and rumination, which is going over the same ground repeatedly without moving forward. If you've been thinking about something for more than 20 minutes without reaching any new insight, it's probably overthinking. Give yourself permission to stop. Consider if the overthinking is actually true or are you over complicating matters. Get a reality check from others.

3. Get it out of your head Overthinking thrives in the privacy of your own mind. Writing things down, messily or just a brain dump, gets the thoughts out of your head and makes them easier to look at. Often, seeing something written down deflates it instantly. It seemed enormous in your head. On paper, it's much more manageable.

4. Work on the self-trust underneath This is the deeper work and it's where coaching can really help. A lot of overthinking is a self-trust issue. The more you reconnect with your own instincts, values, and judgement, the less you need to think your way to safety. You can learn to trust your judgement. You can start to trust that you can handle whatever happens, especially when it doesn't go ‘perfectly’. You can build your resilience.

5. Make the imperfect decision At some point, you have to choose, you have to take one step. Not because the perfect answer has appeared because it won't, but because staying stuck in indecision has a high cost. If you don’t like the one step, the direction you choose, you can change your mind, pivot, and make another choice. You can live in a world of non-perfection.

A Final Thought

If you've spent years believing that you're just ‘an overthinker’, I want to challenge that story. You are not your patterns. You are not your anxious 11pm thoughts. You are someone who learned a way of coping that made sense at the time, and you now have the awareness to change it, to let go of the thoughts going round and round, to get you unstuck and moving forward, trusting yourself again.

That's not a small thing. That's the beginning of your future mental and emotional wellbeing.

If any of this resonates and you're ready to do something about it, I'd love to hear from you. Sometimes just talking it through is the first step to quieting the noise.

Laura Haywood is an ICF PCC certified life coach and former therapist. She works with women who are ready to stop overthinking their lives and start living them. To find out more or book a free call, visit laurahaywoodcoaching.co.uk.