How to Stop Overthinking: 3 Causes and Practical Exercises
It's 2 a.m., and your mind is still replaying something you said earlier: Did I say the wrong thing?
The moment is over, but your thoughts keep circling. The next morning, you drag yourself to work exhausted.
Once in a while, this is just how a stressed mind reacts. But when repetitive thinking takes over your attention and starts wearing down your sleep, mood, and daily life, psychologists call it overthinking.
Overthinking isn't simply thinking a lot. It's thinking in circles without reaching a new understanding or a useful next step. It has clear causes, and there are research-backed ways to ease it. Let's take a look.
What is overthinking?
Overthinking is repetitive thought that drains your attention and emotion without leading to clarity or action.
Psychologists usually describe four common forms:
- Rumination: Looking backward and replaying regret, embarrassment, conflict, or failure without being able to let it go.
- Anticipatory anxiety: Looking ahead and imagining the worst before anything has actually happened.
- Analysis paralysis: Weighing every option so heavily that information overload makes it hard to act.
- Self-critical thinking: Turning every problem inward and treating mistakes as proof that something is wrong with you.
These patterns often overlap. A worry about the future turns into self-criticism, which then becomes rumination about the past, and the loop keeps spinning.
Why do people overthink?
Overthinking usually grows from three things: discomfort with not knowing, mistaking rumination for reflection, and becoming anxious about being anxious.
1. Uncertainty feels unbearable
In the 1990s, Canadian psychologist Michel Dugas and his colleagues developed an influential model of intolerance of uncertainty. Some people are especially uncomfortable not knowing how things will turn out, and they tend to read ambiguous situations as threats.
When uncertainty feels threatening, the brain keeps thinking because it mistakes more thought for more control.
Say a friend reads your message but doesn't reply. You might spend an hour wondering whether you said something wrong, or whether they're upset with you.
The real source of distress usually isn't either possibility. It's that you can't know the answer yet. Your mind keeps hunting for certainty, but many answers don't live inside more mental rehearsal. They arrive later, through reality, conversation, or time.
2. Rumination can feel like self-reflection
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's response styles theory explains why two people can respond so differently to the same difficult feeling. One person shifts their attention and lets the feeling settle. The other keeps examining it without ever gaining a new perspective.
Reflection moves toward understanding or action. Rumination keeps returning to the same painful question.
This second pattern often turns self-critical: Why am I not good enough? What did I do wrong? Psychologists call it brooding. It can feel like problem-solving, but it mostly keeps the same low mood alive.
For example, after a manager questions your proposal, you might replay the meeting for hours, convinced they think you're not good at your job. It feels like you're working through it, but nothing new is actually being learned.
3. You become worried about your own worrying
Psychologist Adrian Wells describes worry as happening on two levels:
- First-level worry: Concern about an outside event, like What if tomorrow's presentation goes badly?
- Second-level worry: Concern about your own state, like Why can't I stop worrying?
Overthinking gets harder to stop when the original concern turns into a fear that your own thoughts are out of control.
You start by checking tomorrow's slides in bed. Thirty minutes later, the thought shifts: Why am I still awake? I'm going to be wrecked tomorrow. Why am I so bad at handling pressure? At that point, the presentation isn't really the problem anymore. You're anxious about being anxious.
How can you stop overthinking?
You can ease overthinking by separating what you can control from what you can't, shifting from "why" to "what next," and postponing worry instead of fighting it.
1. Separate what you can control from what you can't
Lazarus and Folkman's coping theory describes two ways people handle stress:
- Problem-focused coping: Take concrete action when the situation can be changed.
- Emotion-focused coping: Accept and soothe the feeling when the situation can't be changed yet.
Overthinking often happens when you treat something uncontrollable as if more thought could solve it.
Some problems have a next step: gather information, ask someone directly, revise the document, make the call. Others have no answer yet, like what another person is thinking or how something not-yet-happened will turn out. Telling the two apart lets you spend your attention where it can actually help.
2. Replace "Why is this happening?" with "What can I do next?"
Rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy finds that rumination tends to stay abstract and broad. Questions like Why does this always happen to me? rarely lead anywhere useful.
A small concrete action interrupts overthinking more effectively than another round of abstract explanation.
When you notice the same thoughts circling, do one small thing: clear your desk, reply to an email, take a short walk. It won't necessarily solve the problem, but it gives your brain a new experience instead of one more repetition, and a fresh angle to see from.
3. Postpone worry instead of suppressing it
Adrian Wells's metacognitive therapy points out that what really traps people is often not the worry itself, but the belief that they can't control it. And forcing a thought away usually just makes it louder.
Postponing worry teaches you that a thought can be acknowledged without being followed right away.
When the worry shows up, don't fight it. Tell yourself: I know this is here. I'll think about it at 7 p.m. Then actually return to it at the time you picked. The point isn't to prove the worry doesn't matter. It's to discover that these thoughts are far more controllable than they feel.
Can journaling help with overthinking?
Journaling helps with overthinking by moving thoughts out of your head, separating facts from assumptions, and making the next step easier to see.
All three methods above share one thing: thoughts are easier to sort once they're written down. Expressive writing research describes this as externalization. Once a thought is on the page, your brain can clear some space, and you can step back and look at it instead of staying stuck inside it.
If you often loop at certain moments, try these four steps:
- Pour it out. Write down everything in your head. Don't organize it or judge whether it's reasonable yet.
- Separate facts from thoughts. Look at what you wrote and ask: What actually happened? What am I assuming or predicting? If there's one part I can act on, what's the next step? If there isn't, does it need solving right now, or does it just need to be seen?
- Let the thought land. Once it's written down, you don't have to solve it right away. Your brain has already set it down, so let it rest quietly on the page for now.
- Come back to the present. Ask yourself one question: Right now, do I still need to keep thinking about this?
When there's no answer yet, pause first
Some answers come from thinking. Others can only come from action, time, and experience.
That's the real trap of overthinking: it keeps feeling like you're getting closer to an answer, even when you're walking the same mental path again and again.
When your mind feels overloaded, open MoodMons and write something down. It's an AI journaling app that hatches a mood monster from what you write, so your thoughts have somewhere to land. You don't have to solve everything. Write down what's here, let MoodMons interpret the mood beneath it, and give yourself permission to stop for now. That's where taking care of yourself, and getting your sense of control back, begins.
Download MoodMons on the App Store
References
- Dugas, M. J., Gagnon, F., Ladouceur, R., & Freeston, M. H. (1998). Generalized anxiety disorder: A preliminary test of a conceptual model. Behaviour Research and Therapy.
- Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer Publishing Company.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
- Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science.
- Wells, A. (2009). Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression. Guilford Press.
- Watkins, E. R. (2016). Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression. Guilford Press.