Last Tuesday at 3:42 AM, I was mentally redecorating my entire house, planning my funeral (music selection is crucial), calculating if we had enough retirement savings if Curtis lived to 97, and composing the perfect response to an email I received six months ago. My brain was hosting a TED talk series nobody asked for, and I was the exhausted audience of one.
This is overthinking. It’s not problem-solving, planning, or preparation. It’s mental hamster-wheeling that leaves you exhausted and exactly where you started. At 61, I’ve overthought approximately 847,293 decisions, and I can confirm: It has never, not once, actually helped anything.
If you’re reading this while simultaneously planning seventeen different conversations you might have tomorrow, reviewing every stupid thing you said in 1987, and trying to solve problems that don’t exist yet, welcome to the overthinking club. The good news? There’s a way out. The better news? Life is ridiculously better on the other side.
I Wasn’t Just an Overthinker. I Was a Professional.
I once spent three hours choosing between two identical white plates at Target. Identical. I had mentally rehearsed a dentist appointment so many times that when it actually happened, I was disappointed by how undramatic it was. I’ve created elaborate imaginary conversations with people who were not thinking about me at all, solved hypothetical problems for people who didn’t ask, and analyzed a friend’s “okay” text for hidden meaning that was absolutely not there. (Spoiler: she was just okay.)
The real crown jewel of my overthinking career was that 3:42 AM Tuesday. I’d spent four solid hours thinking about redecorating and hadn’t moved a single piece of furniture. That’s the perfect summary of what overthinking actually is: all mental calories, zero actual progress. A lot of effort that feels productive. A treadmill you never get off.
The Day Curtis Called Me Out
I was explaining my seventeen-step decision tree for choosing a restaurant for our anniversary. Curtis listened patiently (he is a saint, truly), then said, “Or we could just go to the place with the good bread.”
I had spreadsheets. Reviews analyzed. Parking situations mapped. Contingency plans for rain. He wanted good bread.
We went to the good bread place. It was perfect. My seventeen steps had been seventeen ways to avoid just deciding.
That’s when I realized: Overthinking isn’t thinking. It’s anxiety dressed up as productivity.
Why Our Brains Do This (And Why It Gets Worse After 50)
Overthinking feels productive because your brain is genuinely busy. But it’s a treadmill. Lots of effort, no forward movement. Your brain chemistry actually rewards overthinking with tiny dopamine hits for “solving” imaginary problems, which is infuriating when you think about it. You’re being rewarded for nothing.
After 50, it compounds. More life experience means more data your brain wants to drag into every decision. The stakes feel higher because they sometimes genuinely are (retirement, health, the people we love getting older). And anxiety about the future has a way of amplifying everything, turning a simple restaurant choice into an existential exercise.
The sneaky part is that overthinking masquerades as wisdom. “I’m just being thorough.” “I like to consider all the angles.” Sure. Or you’re paralyzed and calling it preparation.
The 5-Minute Rule That Actually Worked for Me
My therapist gave me something simple that I resisted for longer than I’d like to admit: if a decision can be reversed and won’t matter in five years, you get five minutes to decide. That’s it. Timer goes on, decision gets made.
I was sweating through those first five-minute deadlines. My brain kept insisting it needed more time, more information, more certainty. But something strange happened after the first week. The decisions I made in five minutes were just as good as the ones I’d spent hours on. Sometimes better, because they weren’t soaked in anxiety and imaginary worst-case scenarios that never materialized anyway.
Restaurant for dinner? Five minutes. Which book to pick up next? Five minutes. How to respond to a text that’s been sitting there making me feel guilty? Five minutes and it’s done.
The relief of just deciding, even imperfectly, is something I genuinely did not expect. Building that decision muscle turns out to be one of the best things I’ve done for my confidence in this decade of my life.
When the Loop Won’t Stop
The five-minute rule handles everyday decisions beautifully. But sometimes the brain gets stuck in a genuine loop, especially at night, and a timer isn’t going to cut it. What I’ve learned after years of being my own worst mental audience is that overthinking lives in your head, and the fastest way to interrupt it is to drop into your body instead.
That sounds woo, but stay with me. Right now, notice where your shoulders are. Probably somewhere near your ears. Notice your jaw. Probably clenched. Those are not the shoulders and jaw of someone who is fine. Breathe deliberately. Unclench deliberately. Overthinking has a very hard time surviving present-moment body awareness because it requires you to be anywhere except right now.
Movement helps too. Not a full workout (though if that’s what it takes, great), just breaking the physical stillness. Walk around the block. Put paint on your hands. You genuinely cannot catastrophize at full volume when you’re doing something with your body. Something about the physical interrupts the mental spiral in a way that thinking harder about the spiral never does.
And then there’s the “so what” test, which sounds dismissive but is actually clarifying. If you’re running a worst-case scenario, follow it all the way to the bottom. We’ll choose the wrong restaurant. So what? We’ll have a mediocre dinner. So what? We’ll laugh about it later. Exactly. Most spirals, when you actually follow them to their conclusion, end somewhere survivable. The anxiety lives in the middle of the spiral, not the bottom.
Nagatha Christie and the Permission Slip She Hates
I named my inner critic Nagatha Christie. (She’s dramatic, she loves a mystery, and she never lets anything go.) Nagatha is the voice that insists the decision needs more time, more information, more analysis. She is very convincing. She sounds reasonable. She is not your friend.
What Nagatha hates most is a direct decision made without her approval. So I’ve started issuing myself permission slips she doesn’t get a vote on. Permission to make an imperfect decision and change my mind later if I need to. Permission to trust my first instinct, the one that usually shows up in the first thirty seconds before Nagatha gets warmed up. Permission to stop solving problems that don’t exist yet. Permission to let some things stay unclear without making that mean something terrible.
This is harder than it sounds. Silencing the inner critic is ongoing work, not a one-time achievement. But every time I make a decision and the world doesn’t end, Nagatha gets a little quieter. She’s still there. She’s just slightly less convincing than she used to be.
What Actually Filled the Space When I Stopped Overthinking
I assumed something had to fill the mental space that overthinking vacated. I thought I’d feel restless or anxious without all that noise. What actually happened was quieter and more surprising than that.
My gut got louder. When you’re not constantly running your intuition through seventeen layers of analysis, you start to notice it. That first instinct that shows up before the brain gets involved turns out to be reasonably trustworthy, which I never got to discover when I was drowning it in scenarios.
I got more creative. Mental energy that used to go toward imaginary conversations and hypothetical disasters started going toward things I actually cared about, like writing, like art, like showing up for the people in front of me instead of the people in my head.
And I became more present, which sounds like a bumper sticker but actually just means I stopped missing things. I stopped being at dinner while also being at the seventeen dinners that might go wrong in the future. Noticing what’s actually good right now, even the small things, turns out to be impossible when you’re mentally somewhere else.
Purpose as an Overthinking Antidote
Here’s what nobody told me: having a clear sense of purpose eliminates about ninety percent of the decisions I used to overthink, because most of them just… answer themselves. When I know what I’m actually building and why, the question of whether something fits takes about ten seconds instead of three hours.
I’m not talking about a vision board or a five-year plan. I mean a simple honest answer to “what am I actually here for?” For me right now: share what I’ve learned, create things that matter, love the people in my life well, enjoy being alive. That’s it. When goals are rooted in something real, the decisions that serve them feel obvious and the ones that don’t feel obvious too.
Should I start something new? Does it serve the purpose? Yes, move. No, don’t. Not sure? Action beats analysis, so try it and see. This filter didn’t eliminate all overthinking, but it eliminated the category of “I don’t even know what I’m optimizing for” decisions, which turns out to be a large category.
The Morning That Changed My Relationship with My Own Brain
A few months ago I started a simple morning practice before the day gets loud. Just a few minutes, before the emails and the to-do lists and Curtis and Roo and whatever Morticia is doing to the entry rug. Starting the morning with something intentional before the brain starts its agenda has been quietly revolutionary. Not because it fixes everything, but because it gives me a moment of ownership over my own mental state before the day takes it.
Overthinking loves a brain that wakes up reactive. It thrives in the space between waking up and getting oriented. A few minutes of intention before the noise starts turns out to be a pretty effective gate.
Where I Still Struggle (Because “Perfectly Imperfect” Is the Point)
I still overthink. Especially at 3 AM. Especially when something important is happening with Curtis’s health, or when work gets complicated, or when I’m tired in that particular way where Nagatha Christie gets very chatty. I have not graduated from this. I’ve just gotten better at noticing it faster and shorter-circuiting the spiral before it goes on for four hours.
When it happens now, I write the worry down. Something about externalizing it onto paper seems to give the brain permission to release it, like “okay, it’s recorded, I can stop holding it.” Then I tell myself I’ll deal with it at a specific time tomorrow, not “later,” but an actual time. And then I get back to right now, usually via whatever I’m grateful for, which is usually something specific and small and real.
It works most of the time. The other times, I get up and paint. You genuinely cannot catastrophize at full volume with paint on your hands. I have tested this thoroughly.
The goal was never to become someone who doesn’t think hard about things. It was to stop thinking hard about things that don’t deserve it. To save the real mental energy for what actually matters. To be here, in this life, instead of in every possible version of it that might go wrong.
Curtis and good bread figured that out a long time ago. I’m just catching up.
P.S. – Took me 14 minutes to write this P.S. because I was overthinking whether to include it. Old habits die hard. But here it is, imperfect and published, because done beats perfect every time. Curtis just asked what I’m writing. Told him it’s about overthinking. He said, “Did you overthink writing about overthinking?” Yes. Yes, I did. We’re laughing. That’s what purpose looks like: choosing laughter over loops, connection over perfection, life over analysis paralysis.
