Don't Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy to Your Life

by Anne Bogel

Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema was a psychology professor at Yale whose research focused on women’s mental health and well-being. Her studies over a twenty-year period showed that overthinking makes life harder, hurts our relationships, and may contribute to mental disorders like depression, severe anxiety, and alcohol abuse.

Over time, I have deliberately cultivated processes I can trust, ones I turn to when I’m wandering into overthinking territory.

your thoughts can be the enemy, or you can make them your ally.”

To extricate yourself from analysis paralysis, you don’t need more information. You need to act.

When you ruminate, your brain gets stuck in a negative thought spiral. Once you’re attending to the negative, it’s easy to keep doing it. But if you notice what you’re doing, you can disrupt rumination by looking for a positive interpretation.

Another way to look for the good is to practice gratitude.

used to engage these thoughts and wrestle with them. But that didn’t help anything; instead, it diverted my attention from where it belonged and made me feel bad. Now when I notice these thoughts floating by, I brush them aside, telling myself that they don’t matter right now.

To stay out of the mental weeds, you can implement your own mental conservation plan, consciously reducing the mental energy you regularly expend by streamlining decisions and creating routines.

Instead of striving to choose the ideal option, we can aim to choose a good one, reminding ourselves that the best memories often start with something going wrong. And then, instead of resisting the change of plans, we can lean in, expecting good things.

Iris Murdoch writes, “One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”

I change myself, I change the world. Gloria Anzaldúa