Overthinking

I think that overthinking things can be just as harmful as doing things impulsively. I feel like with doing things on an impulse, you run into the consequence of doing something you may regret or get a negative reaction afterwards. Then again, the outcome could be exactly as you had hoped for and you feel fulfilled afterwards. With overthinking, you have the benefit of analyzing the outcomes of a situation, but you have the consequence of thinking about a bunch of outcomes that may never occur, and in turn your fear of any of those outcomes may stop you from doing what you wanted altogether.

Though I have a lot of spurts of doing shit impulsively, I tend to overthink a lot more. I try to think of all situations, so sometimes I feel like I’m two or more different people discussing one topic. The problem with overthinking for me is that it’s caused my mind to wander like an intersection. Each thought is a car, and since all of them want to go at once and neither is sure which to go first, the thoughts stop moving altogether (to prevent an accident). Sometimes I also overthink so much I go into a rabbit role. I’ve actually started about five different think pieces since I’ve been writing this paragraph. It also takes me a long time to write because I really want to make sure that everything I say is exactly what I mean. The bittersweet outcome of overthinking for me is that I’ve thought about very extreme hypotheticals that led me to a dark mindset for a time. Now that certain hypotheticals have actually occurred, I’ve handled them very calmly because I’m already over the panic. But it’s also raised my suspicion in some instances where it shouldn’t have.