Overthinking tends to sabotage your performance not only in your job, but in your relationships, love, opportunities that are showing up for you and almost everything in your life.
Overthinking is based on fear. Overthinking makes you anxious. You are focusing on the worst case scenario and you are unconsciously or consciously trying to avoid something that will change your life because it is unfamiliar to you or because it’s outside of your comfort zone.
Let’s talk about dating. A lot of men feel anxious talking to an attractive woman because of the fear of rejection. Therefore they stay silent and let the fat guy take the girl. Women don’t give so much emphasis on men’s outlook, it can attract their attention, but in order to retain it, you have to feel comfortable about yourself. Most men need alcohol to feel comfortable, and this might work in the short-run, but we all know the long-term consequences.
Let’s talk about your job now. You might have found a solution to a problem, or you might have an idea on improving the operation of the business that you’re working in. You’re not so sociable, therefore you keep it inside of you. In the meetings, you never talk, you are afraid of rejection, you are constantly focused on what could go wrong rather than what could go right. You only feel comfortable talking to your best-friend co-worker, and you tell him your idea. The next day, he gets a promotion and a raise. You lost your chance with the girl in the bar, and now you lost a chance for a promotion. All of that because you overthink.
Let me give a real-life example that happened to me. I had the opportunity to move to the UK and start a business with a friend of mine. But I started overthinking: “I’m going to leave from Cyprus, a sunny island, to go to a depressing place? and what if our business fail? what we do next? we’ll lose our money and time. I have a secure job here, and life is great here, why move there?” Long-story short, I decided to stay in Cyprus, and my friend went there and opened a food truck business and made a looooot of money.
I started overthinking again: “Why didn’t I move there? I would have made a lot of money by now. I’m stuck to this job that I don’t really like now. Why didn’t I take the risk? I had nothing to lose. I’m young, I have no kids, no loans, why didn’t I take the risk?”
Most successful people are not intelligent, but bold. We all know the saying “Fortune favors the bold”. No one says “Fortune favors the guy that thinks too much”. Smart and intelligent people tend to work for the bold guys, who don’t think so much, they just get an idea, give it a thought or two and then act on it.
Highly intelligent people tend to struggle with life because they think too much. They over plan, overanalyze and overthink everything. They are stuck in their own heads. No one can stop thinking, but not everyone realizes that overthinking will not solve any problems, but create more of them.
In society we have this belief that thinking leads to success. We were told that the smarter we are and the better our grades in school are, we would be successful, and this is far from the truth as we saw. In fact, we assume that thinking leads to improvements in performance, but if you actually look at the people who think a lot, their life gets harder over time. We were told that thinking leads us to a solution but a lot of times, thinking can be the problem in and of itself.
So, we have discussed a lot about the downsides of overthinking. Now, how do we overcome it? By exposure. Getting out there and start doing stuff, taking action, and gathering data and experiences through practicality and not theorizing. When we experience things and events, we activate different parts of our brain that are not being activated during thinking. This is the best way to learn as well. The more challenges that you face, the more experience you get with them, the easier they become. And that’s not because you thought your way to success, it’s actually because you’re utilizing all of these other parts of your brain.
And here’s the tragedy of people who overthink. The more you think, the more the other parts of your brain become rusty. The more we rely on our thought process, the more atrophied other parts of our brain become. So, the first think that you have to understand if you are an overthinker is that, you cannot think your way to a solution. the only fix for this is to go out there DO stuff. Give your brain data by practical actions.
Think less, do more.
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