Writer's Journal

Overthinking cannot be cured!

Overthinking cannot be cured!

It can only be TAMED

But before we talk about why we overthink, let's take a minute to understand what it is.

If I wanted to be mean to you right now, I would have said - Overthinking is nothing but an excuse for you not taking action. Deal with it or suffer 🙂

I had this approach for the longest, and it really made me start to hate the work that I loved so much. Passive aggression you see!

So I knew, I had to find another way to deal with overthinking.

The root cause of the problem lies in understanding why it happens?

Consider yourself being a manual worker in the factory in the 1900's. You leave your house at 9 am, reach the factory at 9:30, punch in, sit on your seat, and start assembling tools, making them ready to ship. Take a 30-minute break. Go back to your seat. Finish your day at 6, and wrap up. Go home, to do it all over again tomorrow.

Or maybe you worked at a post house and all you had to do was organize, sort, label, and send mail so you would repeat a similar schedule with a little variation in your work. Yet there was a repeating routine!

The catch is the nature of work. The nature of work that leads to overthinking.

When the work we do has well-defined objectives, parameters, processes, and benchmarks for outcomes, you can master the process, and every day all you need to do is repeat it.

I wish I could say the same for the knowledge workers, founders, and leaders of the 21st Century. Because every day what we face is more uncertain, challenging, and hard to define a set of stuff. In a day we might be handling two tasks at the end of the same spectrum. From billing a client to writing the 5-year business plan for your business.

Do you see the gap?

The nature of work fluctuates at a pace faster than we can keep up. Throwing us down the spiral of overthinking. Here, overthinking is sometimes also used as an umbrella for other unwarranted emotions and reactions such as procrastination, self-doubt, perfectionism, getting distracted, etc.

So, how can it be TAMED?

Well, 3 core principles can help. They are also recommended by Dr Cal Neport - a computer science professor and the author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work which are also bestsellers.

In his recent book Slow Productivity, he suggests focusing on 3 things -

I’ll be breaking down all these 3 in Part 2 of this post on How to Tame Overthinking!

From an overthinker’s desk

PS - Tame here is used in the context of making it less powerful and easier to control.