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Before you can begin to address or cope with your habit of overthinking things, you'll need to learn what kinds of thoughts occur when you're engaging in this damaging behavior. Any time you find yourself indulging in painful, unpleasant, or self-doubting thoughts, you are on the road to overthinking because of cognitive distortions. Likewise if you find yourself listing reasons to not do something, or otherwise making excuses for your self-doubt. The most common cognitive distortions include: All or nothing thinking - believing things are absolute and seeing every situation as being black or white. Overgeneralization - seeing one negative event as a continuous cycle of defeat or embarrassment. Mental filtering - dwelling only on negative things (thoughts, feelings, outcomes) while ignoring all the positive elements of those situations or scenarios. Discounting the positives - believing that none of your admirable qualities or accomplishments matter. Jumping to conclusions - either assuming that other people are reacting/thinking negatively towards you without any real evidence (called "mind reading") or believing that an event will turn out badly without any evidence for this conclusion. Magnification or minimization - blowing bad things out of proportion or reducing the importance of good things. Emotional reasoning - believing that the way you feel reflects an objective truth about yourself. "Should" statements - chastising yourself or others for things that should or shouldn't have been said/done. Labeling - turning a mistake or shortcoming into a character attribute of yourself. (For example, turning the thought "I messed up" into "I'm a loser and a failure.") Personalization and blame - internalizing fault for situations or events you aren't responsible for, or blaming others for situations/events that they had no control over. There are numerous ways to overthink, many of which are caused by cognitive distortions. One form of overthinking is the thought pattern known as "catastrophizing." Catastrophizing occurs any time you automatically predict a negative outcome to some event or series of events, and jump to the conclusion that such an outcome would be devastating and unbearable. Catastrophizing is a combination of jumping to conclusions and overgeneralizing. Try to identify which cognitive distortions affect your overthinking the most. Write down the thoughts you experience, and try to label which thoughts could fall into the category of cognitive distortions. Practice learning to recognize your "overthinking" thoughts in the moment, as they arise. Simply naming them when you become aware of them may be helpful. Try silently saying the word "thinking" whenever you begin to overthink - it may help ground you and break you out of your spiraling thought pattern. It's easy to fall into "autopilot" mode during the course of your day. But if your day is filled with situations that have the potential to induce anxiety, you may be walking blindly into a situation that will cause you to overthink and catastrophize. Try mandating a personal "check in" for yourself. Assess how you're feeling as you enter different scenarios and situations that tend to evoke your pattern of overthinking. Identify any instance in which you begin to indulge patterns of overthinking. Don't judge yourself for it, just acknowledge it before you work to change it. Once you've identified an incident of overthinking or catastrophizing, you can now begin to challenge the validity of those thoughts. Challenging those thoughts by remembering that thoughts are not facts may help you break out of your pattern of overthinking. Thoughts do not always reflect reality, and they are oftentimes warped, uninformed, or simply wrong. By letting go of the infallible perception of your thoughts, you'll be more capable of considering other possibilities, or at least accepting that your overthinking isn't always right. Examine what (if any) real, objective evidence you have to support the cognitive distortions and patterns of overthinking that you're experiencing. There is a good chance that you will not be able to come up with any real, compelling evidence that the thoughts you're experiencing have any basis in truth. Try silently saying to yourself, "These are just thoughts, and they are not truth." Repeating this mantra may help you disengage from the spiraling thought patterns you're stuck in. If your patterns of overthinking are spiraling out of control, it may feel difficult to break out of that thought pattern. However, once you learn to recognize that the thoughts you're experiencing are not factual, you can then fairly easily replace that thought pattern with a more realistic one. Tell yourself, "If I accept that my assumptions and overthinking are not grounded in facts, then what are the facts in this situation?" Even if a situation ended badly, you can focus on what to do differently next time as an alternative to dwelling on what you should have said/done in the past. It won't come easily at first, but once you retrain your brain to process situations differently, it will eventually get easier. Try asking other people who are aware of the situation for their input. Sometimes asking a trusted friend, relative, or colleague whether you're overreacting or overthinking things can help you realize that there's no reason to continue thinking that way. Try positive self-talk to replace self-doubt or overthinking. The way you talk to yourself (and think about yourself) can affect how you feel. So instead of criticizing yourself or ruminating on bad thoughts, try to focus on the things you did well and continue to do well.
Learn different cognitive distortions. Identify how you overthink. Take note of how you're feeling. Challenge your automatic thoughts. Replace cognitive distortions with real facts.