"Overthinking can affect how you experience and engage with the world around you — preventing you from making important decisions, keeping you from enjoying the present moment and draining you of the energy you need to handle daily stressors," explains Dr.
Overthinking can create an endless cycle of stress and worry, which can ultimately cause you to feel less prepared, motivated, and confident. It can also play a role in mental health issues like anxiety and depression, so it is important to find ways to break out of such destructive thought patterns.
Overthinking is a strenuous mental exercise that creates extra stress which leads to burnout. When riddled with indecision, consider how you could begin spending less time making decisions in order to experience a less-stressed life.
Overthinking can put your brain and body into negative stress, which can result in feelings of anxiety, depression and fear, and may even cause panic attacks.
Mental fatigue is a state of tiredness that sets in when your brain's energy levels are depleted. Mental fatigue is usually the result of prolonged stress. Long-term stress can be brought on by a variety of factors, including a challenging life event, a demanding job, or procrastination.
What Is Mental Exhaustion? It's kind of like physical tiredness, except it's your mind instead of your muscles. It tends to show up when you focus on a mentally tough task for a while. You might also feel this kind of brain drain if you're always on alert or stressed out.
"Studies show that ruminating on stressful events can, over time, lead to anxiety and depression," warns Dr. Fowler. "From a mental health standpoint, anxiety can affect your ability to cope with everyday stressors, and depression results in sadness, loneliness and feelings of emptiness."
Although there are positive traits of an overthinker, such as patience, commitment, dedication, drive, and passion, overthinking also promotes stress, anxiety, self-consciousness, and lack of self-confidence. It can be difficult to find any mental peace when you're thinking about every situation.
Overthinking is caused due to various reasons like fear, intolerance to uncertainty, trauma, or perfectionism. Overthinking can also be a symptom of already existing mental health conditions such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, or depression.
Cognitive fatigue results from thinking too hard and long. Neuroscientists now believe they know why this occurs. Thinking hard makes everyone tired, but the neurological mechanism was unknown. New research suggests that the cause is a build-up of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the lateral prefrontal cortex.
Overthinking strikes all of us at some point, but if it goes unchecked and unresolved, overthinking can certainly morph healthy relationships into toxic relationships. If you fall victim to your thoughts and allow them to go too far, they can end up driving a wedge of distrust between you and other people in your life.
Writing daily in a journal is a fantastic way to reflect on your attitudes and progress. It's also been found to reduce anxiety symptoms you might experience when overthinking. And it forces you to carve some time for rest in your busy schedule.
Cortisol is the main villain who creates unhealthy overthinking and is released in the hypothalamus – a region very near to the centre of your brain.
INFP and INFJ: The Overthinkers
We start off with INFPs and INFJs: two Introverted personalities that often experience bouts of anxiety. When it comes to these types, their anxiety can stem from an inclination to overthinking.
You may dwell on even tiny choices and wonder about what-ifs so much that you become frozen with inaction. Experts call this overthinking. It's normal to get too “in your head” sometimes. But chronic overthinking can start to interrupt your sleep, work, relationships, health, and other aspects of your everyday life.
Overthinking may be a common mental health issue that may negatively affect your emotional and physical wellbeing. When you become excessively preoccupied with your thoughts, it may lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress. This might also manifest as physical problems such as headaches and stomach upset.
It's a common stereotype that is often humoured, but it turns out there is actually scientific backing to it. A study reported in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease has confirmed that women overthink more than men do, due to their brains having more activity.
Chronicfatigue, tiredness, and lack of energy.
"When the body cannot handle emotional overload, it simply begins to shut down. And that is often manifested by a sense of extreme tiredness and fatigue," says Kalayjian.
It takes an average time of three months to a year to recover from burnout. How long your burnout lasts will depend on your level of emotional exhaustion and physical fatigue, as well as if you experience any relapses or periods of stagnant recovery.
A nervous breakdown, also known as a mental health crisis or mental breakdown, describes a period of intense mental distress. A person having a nervous breakdown is temporarily not able to function in their everyday life.