While overthinking itself is not a mental illness, it is associated with conditions including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance use disorders. Rumination can be common in people who have chronic pain and chronic illness as well, taking the form of negative thoughts about that pain and healing from it.
Overthinking is when your thoughts and worries circle in an endless loop. Instead of preparing you for next steps, overthinking usually leads to inaction because it causes you to become overwhelmed by fear. Overthinking can be an early indicator or symptom of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions.
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.
Overthinking can be an all-natural process, it can also be the result if the creative and overly active ADHD brain. While most believe overthinking to be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it' actually relates more to ADHD.
While both mental health conditions involve repetitive worrying, people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often engage in unwanted and repetitive behavior in response to their worry. People with anxiety, however, tend to overthink their worry, but don't act in specific responsive manners.
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.
Sometimes it's helpful to have a way to distract yourself with happy, positive, healthy alternatives. Things like mediation, dancing, exercise, learning an instrument, knitting, drawing, and painting can distance you from the issues enough to shut down the overanalysis.
Are you always waiting for disaster to strike or excessively worried about things such as health, money, family, work, or school? If so, you may have a type of anxiety disorder called generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). GAD can make daily life feel like a constant state of worry, fear, and dread.
Although many use the words worry and anxiety interchangeably; the two are very different psychological states. According to Psychology Today, “Worry tends to be more focused on thoughts in our heads, while anxiety is more visceral in that we feel it throughout our bodies.”
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.
Hyper-Rationality is a trauma response and coping strategy. Overthinking, over-analyzing, and over-rationalizing are coping strategies that we learned early on to help us make sense of an unpredictable environment that at some point made us feel unsafe.
Stress is one of the “usual suspects” when you can't seem to stop thinking. Stress causes your body to release cortisol, and cortisol helps you stay alert. This means that your brain stays alert, too — even when you don't want it to.
Maladaptive daydreaming is a behavior where a person spends an excessive amount of time daydreaming, often becoming immersed in their imagination. This behavior is usually a coping mechanism in people who have mental health conditions like anxiety.
What drives this is underlying anxiety. Common forms include worrying, perfectionism, struggle with making decisions, and excessive control over yourself and others. Keys to coping include getting your rational brain online, using your gut reactions as important information, and taking acceptable risks.
INFP and INFJ: The Overthinkers
When it comes to these types, their anxiety can stem from an inclination to overthinking. Psychology Today defines overthinking as “an excessive tendency to monitor, evaluate, and attempt to control all types of thought,” something this INFJ knows all too well.
While overthinking itself is not a mental illness, it is associated with conditions including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance use disorders. Rumination can be common in people who have chronic pain and chronic illness as well, taking the form of negative thoughts about that pain and healing from it.
People who overthink tend to score high in the neurotic department. Neuroticism is one of the five big personality traits, along with openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness.
Although both OCD and ASD have similar symptoms, they are different conditions. OCD is a mental health disorder, whereas ASD is a developmental condition. ASD is a condition that a person is born with. OCD can develop during a person's lifetime.