Your brain always finds problems due to its attempt to anticipate and make an uncertain future a little clearer and safer. While this might seem logical, there's a small flaw. It's the fact that your illusion of control is false. However, you tend to think that if you worry more, things will turn out better.
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.
Why Your Brain Never Runs Out of Problems to Solve. Turns out, research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests this is simply the basic way our brains process information—we're constantly comparing what's front of us to its recent context.
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 commonly associated with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), says Duke. GAD is characterized by the tendency to worry excessively about several things. “Someone can develop GAD due to their genes. Or it could be personality factors like the inability to tolerate uncertainty in life.
Intrusive thoughts are often triggered by stress or anxiety. They may also be a short-term problem brought on by biological factors, such as hormone shifts. For example, a woman might experience an uptick in intrusive thoughts after the birth of a child.
Repetitive fear about saying the wrong thing can be an OCD-related fear, involving concerns about saying something that is inappropriate, embarrassing, or hurtful. This OCD-related fear is often part of the larger subtype of Harm OCD.
When there is too much information to process, you may feel cognitive overload. This happens when you reach a point of paralysis of information — not being able to process and then act on what is heard.
It's normal to ruminate sometimes about some things. But chronic rumination could be a sign of an underlying mental health condition like anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Generalized anxiety disorder can cause you to have excessive and constant worries about situations that don't objectively merit them.
Subconscious anxiety is a type of anxiety that exists without your being fully aware of it. It often manifests as a persistent feeling of nervousness and discomfort, which isn't connected to anything specific or identifiable.
You are more likely to experience paranoid thoughts when you are in vulnerable, isolated or stressful situations that could lead to you feeling negative about yourself. If you are bullied at work, or your home is burgled, this could give you suspicious thoughts which could develop into paranoia.
Anxiety brain fog happens when a person feels anxious and has difficulty concentrating or thinking clearly. Many conditions may cause anxiety and brain fog, including mental health diagnoses and physical illnesses. It is normal to experience occasional brain fog and anxiety, especially during high stress.
ADHD is a long-term (chronic) brain condition that causes executive dysfunction, which means it disrupts a person's ability to manage their own emotions, thoughts and actions. ADHD makes it difficult for people to: Manage their behavior.
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.
Everyone experiences intrusive thoughts from time to time. But they can cause a lot of distress, especially when they're negative. Allowing intrusive thoughts to pass by without giving them much attention can be helpful. You can label them as “just thoughts” and remember your brain has thousands of thoughts each day.
Furthermore, individuals with ADHD often have co-occurring mental health conditions, such as anxiety or depression, which can contribute to the experience of intrusive thoughts. For example, anxiety can lead to obsessive worrying and ruminating.
It might be a result of your previous bad experiences that you can't shake, or it could be linked to mental health issues like anxiety or chronic depression. According to Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist and columnist at the Telegraph, catastrophising is an unhelpful habit people fall into in some way.
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.