anxiety and
overthinking

The familiar loop

The message is sent. And then begins what you know by heart.

Reread it for the tenth time — did something slip past you, between the lines. Parse the pause: why "ok" and not "ok!", why the period at the end, why he was online and didn't reply. Wind the whole conversation back: where you said too much, where too little, where you ruined it. Rehearse what you'll say if he answers like this; and if like that; and if he doesn't answer at all. And somewhere on this lap there's already a finished picture in which it's all over.

In everyday speech it has simpler names: "working myself up," "spiraling." The mind is running at full power; it seems busy with real work — searching for an answer, preparing a plan, defending you from a blow. But the lap doesn't move an inch. You step out of it right where you stepped in, only drained. And that's the first hint that what's happening isn't what it looks like.

The mind runs at full power — and the lap doesn't move a single inch.

It looks like thinking, but it isn't

Overthinking masquerades masterfully as analysis. It uses the same words — "I'm just trying to understand," "I need to work this out" — and that's why it's so easy to mistake it for useful mental work. But real thinking has a mark this lacks: it arrives somewhere. Having thought, you know something you didn't; you draw a conclusion, make a decision, close the question. Thought produces new information.

The loop produces nothing. Take the hundredth lap around the same pause, the same period, the same phrase — and on the hundredth you'll know exactly as much as on the first. There's no new data, because there's nowhere to get it: everything there is, you already churned in the first thirty seconds. After that it's idling: the same three facts, reshuffled for the hundred-and-first time. This isn't analysis slowly closing in on the truth. It's a wheel spinning in place.

Catch this mark and much falls into place. The question isn't "what else did I miss," but "does this lap produce anything new." And almost always the honest answer is no. And if so, what's in front of you isn't a task for the mind, but a state pretending to be a task.

Thought arrives at a conclusion. The loop returns you to the starting point — only bled dry.

The engine: the locus outside

If the loop computes nothing, why does the mind keep spinning it? For the same reason the body shivers in the cold — not to solve anything, but because a certain mode is switched on. The engine of overthinking is the locus outside. Locus here means the point where you get your judgment of yourself: from outside or from within. It isn't Rotter's "locus of control," which is about who steers events; it's closer to what Carl Rogers called the locus of evaluation, and what the psychologist Jennifer Crocker calls contingent self-worth. When the locus is outside, whether you're okay or not, whether you have the right to be calm — is decided not by your assessment but by his reaction, his verdict, his reply.

And since your state depends on someone else's verdict, the mind does the one thing it knows in that mode: it tries to predict and control that verdict in advance. Running through every variant, guessing what he thought, rehearsing a reply to each outcome — that's not curiosity or thoroughness. It's an attempt to secure yourself against a sentence that, as it seems to you, holds your stability in its hands. The mind churns not for an answer — but for control over the thing on which, by its reckoning, everything depends.

That's why overthinking can't be cured by the mind: the matter isn't what you think, but from where you stand. As long as the footing is outside, any new certainty from outside will instantly become a new stake, and the loop will spin again. What changes isn't the thought — what changes is the locus. This is the main engine, though not the only one — more on the others at the end.

The mind churns not to find an answer, but to take control of someone else's verdict, on which, it seems, you depend.

Why "thinking it through more" doesn't help

The most honest and most unwelcome fact: the certainty the loop is after is in principle unreachable by thinking.

You're trying to compute what's inside the other — what he really feels, exactly how he read your message, whether he'll change his mind. But another's interior is inaccessible to you by definition: there's no door there, and however much you churn the crumbs you do have, they won't birth new certainty.

And here's the key substitution: the loop's task isn't to find an answer but to quell anxiety. The very churning creates the illusion that you're doing something, holding the situation, not sitting idle — and for a few seconds it dulls the unbearableness of not knowing. That's why the loop is so addictive: it doesn't solve the problem, it anesthetizes. And a painkiller always tempts you to take it again. "Thinking it through more" doesn't help, not because you think badly, but because thinking here isn't a tool of solution at all — it's a way not to feel.

You can't compute certainty about another's interior. The loop doesn't compute — it anesthetizes.

Phantom conversations

A separate, especially exhausting branch of the loop is rehearsals. You carry on, in your head, a conversation that isn't happening: you say what's long been building up, catch the imagined objection, parry it, finish with the closing argument. Sometimes you win the argument brilliantly; sometimes you lose and start over, rewriting the lines. Hours go into this — and not one of them happens for real.

The most important thing here is this: you're arguing not with a person but with your projection. The imagined interlocutor speaks your words, chosen to wound you; reacts the way your anxiety fears; takes the stance you assigned them. You're fighting a figure you yourself molded out of your fear — and whatever this phantom "answers," it always confirms the worst, because it's made of it. The real person, if it ever comes to a conversation, will almost certainly say something else entirely.

So phantom conversations don't prepare you for the real one — they only drive the anxious script in deeper, making it ever more convincing. You're not rehearsing a dialogue. You're training a catastrophe.

In a phantom argument you always fight the one you molded out of your own fear — and it always confirms the fear.

Reading into silence

A special torment is the pause. He doesn't answer for an hour, an evening, a day. And in that silence the mind unfolds at full power, because silence is the perfect material for the loop: there's nothing in it, which means you can write anything into it. It's a Rorschach test: a shapeless blot in which each person sees their own. Only what you see in it isn't random, but exactly what you fear most.

Silence carries no message — it carries a gap, and the gap you fill yourself, out of your fear. "Changed his mind." "Realized what I'm really like." "Just vanishing, no explanation." Meanwhile the reason for the pause is usually dull and not about you: busy, tired, distracted, phone in a pocket. But anxiety doesn't pick the dull reason — it picks the one that confirms the sentence.

Sometimes, though, the anxiety is right. What helps you tell is scale: one pause means almost nothing, a pattern over weeks means something. If he keeps vanishing, replies ever more coldly, promises and doesn't follow through, that's no longer emptiness but data. More on this in "signals and noise". But you can't extract "the truth" from a single silence — it isn't there. Everything you just "read" you brought with you.

Silence says nothing. You write your worst fear into it yourself — and then read it as someone else's sentence.

The body underneath

There's a temptation to treat overthinking as a purely mental problem: the thoughts scattered, you just have to gather them back. But look closely at what's happening in the body at that moment and the picture shifts. A clenched stomach, shallow breath, a tremor, the inability to sit still, the urge to check the phone one more time — these aren't "thoughts." This is a nervous system in anxiety. The loop isn't up top, in the head; it's down below, in the body, and what's in the head is only its voice-over.

And then it becomes clear why the loop is so hard to "reason with." Churning is what an agitated nervous system does to try to calm itself: give the mind a task, keep it busy, create the illusion of action — anything but sit in bare anxiety. It's regulation, clumsy and not working, but regulation. The mind hasn't gone mad — it's desperately quelling the alarm signal the only way it can.

The practical conclusion: it's pointless to argue with the content of the thoughts while the body is in anxiety mode. First — calm the body. For example, breathe so the exhale is longer than the inhale: in for a count of four, out for six or eight, for about five minutes. Or go for a ten-minute walk and leave the phone at home. Or splash your face with cold water and hold your wrists under the tap. When the nervous system comes off combat readiness, the loop most often unwinds on its own, without any argument with it. Not because you talked it out of anything, but because the reason to churn fell away.

It isn't in your head. It's a nervous system churning a thought, trying to calm itself.

The way out isn't a better thought

You can't exit the loop by finishing the thought. You exit it by ceasing to need the answer.

Don't wait for the thought — the wording, the fact, the guarantee — after which the mind will agree and fall silent. For every reason you give, anxiety has a "but what if," because you can't prove the absence of a threat logically. The real way out is different: to bear "I don't know." To withstand the unknown without filling it — and stay whole anyway. Then your stability no longer hangs on his verdict, and there's no point in churning.

What that looks like in practice. Notice the question that's spinning: "what if he…?" Tell yourself, out loud if you like: "I don't know. And there's no way to know right now." Then find where the anxiety sits in your body — chest, stomach, throat — and stay with that feeling for a couple of minutes, without chasing it off or grabbing the phone. Usually it rises, peaks and starts to ebb on its own. Each time you let it ebb without anyone's reply, you learn from experience that not knowing is survivable.

Then the other's reaction turns from a sentence into data. Answers coldly — that's information about him and about the two of you, not a conclusion about what you're worth. Doesn't answer at all — sad, but that's about his choice, not your right to stand on your feet. You can want closeness, warmth, a reply — and not fall apart while they're absent, and act from clarity rather than from anxiety. Where that footing itself comes from is a subject in its own right — "inner ground."

The way out isn't a better thought, but the capacity to bear "I don't know" and stay whole.

What to do with the specific lap

The big understanding — about the locus — is slow. But in the very moment the loop has already started spinning, you need simpler things, and here they are.

First: name what's happening anxiety, not analysis. Not "I'm thinking the situation over," but "I'm anxious right now, and it's churning the thought." That alone strips the loop of its mask of useful work and part of its power. Second, the novelty test: "does this lap produce anything new?" If not, it isn't thinking, and there's no point continuing. Third, the calm-head test: "would I be doing this, acting this way, sending this message, if I were calm right now?" If the answer is no — set it aside; decisions from the peak of anxiety are almost always from anxiety, not from you.

Fourth — let the message sit. Wrote an anxious text — don't send it right away; let it stand till morning or at least an hour; almost always, by morning you'll send a different, calm one, or none at all. Fifth — postpone the worry. Adrian Wells describes this technique in metacognitive therapy. Set yourself a worry time — say, fifteen minutes at seven in the evening. When the loop starts during the day, don't argue with it; tell it, "Not now — at seven," and go back to what you were doing. By evening you often no longer feel like churning, and that's a lesson too: worry can be put off, it isn't as all-powerful as it seems.

And sixth, the most important: don't beg for reassurance. Two things are easy to confuse here. One clear question or request is communication: "It matters to me to know where we stand. If you go quiet for a day, send me a couple of words — it helps me feel calmer." You say it once, hear the answer — and live with it. Asking the same thing again and again — "you're sure you're not mad? and now? really?" — is quelling anxiety with someone else's word. That kind of reassurance soothes for minutes and feeds the loop: the more often you quell anxiety from outside, the more you cement that without an external "it's okay" you can't stand.

When it's not only the locus

It would be dishonest to reduce everything to one cause. Overthinking is strongly fuelled by anxious attachment: for people with that style, a partner's silence sets off anxiety faster and harder — more in "attachment". And sometimes behind the loop there's an anxiety disorder or so-called relationship OCD, where intrusive doubts — "do I really love him," "is this the right person" — spin on their own even when everything is fine.

It's time to see a specialist when the loop eats your sleep, your work, hours of every day, doesn't let go for weeks, and the techniques above don't help. Cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy work well with this. That isn't weakness — it's a normal way to stop churning alone.