Many of us that struggle with depression and anxiety tend to overthink various situations we are placed into. Whether it is a future job, what happened in the past, or what is happening at this second, our worries and thoughts tend to override us. As much as we would like to think so, overthinking is not a small problem nor is it a cut-and-dry one, but we can definitely tackle it and develop ways to stop it. In fact, there are 9 types of overthinking that many people tend to go through – as outlined by “The Depression Project” – and those 9 types will be explained in this article.
The 9 Types of Overthinking
- Worrying about the future: This type of overthinking addresses your stressors to potentially damaging events – whether small or big ones. In other words, you could be stressing and thinking about some disaster happening, like a car accident, a bad grade, or maybe a friendship possibly ending. Whatever your stressor may be, you would unintentionally be increasing the direness of the situation and stressing yourself out more by doing so.
- Dwelling on the past: This type of overthinking addresses your thoughts and stressors about past events that really impacted you. Maybe you keep going back to a bad breakup or a time where you got really hurt. Maybe you keep replaying a problem that happened because of you, where you hurt someone unintentionally. You could even be replaying the way you behaved in front of a relative or the way you reacted when your friend confided in you. Put simply, your overthinking of the past can consist of anything – small or big – that impacted you in a negative way.
- “Big picture” overthinking: This type of overthinking happens when you start having existential questions – questions about your character, existence, what you are doing with your life, where you want to go, or whether you are doing the right thing by staying in a relationship that makes you miserable, among so many other big picture questions.
- “Mindreading”: This type of overthinking consists of you constantly and obsessively trying to decipher and come to conclusions about what others think of you, as though you could “read minds”. In this mindset, you are constantly worried about how they are perceiving you, and this impacts the way you behave around others and the way you perceive yourself. Keep in mind that here, chances are, they are not talking or even thinking about you, but your mind can play tricks on you and convince you that they are.
- ”Indecisiveness”: This type of overthinking – as the name suggests – consists of you not being able to make a decision on even the littlest of things. They can be something as simple as not knowing what to eat or what to wear. In fact, knowing that you have to make a decision makes your brain explode due to the immediate and irrational thoughts that come up, which prevent you from making a decision.
- Reading too much into things: This type of overthinking consists of you scrutinizing every single small event that happened, dissecting it, and trying to make sense of it. It can be as small as a word that was said to you. This leads you to pause and try to decipher what this word meant, when, in reality, it probably did not mean anything at all!
- Having hopeless thoughts: These types of anxious thoughts are very degrading and the fact that they are repetitive makes them pretty detrimental to the person having them. Hopeless thoughts are thinking things like “X will never get better,” “I will never achieve this,” or “I will never be happy,” and this incessant overthinking in this way can damage everyday performance.
- Worthless thoughts: This type of overthinking tackles overwhelming feelings of worthlessness, like negatively talking to yourself or obsessively thinking that you are stupid or not good enough.
- Mental chatter: This type of overthinking is when your brain is on overdrive and thinking about anything and anything that stress you – be it the way you tie your hair, to a divorce you may have. Your brain is being fried with thoughts, and you cannot get it to stop.