Do I overthink?

Stuck on a moment, or getting to know yourself?

Some time in your own head feels like being stuck. The same awkward moment plays again and again, and nothing new comes out of it. Other times it feels good, like working out why a song made you cry or why you keep having the same fight. The first score is about the stuck kind: how much old mistakes, doubts and setbacks stay in your head.^{1, 2} The second is about the curious kind.

From the outside the two can look alike. Research that pulled them apart found that the stuck kind goes with worry and low mood, while the curious kind goes with being open to new ideas.³ They also barely travel together. Among about 650 adults who answered these questions, knowing someone’s score for one hardly helped you guess the other.⁴ So lots of curiosity with little getting stuck is a perfectly ordinary mix, and so is the reverse.

Who you’re compared with

Your mark on the line comes from comparing your answers with about 650 adults in two towns in Oregon, in the United States, who answered these questions between 1994 and 1996. They were found through lists of home owners, almost all of them were white, and they were between 18 and 85 when they signed up.⁵ No official averages exist for these questions, so your mark is set against that group’s own answers.^{4, 6} Their questions were worded a bit differently and came without the short everyday moment shown above each one here, so treat where you land as a rough guide.

The score for how long thoughts hang on rests on fewer questions than the other one, so answering just one of them differently on another day can move your mark quite a way.⁴ Answering “quite like me” to almost everything also pushes it up.⁷

Going over a mistake isn’t always wasted time

A big review of the research found that going back over a bad moment helps people get over it and plan ahead when the thinking stays concrete, on what exactly happened and what to do next time. It tends to wear people down once it turns into judging yourself, asking why this always happens to you and what it says about you.⁸

Catching a loop while it’s happening

Your score can’t tell you where the thinking goes once it starts, but you can check that yourself next time an old moment comes back. Notice the question in your head. “What happened, and what will I do about it?” tends to lead somewhere. “Why does this always happen to me?” tends to go round in circles.⁸

If it keeps circling, one idea with early support is to give your worries a fixed half hour each day, in the same place, and park them until then. In one small trial with people who worried a lot, those who did this for two weeks ended up less anxious and sleeping better than those told to let their worries come whenever they came.⁹