How to Stop Overthinking — When Your Mind Won't Let You Rest

Why You Overthink

Overthinking isn't a sign of a broken brain. It's a sign of a brain doing its job — poorly calibrated, perhaps, but genuinely trying to help. The mind's job, from an evolutionary standpoint, is threat detection. It's supposed to notice danger, analyse it, and find a way to avoid it. In contexts where the threats were physical and immediate, this was invaluable.

In modern life, the threats are mostly social and psychological — which means they're not resolvable by thinking harder. You can't think your way out of a fear of rejection. You can't analyse your way to certainty about the future. The mind keeps trying, because that's what minds do. But the tool doesn't fit the problem.

Overthinking is also often a response to feelings that are uncomfortable to feel directly. The rumination circle is, among other things, a way of staying busy enough not to have to sit with the feeling underneath. Anxiety, grief, anger, shame — these are easier to circle in the abstract than to experience directly. Overthinking keeps you in your head, which keeps you out of your body, which keeps you from having to feel whatever's actually there.

Why "Just Stop Thinking" Doesn't Work

The advice to simply stop thinking, or to "quiet your mind," or to meditate the thoughts away is partially useful and mostly inadequate. Meditation does help, over time, and for some people in some moments. But the instruction to not think the thoughts tends to just add them to a list.

Telling a worried mind to be less worried is like telling an anxious dog to calm down. The anxiety doesn't respond to commands. It responds to signals that say: the threat is manageable, we're safe enough to lower the vigilance.

The most effective thing for overthinking tends to be not suppression but resolution — either of the underlying concern (when that's possible) or of the underlying feeling (which is almost always possible to do something with, even when the situation isn't resolvable).

Getting Out of the Loop

If you're stuck in an overthinking loop, the question that can move it is usually not what should I do about this? — which is what the overthinking is trying to answer — but what am I actually feeling right now?

Feelings, when they're addressed directly, tend to move. They're not static. Anger, when it's acknowledged and given some space, tends to shift or soften. Fear, when it's looked at honestly, often turns out to be smaller or more specific than its general presence suggested. Sadness, when it's allowed, tends to want to be experienced rather than analysed.

This is not a technique for eliminating overthinking. It's a reorientation — from trying to solve the thought to being with the feeling underneath it.

On Being With Uncertainty

A lot of overthinking is fundamentally about trying to resolve uncertainty in advance. To know what's going to happen, how it's going to go, whether the thing you're worried about is actually going to occur. The mind builds simulations, runs scenarios, checks and double-checks.

But uncertainty doesn't resolve through more thinking. It resolves through time, and through building a tolerance for not knowing. This is one of the harder psychological skills — sitting with open questions without needing to have them closed. Holding a situation in suspension while it develops, rather than reaching prematurely for a conclusion.

Asclepiad isn't a mindfulness app. But Maia is a space where the actual feeling underneath the overthinking can find somewhere to land. Where you can say I can't stop going over this and have it met with curiosity rather than advice. Where the conversation can move toward what you're actually carrying, rather than circling around it indefinitely.

The mind that won't rest is usually a mind carrying something it hasn't found a safe place to put down yet. Maia can be that place.

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You don't have to stop thinking. You just need somewhere to put it. asclepiad.ai/?context=anxiety