Audio Version (10:05)
You can be smart, capable and brilliant at solving complex problems… and still spend hours replaying one conversation in your head.
Being intelligent doesn’t make you immune to overthinking, and I’m certainly not suggesting that overthinking makes you intelligent! The psychology is much more interesting than that.
In today’s article, I’ll explain why the same skills that help us analyse information, spot patterns, and anticipate problems can sometimes work against us, and why being good at thinking doesn’t necessarily mean you know when to stop.
In the extended YouTube version of this article (click here to watch), I also discuss:
When Your Professional Brain Meets Your Personal Life
Knowing More Can Make Decisions Harder
Reflection or Rumination?
Learning When You’ve Thought Enough
Introduction
Have you ever wondered how someone can make complex decisions at work, solve problems other people struggle with and be the person everyone turns to for advice, yet spend three hours wondering whether they said the wrong thing in a meeting? Perhaps you do it yourself.
You can manage a team, run a business, analyse complicated information, or calmly handle a crisis. But then somebody sends you a slightly unusual email, and suddenly you’re analysing every word, wondering what they meant and replaying your last conversation with them.
It seems contradictory. Surely if you’re good at thinking, you should also be good at knowing when to stop?
Not necessarily, and just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that people who overthink are more intelligent, or that smart people necessarily overthink more than anybody else. I’m interested in something slightly different:
Why being smart, capable and highly analytical doesn’t protect us from overthinking.
In fact, sometimes the very thinking skills that serve us so well can give our brains even more material to work with.
Being Good at Thinking Doesn’t Mean You Can Switch It Off
Many of the skills we associate with being capable are based on thinking. We analyse information, recognise patterns, anticipate problems, compare different options and consider possible consequences. In the workplace, those abilities can be enormously valuable.
They’re often rewarded too.
You spot the problem nobody else noticed.
You ask the question everyone else missed.
You think three steps ahead and prevent something from going wrong.
Over time, you learn something important: careful thinking works.
So when you’re faced with uncertainty in another area of life, what does your brain naturally do? It thinks harder!
Our Brains Are Prediction Machines
Our brains are constantly trying to anticipate what happens next. They use past experiences, patterns, and whatever information is available to predict the world around us.
Most of the time, this is incredibly useful. If something went badly before, your brain remembers it. If you’ve repeatedly seen a particular behaviour lead to a particular outcome, you’ll probably notice it more quickly next time.
The difficulty comes when there isn’t enough information to make an accurate prediction.
Your manager says, “Can I have a quick word?”
A colleague sends a much shorter message than usual.
A client who normally replies immediately hasn’t responded.
Now there are gaps in the information and if you’re somebody who’s particularly good at analysing situations, your brain has plenty of ways to fill them.
You Can See Too Many Possibilities
Being able to see different possibilities is enormously useful when you’re solving a problem. You don’t just see the obvious answer. You consider alternatives. You look at the situation from different perspectives and think about consequences other people may not have considered.
But apply that same skill to an ambiguous social situation, and things can get complicated fast.
Perhaps your colleague’s email was short because they’re annoyed with you.
Perhaps they’re busy.
Perhaps they’re under pressure.
Perhaps you said something yesterday that upset them.
Perhaps they’ve heard something you haven’t.
Perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
You’ve now got six perfectly plausible explanations. So your brain starts analysing them.
You replay conversations, look for clues and examine what happened earlier in the week. Before long, a three-word email has generated half an hour of thinking. The problem isn’t that you can’t come up with an explanation. It’s that you can come up with too many.
Experience Gives Your Brain More Material
There’s another interesting problem that can come with being experienced. You’ve seen more things go wrong. If you’ve worked for twenty or thirty years, you’ve probably experienced restructures, difficult bosses, redundancies, failed projects, challenging clients, and workplace conflict.
That experience can make you extremely good at spotting potential problems. But it also gives your brain an enormous library of previous situations to search through. A small change happens at work, and your brain remembers the last time something similar happened.
“This is exactly how that restructure started.”
Perhaps it is. But perhaps it isn’t. Experience helps us recognise patterns, but patterns aren’t guarantees. Two situations can look remarkably similar at the start and end up completely differently. Sometimes experience gives us wisdom. Sometimes it simply gives our overthinking more evidence.
Success Can Reinforce the Habit
I’ve worked with many highly capable professionals who have built successful careers by being thorough.
They prepare properly.
They anticipate problems.
They think things through.
They don’t make careless decisions.
Those behaviours have probably contributed to their success. The problem is that the brain can learn the wrong lesson from that success.
Instead of learning, “Thinking carefully is useful,” it can start learning, “The more I think, the better the outcome will be.” Those aren’t the same thing. There comes a point where additional thinking stops improving the decision. But if thinking has served you well for most of your life, recognising that point can be surprisingly difficult.
Thinking Can Create an Illusion of Control
I’ve lost count of the number of coaching clients who’ve apologised for “overthinking”, only for me to discover that what they’re really doing is trying to think their way to certainty.
They believe that if they analyse the situation for another ten minutes, they’ll eventually find the answer and I understand why.
Thinking feels productive.
It feels responsible.
It feels as though you’re doing something to improve the situation.
The problem is that some things can’t be solved through more analysis.
You can’t know exactly what somebody else is thinking.
You can’t guarantee that a new job will work out.
You can’t predict exactly how somebody will respond to a difficult conversation.
You can’t eliminate every possibility of making the wrong decision.
At some point, you have to act without knowing everything.
The Wrap-up
Being smart, capable, or highly analytical doesn’t make you immune to overthinking, and overthinking certainly isn’t proof of intelligence. The relationship is far more interesting than that.
The same skills that help us solve complex problems can sometimes make it harder to leave simple ones alone. We spot patterns, generate possibilities, draw on previous experience and try to anticipate what happens next.
Those abilities can serve us incredibly well. But not every situation needs more analysis. Sometimes there isn’t another piece of information to find. No hidden meaning is waiting to be uncovered, and no perfect decision guarantees everything will work out.
The challenge isn’t learning to think less. It’s learning to recognise when thinking helps you and when you’re just going around the same loop again. Because being good at thinking doesn’t mean you have to think about everything, and sometimes the smartest thing you can do is recognise that you’ve thought enough.
What Next?
Again, in the extended YouTube version of this article (click here to watch), I also discuss:
When Your Professional Brain Meets Your Personal Life
Knowing More Can Make Decisions Harder
Reflection or Rumination?
Learning When You’ve Thought Enough
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