You Need To Stop Overthinking Everything

You know you’re an obsessive over-thinker when you can do something naturally, easily without even thinking about it, but as soon as you start thinking the vibe’s gone. That first date you had with a cute guy went well because you weren’t really thinking about it all that much. But when he asked you for a second date, well, then you started overthinking because you wanted to make a good impression and he didn’t call you back.

People who overthink things tend to do the following:

1. Read into text messages/text message intervals from crushes.

2. Spend way too much time crafting the perfect response to a text message from a crush.

3. Make basic life decisions about what to eat, what to wear, which coffee shop to go to, which profile pic to use way more difficult than they need to be.

4. Seek second and fifteenth opinions from everybody.

5. Reach a point (say, when choosing a restaurant for dinner) where they hand the decision-making process over to someone else in hopes of relieving their own personal angst.

6. Blame themselves when relationships go wrong.

7. Won’t budge unless they are SURE that this is 100%, absolutely the best choice.

8. Spend countless hours researching the correct ______ to buy, reading reviews, blogs, watching YouTube videos and unboxings.

9. Like knowing exactly what’s going to happen.

10. Are probably always late.

11. Difficult to get things done.

12. Start a lot of projects but don’t finish them.

13. You always imagine and anticipate the worst possible scenario, without fail.

Over-thinkers can always see both sides of the same coin. If I do this then THIS will happen, but if I do that then THAT will happen! You probably spend more thinking about and agonizing over a decision than actually doing the thing you’re thinking about. No option is ever a bad one, just a different outcome, turning life into a choose your own adventure nightmare.

But you should know that being an over-thinker is ruining your life — and your productivity, relationships and creativity. You overthink things because you’re a perfectionist and because you want to make the right choice or give the perfect impression, not the wrong one. The thing is, there’s no such thing as a wrong choice or a bad impression, only a choice you made and the lessons you learned from it. People either like you or they don’t, and some choice you made isn’t really going to influence that very much.

Overthinking is ultimately about a fear of failure, a deep anxiety about making the wrong choice while also seeing both sides of a choice.

But sometimes, you just have to take a leap and go with it. If you’re agonizing about telling some guy you like him in a text message and you do and then he stops responding then, girl, whatever, now you can move on to the next one. Instead of seeing every decision as the last and most important decision you will ever make in life, think about decision making as a source of freedom. The more decisions you make, and the more you chose for you, the freer you can be.

Don’t think. Do it and do it now.