Overthinking: What's Really Happening | Berkhamsted Therapy
The Problem with "Overthinking": What's Really Going On?
"Overthinking" is often anxiety that's been mislabelled. The real issue involves thoughts, emotions, and body sensations working together, not just mental activity you can simply turn down.
When you say you're "overthinking," you're typically describing an emotional experience of distress where your mind won't stop spinning. The problem isn't the quantity of thinking, it's that we've been taught to focus only on thoughts while ignoring feelings and physical sensations that are equally present and important.
Quick Facts:
• "Overthinking" often masks anxiety involving thoughts, mental images, and body sensations, not just cognition
• Repetitive thinking patterns frequently avoid direct emotional contact. Contact with and then working with the emotions underneath creates an opening.
• Integration of thinking, feeling, and sensing, not thought control, leads to better emotional regulation
Why the "Overthinking" Label Falls Short
A client sits forward in the chair, hands clasped tightly, describing how she's been "overthinking everything" about a work presentation next week. As we slow down to notice what's actually happening, she becomes aware of the tight knot in her stomach and realizes she's been rehearsing disaster scenarios on an endless loop while her body holds a profound dread of being exposed as incompetent.
The most obvious problem with the idea of "overthinking" is that it implies there's a correct amount of thinking, a perfect midpoint between underthinking and overthinking. But who could determine what that ideal level is?
Even if it could be measured, how could anyone consistently think the "correct" amount? The way the label frames the problem can't lead to a solution, because there is no measurable standard about how much one should be thinking.
But something even more important is missing: the label frames the experience as a purely cognitive problem, as if your inner world were just mental computation. Yet when you describe being distressed about your thoughts, you're talking about an emotional experience. The feelings, which are the distress itself, get completely overlooked.
When people say they're overthinking, they often mean, "I feel really anxious, and my mind won't stop spinning." The anxiety is the feeling component; the spinning thoughts are just another part, the cognitive part.
What "Overthinking" Actually Involves
• Thoughts: Internal commentary and mental chatter
• Mental images: Vivid scenarios like internal cinema detailing all the things that are going to go wrong
• Physical sensations: Tight chest, stomach knots, muscle tension, racing heartbeat
• Emotional states: Anxiety, dread, restlessness, overwhelm, sometimes depression or obsessive urges
• Behavioural patterns: Seeking reassurance, avoiding decisions, checking behaviours, substance use
What's Really Happening: The Fuller Picture of Your Experience
Your experience involves much more than just thoughts. Human experience takes place in several different dimensions.
Thinking: The internal commentary running in your head.
Mental Images: The pictures, memories, or scenarios your mind creates.
Physical Sensations: What you feel in your body.
When you're anxious, for example, you're not just having anxious thoughts. You might also be seeing mental images of things going wrong and feeling physical sensations like a tight chest, butterflies in your stomach, or tension in your throat.
This is the key: becoming more aware of and then working with this wider range of experience is essential for developing better emotional regulation. How can you learn to regulate an experience if you don't recognize that feeling and physical sensation are part of what's going on?
Focusing only on thinking often leads to just becoming more obsessed with your thoughts.
A Different Way of Understanding: From Mind to Senses
There's an old saying in Gestalt therapy: "Lose your mind and come to your senses." While it might sound like an old motto from the 60s, it points to something practical and important— we have an ability to shift registers of experience so we can experience something other than our thoughts.
It means learning to shift your attention from endless mental activity to what's happening right here, right now through what you feel, what you see, and what you hear. Instead of being lost in mental fantasies about the past or future, you can connect with now.
Gestalt is all about waking up into the aliveness of the present moment and being aware of your connection to it. This isn't about stopping thoughts, that's impossible. It's about expanding your awareness to a wider vista than merely your cognition.
When you start paying attention to your feelings and body sensations and the environment, the mental spinning often begins to find a calmer pace. Treating mental activity like computer processing misses the essence of what inner life is truly like.
This mechanical view doesn't help develop the ability to be with difficult feelings, which is fundamental to mental health. These feelings can't be banished; they are a recurring part of being human. We need to grow our tolerance for experiencing them.
Thinking to Avoid Feeling
In my clinical experience, I often observe that repetitive thinking patterns can be a way of avoiding direct emotional contact. Here are some signs this might be happening:
• Your thoughts go in circles without any dissipation of tension
• You feel mentally exhausted but haven't solved anything
• Physical tension accompanies your mental activity
• Emotions feel "stuck" or hard to identify
• You are locked into states of distress and find it hard to find soothing
• The same worries return on loop
The Path Forward: Integration, Not Control
When someone is stuck in repetitive thought patterns, they're often struggling with feelings they're not allowing themselves to fully experience. They're blocking them because they're scared of feeling. The thinking becomes a way of staying busy mentally while avoiding direct contact with emotional experience.
When you stop trying to "fix" your "overthinking" and start paying attention to what you're actually experiencing in all its domains, something interesting happens.
The goal isn't to become someone who doesn't think deeply or doesn't have an active mind. You don't need to change who you are. The goal is to develop a more complete relationship with your experience, one that includes thinking, feeling, and sensing as integrated aspects of being human.
What This Looks Like in Practice
This integration work can take various forms:
Therapy helps develop mindful awareness: Instead of fighting your thoughts, we practice noticing them alongside what you're feeling in your body, developing your capacity to sense and be aware of feeling.
As Jon Kabat-Zinn notes in Mindfulness for Beginners (2012): "Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."
Grounding techniques: We work together to deliberately connect with your physical senses—what you can see, hear and feel in order to help loosen repetitive mental loops.
Emotional exploration: Therapy helps facilitate a balanced exploration of feeling and thought rather than just encouraging more analysis.
Body awareness: Noticing where you hold tension when your mind is spinning, and experiment with breathing into those areas and expanding awareness.
Present moment contact: Practicing shifting attention from mental scenarios to actual, immediate experience.
In my practice in Berkhamsted, we explore not just what you think, but what you feel, what you sense, and how you make contact with the present moment. When you can make contact with the present moment and be with all aspects of your inner experience, you're developing better emotional regulation skills.
Different approaches work for different people, some find somatic practices helpful, others benefit from exploring the emotions beneath their thinking patterns, and some need to develop basic awareness of their body sensations. The key is finding what helps you expand beyond purely mental focus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.How do I know if I'm avoiding feelings?
A. Often, repetitive, circular thinking is a clue. When your mind goes in circles without resolution, it may be because an emotional experience is trying to get your attention but isn't being felt directly.
Q. Isn't some "overthinking" just anxiety?
A. Often, yes. "Overthinking" is frequently anxiety that's been mislabelled as simply a thinking problem when it's also a feeling and physical experience. When we recognize that anxiety involves thoughts, images, and body sensations, it becomes much more workable.
Q. What's the difference between awareness and just thinking about thinking?
A. Awareness includes your body, senses, and emotions, not just your thoughts. It's about noticing what's actually happening in the present moment rather than analyzing it mentally. In Gestalt therapy: excitement and growth in the human personality it's noted:
'Awareness is not a thought about the problem but is itself a creative integration of the problem'
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If you're tired of fighting with your thoughts and ready to explore a different way of relating to your inner life, I offer therapy in Berkhamsted that helps people develop fuller awareness of their emotional experience.
Phone: 07717 515 013
Email: sean@seanheneghan.com
Located at: Berkhamsted Chiropractic Clinic, 69 High Street, Berkhamsted, HP4 2DE
About Sean Heneghan - Therapist in Berkhamsted
Sean Heneghan is a BACP registered counsellor and member of The British Acupuncture Council serving Berkhamsted for over 20 years. He offers an integrative approach combining depth-oriented therapy with acupuncture to support emotional regulation and self-understanding.
Services include:
• Gestalt counselling and therapy
• Traditional acupuncture
• Support for anxiety, repetitive thinking patterns, and emotional regulation
• Serving Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, St Albans, and the wider Hertfordshire area
References
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2012). Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life.
Perls, Hefferline, Goodman (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the human personality