Let’s Solve Your Overthinking

“I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

At some point you realise you have spent more time thinking about your life than living it. That’s overthinking.

It’s your mind constantly over-analysing everything. It weighs every decision against every possible risk and failure until it paralyses you completely. You see every path clearly. You understand the options. You still will not move, because what if it is the wrong one?

That is the whole trap. Overthinkers are often sharp people. The analysis has become the destination. You are not thinking in order to decide. You are thinking in order to avoid deciding.

Why You Do It

The first reason goes back further than you do.

Your ancestors survived because their brains paid more attention to threats than to opportunities. If you heard a noise in the bush and assumed it was nothing, you got eaten. If you assumed predator and ran, you survived, even if it turned out to be nothing. The brain that over-scanned for danger passed its genes on. You are the descendant of the worriers, and their instinct is still running in you.

This is negativity bias. Your brain gives more weight to potential losses than to potential gains. It flags problems more urgently than possibilities. It runs threat simulations on your career decisions, your relationships, your creative work, every domain where the cost of being wrong is survivable.

So we’ve all heard of this, but less of the connection to today. Because that same ancestor who scanned for threats did not stand frozen at the edge of the bush running scenarios for three days. He assessed fast and then he moved. The thinking and the acting were tightly coupled. The negativity bias was never a destination, it was a brief filter before action. The loop was always meant to close through movement.

What broke that sequence is the feedback loop.

In the ancestral environment, inaction had immediate consequences. You did not hunt, you did not eat. You froze in the field, you died. The cost of paralysis was tangible and fast, which meant the brain had no option but to resolve the loop through action. As a hunter-gatherer, you had to bite or you died. There was no waiting around until your teeth fell out.

Modern life removed that forcing function. Now you can avoid the decision, stay comfortable, survive anyway, and your brain occasionally even gets rewarded for it. You overthought something, it turned out the risk was real, and the avoidance felt like wisdom. The brain logged that as a win. It does it again. Over time the loop that was always supposed to close through action stays open indefinitely, fed by false rewards and the absence of real consequences. Passivity becomes the path of least resistance, and the brain learns to live there. It becomes habit, then identity.

The second reason is closer to home.

Your parents learned to be cautious in a world that punished recklessness. Maybe it was real scarcity, real danger, real consequences for getting things wrong. That caution kept them safe. They passed it to you as wisdom. Look before you leap. Think it through. Make sure. And you absorbed it, the way children absorb everything, completely and without questioning whether it still applies.

It does not. The circumstances that made that worldview necessary are gone, but the worldview remains. You inherited a map drawn for a different terrain and you are still navigating with it.

That is what you are actually dealing with. A sequence that was always meant to end in action, broken by a world that removed the consequences of never acting.

Why Inaction Is Destructive

Look at the entire historical record of what male life has been organised around. Building. Conquering. Providing. Creating. Fighting for something. Every culture across every era defined a man by what he did, what he built, what he was willing to put at risk. Passivity was never a viable male strategy. The man who did not act did not survive, did not build a family, did not leave anything behind. For most of human history, male identity and male action were the same thing.

That changed very recently. And the results are visible everywhere.

When you strip a man of action, you strip him of the organising principle that has always given male life its shape and meaning. What fills that vacuum is mental activity, endless loops of analysis and rumination that feel like doing something and produce nothing. That gap, between the feeling of being active and the reality of standing still, is where the deterioration begins. The anxiety, the depression, the sense that something is fundamentally wrong but you cannot name it. You can name it. It is the absence of action.

Thinking generates more thinking. Every question it answers produces two more. The loop does not close from inside itself. The only thing that closes it is moving.

I notice this constantly in my own life. When I stop going to the gym regularly, I start feeling worse. When it has been too long since I did a demanding hike, the overthinking creeps in and my mental state deteriorates with it. Then I do the hike, as gruelling as it is, and it is solved immediately.

The same pattern shows up with reading, thinking, reflecting… I love these activities. They have played a real role in getting me where I am. But too much of them, at the expense of creating, producing, doing, always leads to the same place. A kind of mental heaviness that no amount of additional thinking ever lifts. Only action does. Every single time.

What You Do Instead

I am writing this from Mexico where I’m currently living these past few months. Earlier this week there has been a lot of troubles where I am. Close enough that people around me are watching every update, making calls, reading everything they can find, consuming the chaos from every angle.

I made a different decision. I assessed the situation once, identified my actual options, which are to stay informed at a basic level, stay home, and keep working, and then I closed the file. I stopped consuming information about it. I walled it off. I put my attention back on the things I actually need and want to be thinking about. I teach this process in my course Conquer Your Attention, linked et the end.

What would change if I spent the next three hours reading updates and calling people? My options would be identical. My actual situation would be identical. The only thing that would change is that I would have spent three hours generating mental noise instead of producing something.

That is what a functioning relationship with uncertainty looks like. You assess once. You identify what is in your control. You act on that. You close everything else.

The overthinker does the opposite. I know because I was this guy before. He keeps the file open. He keeps feeding it. He mistakes the feeling of monitoring for the feeling of doing something, and the two feel similar enough that he rarely notices the difference.

The way out is pain tolerance. You build this through repeated experience of doing the hard thing and surviving it.

The hike I mentioned is a good example of this. It’s gruelling, my legs hurt, it takes hours, it is genuinely difficult. Imagine if I avoided it totally because it hurts a little, I wouldn’t get the mental health benefits that solve the chatter in my mind.

Decisions work the same way. You avoid making them because being wrong is uncomfortable, because uncertainty feels dangerous, because you might have to live with a mistake. But that discomfort is the exact thing that builds real judgment over time. Every time you make a call before you feel ready, let the outcome land, and keep moving, you are training your brain to understand that life goes on after a wrong turn. That the fear was larger than the actual cost. Do enough reps of this and the loop loses its grip.

The deeper root underneath all of this is how much you trust your own judgment, and how much of that trust you have quietly handed over to what other people think of your choices. When someone else’s opinion of your decision matters more than your own read of the situation, every choice carries weight it was never meant to carry.

You need to lose respect for the general public.

Building real confidence in your own judgment is its own system to achieve that, and that is what my article on confidence is for:

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And if you want to Conquer Your Attention like I did, in order to chill while in chaos:

→ Get the course here and change your life

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