HOW TO STOP OVERTHINKING (& START DOING)

If you struggle with taking action because you overthink absolutely everything and you watch other people easily work on their plans without agonizing over every single step, believe me, there is nothing wrong with you. There's a cycle of overthinking happening in your brain that is actually trying to protect you. And in this video, we're going to learn how to work around it so we can finally pursue our goals with ease. My name is Olga. I just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where I studied computation and cognitive science. And after the last four years of studying how the human mind works, this is genuinely one of the most interesting things I've learned about. There's a common misconception that you overthink because you're just very analytical. Your brain works just harder than other people's. You think too much. You're just way too smart. And obviously, this framing feels kind of good because it turns a problem that people have into kind of like a compliment. But imagine a situation. So let's take an example from my life. I, for the longest time, wanted to become a YouTuber and start a YouTube channel. But instead of actually creating a YouTube channel, I spent months and years thinking about what gear I have to get, what sort of editing software to use, what would I even make videos about. So I was just thinking and thinking and thinking about it and overthinking every single step that I have to take to actually start a YouTube channel. So explain to me how exactly does overthinking help us here? Because I cannot see why overthinking, over worrying, over researching can be helpful because it basically delays the moment when you actually have to take action and see the result. So if overthinking is not helping, why does our brain keep doing it instead of just taking action? Well, because taking action means that you have to face uncertainty. And our brains hate uncertainty. When you're recording the first video, you don't know if it's going to be good. You don't know if people are going to judge you. You don't know if the idea you've been planning is going to survive contact with reality. And our brain hates that uncertainty. Our brain basically treats that uncertainty as a real threat. Instead of letting you take action and find out what is going to happen, which would actually resolve that uncertainty, it offers you a deal. Your brain says, oh, do not do this scary thing yet. Do not do this. Research a little bit more. Think about it a little bit more. Analyze it a little bit more. Oh, and then we're going to have certainty. Then we're going to know what is the best course of action. And your mind creates something that I personally like to call like a certainty loop. So first, you're facing the decision or a goal or a plan that has an uncertain outcome. And that uncertainty, it feels very threatening. So in order to resolve the uncertainty, you start to overthink. You start to overanalyze, compare options, do planning, and that gives you temporary relief from the uncertainty. But the certainty never actually arrives because you cannot be certain about an outcome before you've actually lived it. So the uncertainty comes back and it only will be resolved once you're actually done with the action, done with the plan. A researcher named Thomas Borkowitz at Penn State University studied this problem for decades. And he actually found out that overthinking functions as emotional avoidance. When you research and you analyze and worry, you're actually engaging with the problem at arm's length. And that protects you from the actual feeling of uncertainty. And there's another reason why this overthinking loop is so hard to escape. So there's a phenomenon in psychology called the Zagarnik effect. And it's when your brain treats every unfinished task, every unmade decision, every unsent message as basically an open tab. So if you were to imagine your brain as a browser and you're clicking through different things, you're thinking about many different ideas, every single unmade decision would stay as an open tab in your brain. And you would always see it on the top of the browser. For example, you know when you receive an important email, but you do not immediately reply to it. And then in the middle of the day, you're going to keep remembering about replying to this email. In the middle of a conversation with someone, in the shower, taking a walk, you're always going to be getting reminded by your brain that, oh there's an email I have to reply to. And it's never going to actually leave you until you go and reply to that email. And it keeps running in the background because it is your brain's way of making sure that important things do not get forgotten. So when you're stuck in the certainty loop, you never actually act on anything. You keep overthinking and trying to reach that certainty. But the certainty never arrives because you never actually complete the action. And that's where the Zagarnik effect comes in. Because you keep being reminded by your brain about all the plans that you have. And it's actually just, it's like a ton of open tabs in your mind that keep cluttering your mental space. So how do we actually close these tabs? You might think that you have to make every decision, finish every task, complete every project. But no. Researchers Baumeister and Mazzicampo found something very interesting. They found that your brain doesn't actually need every task to be done. It just needs to create a plan to resolve it. When people in their study took an unfinished goal and they wrote down a specific plan of how they would complete it, their intrusive thoughts, their overthinking, it stopped. So the first exit from the certainty loop is very simple. So you sit down, you take pen and paper, and you write down every single open tab that you have in your mind. So every unmade decision, every plan, every dream you have, everything that you keep thinking about. Also very minor things as well. Every random email that you forgot to reply to, every message you forgot to reply to. And just write it down from your mind and onto paper. Then for each one of them, write a concrete next step of how you're going to resolve it and how you're going to turn a thought into an action. Personally, I love to write a brain dump like this on my iPad. It's where I write my notes, my plans, my tasks I have to do, plan my videos. I use a screen protector called Paperlike 3 which has this nano dots surface and it gives you real friction when you write. So it basically feels like you're writing pen on paper instead of writing pen on glass. And they spent years testing and producing this nano dots technology that has this paper feel experience without actually compromising the clarity of your screen. I also have to mention installation because I definitely ruined screen protectors before. But Paperlike 3 has this butterfly application system. It basically makes it impossible to mess up. It keeps your screen sealed from dust until the exact moment the protector goes on. And there's also an interactive guide on your iPad that walks you through everything step by step. So I got it perfect on the first try. If you want to try it, I'll put my link in the description. And they also have a 100-day money-back guarantee. So there's genuinely no risk. And it comes in a pack of two, so you always have a spare. And thank you to Paperlike for sponsoring this video. Fix number two, shrink the action until your brain can't resist it. Remember, the loop spins because the action feels way too big. Starting a YouTube channel, launching a whole business, having a whole difficult conversation. Basically, the bigger the action, the more uncertainty it carries. So if you're going to shrink the action, make it very small, and cut it down into very small achievable chunks, you're going to feel less uncertainty when you try to complete that like one small step. Fix number three, act for evidence. The certainty loop makes you a promise. It says that if you think about it a little bit more, you're finally going to achieve certainty. But it doesn't work this way. You will never analyze your way into knowing whether your business idea is going to succeed. You have to go, and you actually have to do it, and then you're going to find out. So you're never going to know whether your goal or your plan is going to be successful. You have to go and actually turn it into the physical reality. I also love this related idea from procrastination research, and it says that procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotion regulation problem, and I talked about it extensively in this video. I'm going to link it somewhere here, but it's very interesting because we productively procrastinate on our goals and on our dreams because we just want to avoid the negative emotions of thinking about potential failure and the uncertainty of the outcome that we're going to reach. Now I have given you all the fixes that have helped me with dealing with overthinking that I've learned through my personal experience, talking to people, reading books and articles, and these fixes probably are going to help if you actually know that you're overthinking. But some people overthink without actually realizing that they are overthinking. So I think it's very helpful to know about different types of overthinking and how it can show up in our lives. So now I'm going to give you four overthinking types, and let me know in the comments if you recognize any of them in yourself, and maybe you don't recognize some of them in yourself. Be very curious to hear. Number one is the replayer. Imagine you had a conversation with someone three days ago, and you're still thinking about it. You're still playing it over in your head and thinking, oh, I should have said this. Maybe I said something wrong. Maybe I said something insensitive. Maybe I should say something else next time. And you keep overthinking it despite the fact that it already happened and the conversation has already taken place. So you cannot actually change anything you said in that conversation. Of course, a lot of us do it in like our daily lives, especially if we accidentally say something that we did not mean to say. But if you find yourself doing it constantly with like a lot of conversations, you're definitely the replayer. Number two is the catastrophizer. And it's when you have a certain goal or a certain plan, and before you even started pursuing it, you already imagined 20 different ways that it's going to go wrong. So you're constantly pre-living different disasters and worst-case scenarios, so that if they do happen, you're not going to be surprised by them, and you're not going to be too disappointed. Number three is the over-planner. It's when your plan has another plan, when your backup plan has another backup plan. You've been getting ready to do something for so long that the preparation itself becomes an entire new project even of itself. So you're basically wasting time on preparation instead of doing the actual original project. Number four is the over-analyzer. And this one is me, and it's basically when you want to analyze every single course of action. It feels like the most dangerous form of overthinking, because you genuinely feel productive when you over-analyze. When you take notes, when you create spreadsheets, when you do research to prove that you are actually working. Let me know in the comments which one of these characters is you. I'd be very curious to hear from you and how you actually deal with these forms of overthinking. And also, if you know any other forms of overthinking that I didn't mention in this video, I'd also be very curious to hear and learn something new. So we have now discussed why we overthink our actions and how we can stop doing that, but I also want to add one very very important thing. Everything I discussed today is about everyday overthinking. It's the type of overthinking that can slow you down a little bit, can make it a little bit slower to take action, or it might be a little bit harder for you to make a decision because you keep thinking about it. But if overthinking is consuming most of your days, if it's affecting your sleep, your relationships, your health, this is not something a YouTube video can fix. This is definitely something that is worth talking to a professional about. But if this is daily overthinking, I'm always happy to share my experience and what I think about it. Also guys, I have not been posting for a while and thank you so much for checking in on me, because some of you have reached out and asked if I'm okay, but I am okay. So the thing that happened is that I graduated from college, I moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and this entire time I was trying to find an apartment in San Francisco. If you know anything about San Francisco, you know that the apartment search here is absolutely insane right now. I spent such a long time trying to find an apartment and I'm so happy that I'm finally, I moved and I settled into my cozy little studio here. So from now on, I will be recording my videos in here, and if you learned something new in this video, I'd really appreciate if you like this video and subscribe to my channel. And right now I'm trying to build out this big library of videos about cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, maybe some other topics as well. And if you have any sort of topics or themes that you'd be interested to hear my perspective on and to do a little research on, do let me know in the comments and I'd be very happy to hear your ideas. And thank you so much for watching!