I’ve been a psychotherapist for 15 years. Here’s my top piece of advice for people struggling with anxiety and ‘overthinking’

‘Overthinking’ is a term that I hear people say a lot, when describing their experience of anxiety. But since the average human brain processes up to 70,000 thoughts per day (according to research conducted by the University of Southern California's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging), I’m prompted to ask the question: what does ‘overthinking’ actually mean?

When faced with this question my clients often clarify that they’re having lots of recurring anxious thoughts. So perhaps the problem is the nature of our thoughts, not just their frequency and volume. Particularly when those persistent anxious thoughts are blindly believed and go unchallenged, free to influence our emotions, our behaviours and our physical states.

The character 'Anxiety' from the movie Inside Out 2.

Not all thoughts are facts.

Some are, but many aren’t. Many are predictions, ideas, opinions, fears, worst-case scenarios. And often our thoughts get filtered through layers of cognitive bias. That’s partly a survival mechanism. Let me explain…

As humans we’ve evolved to attend to potential threats. This was, and arguably still can be a vital survival strategy. There’s not the same survival need to attend to positive things, so our brains have developed this bias towards paying attention to negatives, whether real or perceived, current or purely hypothetical.

Keep an eye on the sabretooth tiger. 

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. However, sabretooth tigers died out approximately 10,000 years ago. And whilst some people unfortunately live in dangerous environments due to war or crime, most of us no longer face immediate threats that we need to actively attend to in our day to day lives. The modern world has got safer, faster than our brains can evolve. So, we’re left with this antiquated, over-sensitive alarm system, which neuroscientists call the amygdala, and Professor Steven Peters calls ‘the inner chimp’ (see his book The Chimp Paradox). And we end up with a lot of false alarms.

The primal roots of anxiety can be understood as a survival mechanism in our evolution.

Anxious thoughts play a role in our response to the alarm being raised. We perceive potential threats, those could be threats to social status in the absence of a sabretooth tiger… and we make predictions: “I’ll probably embarrass myself?” Our brains are prediction machines, constantly working, constantly risk assessing. Interestingly, a lot of my clients who experience excessive worry, work in roles where a lot of risk assessment is necessary. But what came first, the chicken or the egg? Have they developed the inability to stop risk assessing and chill the hell out, because they do so much of it at work, or did they find themselves in that role because they have so much experience of dynamic, moment to moment risk assessing?

There does seem to be a difference between professional and personal risk assessment thought. In work, we’re far more likely to think rationally when risk assessing, weighing up all of the different considerations, and committing our thoughts to writing, a formal document that needs to be shared and adhered to. So, it must be evidence-based. When we habitually, dynamically and often semi-consciously risk assess threats moment to moment in daily life, we are less likely to verbalise our thinking, and that thinking is far more likely to be emotionally informed and biased towards negative outcomes.

Go with your gut.

Generally accepted as good advice right? No! Your gut is full of shit! When people talk about a gut feeling, they are likely to be referring to a visceral emotional reaction. And sure, our emotions can give us clues about what’s going on around us, including potential risks, but they can also mislead us and make false anxious thoughts seem far more plausible. This is called emotional reasoning, and it can become an unhelpful thinking habit that keeps anxiety going. So, rather than instinctively going with your gut, notice how you feel and then think. Apply logic. Question your assumptions. This ability to think about our thoughts is called ‘metacognition’, and I’d argue that it’s an essential practice to overcoming anxiety - my top piece of advice for people struggling with ‘overthinking’.

Put your thought in court. A useful approach to this is to cross-examine your anxious thought. Imagine that it’s on trial. The defence will consider all of the evidence to support the thought – what evidence suggests that it’s true. And the prosecution with consider all of the evidence that suggests the thought is untrue unlikely to be true. Once all of the evidence has been laid out, the jury’s job is to weigh it up and based on hard, factual evidence alone (not emotion or gut feeling), decide what is most likely to be true – a verdict.

Balancing the Scales: evaluating concerns and reality checking Anxious Thoughts.

The goal of this thought exercise is not to force your mind to change. You can exhaust yourself battling to overturn anxious thoughts completely. The aim should be modest: to consider an alternative perspective. Just get that alternative possibility on the table alongside the worst-case scenario. If your conviction of belief in the original anxious thought reduces even slightly, then so should the intensity of your anxiety. And with lots of practice, you will get really good, and quick, at batting away irrational anxious thoughts.

So, here’s a simple checklist to use when practicing questioning anxious thoughts:

·      What is the thought? – write it down as a sentence.

·      What’s the evidence for this thought?

·      What’s the evidence against it?

·      Based on that evidence, what is most likely to be true?

·      And on that basis, can I write down a revised thought?

Good luck with applying this technique, and if you’d like help from a therapist, to overcome anxiety or any other mental health problem, than please get in touch and we’d love to help you work towards a calmer happier future.

Author: Joe Badham

Psychotherapist in counselling and CBT.