You know you do it. You have probably been told you do it. You have definitely tried to stop. But the thoughts keep running. You replay conversations. You rehearse ones that have not happened yet. You turn decisions over and over, examining every angle, and still cannot land. You lie awake at night with your mind going through the same material it went through during the day. You are tired of it. You might even be tired of yourself.
People have suggested meditation. Journaling. Exercise. Breathing techniques. Thought-stopping. Maybe you have tried some of these and they helped for a few hours. Maybe they helped for a few days. But the loop always comes back, because nothing you have tried so far has touched the thing that keeps it running.
What the research says
The research on overthinking is extensive and clear on certain points. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's response styles theory, one of the most well-supported models in the field, established that rumination predicts the onset of new depressive episodes, intensifies existing depressive symptoms, impairs problem-solving, and erodes social support. This finding has been replicated across populations and age groups in dozens of longitudinal studies. Overthinking is not just a consequence of feeling bad. It is a mechanism that makes things worse.
More recent work has treated repetitive negative thinking as a transdiagnostic process. The same underlying pattern shows up across depression, generalized anxiety, PTSD, insomnia, eating disorders, and social anxiety. The content changes depending on the disorder, but the process is the same: the mind gets locked into a loop of abstract, negative, repetitive thinking that it cannot disengage from. Edward Watkins and colleagues have proposed a model that identifies five factors maintaining the loop: it becomes a habit; executive control weakens; thinking stays abstract instead of concrete; unresolved goal discrepancies keep pulling attention back; and negative information-processing biases keep the material dark.
Treatments that target overthinking directly have shown real results. Rumination-focused CBT reduces both rumination and depression. Mindfulness-based approaches help by training present-moment attention. Metacognitive therapy works by challenging the beliefs people hold about the usefulness of their rumination. All of these approaches deserve credit for taking overthinking seriously as a clinical target rather than treating it as a side effect of something else.
Where most approaches stop
CBT for overthinking teaches you to notice when you are ruminating and redirect your attention to something concrete. Metacognitive therapy goes further by targeting the belief that rumination is useful or necessary. Mindfulness trains you to observe thoughts without engaging them. These approaches work at the level of the process. They help you relate differently to the thinking once it starts.
But they share an assumption: that the thinking is the problem. In my experience, the thinking is not the problem. The thinking is the solution. It is a solution to a different problem, one that the person is usually not aware of.
Watch what happens right before the loop starts. Something happened that made you feel something. An interaction that stung. A moment of vulnerability. A flicker of anger that you were not supposed to have. A want that felt dangerous. And instead of the feeling landing and being felt, your mind kicked into gear. It started analyzing, reviewing, predicting, rehearsing. The thinking replaced the feeling. It feels productive, like you are working on something. You are not. You are running from something.
How I work with this
My approach comes from the character-analytic tradition of David Shapiro, Wilhelm Reich, and Hellmuth Kaiser. In this framework, overthinking is not a cognitive error or a bad habit. It is a characteristic mode of attention. Shapiro described it precisely: certain people organize their entire experience through a narrow, effortful, sharply focused mode of attention that filters out the softer, more diffuse signals of feeling, intuition, and spontaneity. The result is a person who is always thinking about their experience but rarely having it.
This pattern has a history. It usually forms in response to an environment where feelings were not safe. Maybe the feelings were too much for the family. Maybe they were met with criticism, dismissal, or anxiety. Maybe the child learned that the way to stay in control, to be good, to be safe, was to live in their head. Thinking became the place where everything got managed. And it worked, for a time. The problem is that it keeps running long after it needs to, producing the exhausting loop that brought you here.
In sessions, I pay attention to the pattern as it happens. The moment you start analyzing instead of feeling. The way you report an emotional experience from a distance, as if narrating someone else's life. The subtle shift from being in the room with me to being in your head about the room. I point out the shift, not to stop the thinking, but to make it visible as a move. When you can see it as a move rather than just the way your mind works, it starts to lose its grip. And when the feelings underneath can finally be felt, the mind does not need to run anymore.
I am a therapist, not a doctor. This is talk therapy, not medical treatment. Sessions are 60 minutes over secure video. Before your first session, we have a brief 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
Frequently asked questions
Related
Contact Aaron
You do not have to be ready. You do not have to know what to say. A few sentences is enough.