Overthinking - My Experience With It

Introduction

Over thinking as the name suggests is a process of thinking continuously about something. That ‘something’ could be about a situation of past or a tension of coming future. The thinking happens in such a way that it makes the person to be preoccupied in the thoughts making him psychologically away from the real world around him.

Why it happens?

It happens to many people in the world but it affects the most to introverts. Introverts in my views are the people who do have so many thoughts about everything but they don’t share it with others. This might be because they feel that their view may not be respected by the other person.

Lack of sharing thoughts with others makes the mind to generate one sided opinions which disturbs the mind in such a way that it stops logical thinking. More than that over the board thinking leads to no benefitted conclusion other than creating a mound of negative thoughts in the mind.

My Experience

I am an over thinker and introvert person. I have my opinion on about everything. I am in sophomore year of engineering. It takes me 45 minutes to reach college by bus. In that 90 minutes duration I used to think about every possible thing starting from my past situations to coming future. From each and every word of mine that might had hurt somebody and used to feel guilty about it . This happened to me for a whole year. All those crap thoughts made me to live in a small world of my own which had a lot of negativity in it. I realized that over thinking happens more when you are thinking about self i.e. when you are concerned about what happened to you, why it happened, by whom and what might me consequences of it. So it’s all about ‘YOU’.

How to control it?

It is rightly said that if you know your true problem then you also know its solution. When I realized my problem of negative thinking is because of over thinking I searched for its solution. The basic solution I found was to keep myself indulge in something that it didn't allow me to think about self. I started reading. Habit of reading not only helped me to control over thinking but also gave me a lot of knowledge about new things.

Reading is my way of distracting self from continuously thinking about something and other people might do something else of their choice but the main thing is that distraction from the process of over thinking is what the key to control it or stop it. If you are able to distract yourself from process of continuously thinking about one thing then you can easily control it.