Analyzing is just part of who I am, part of my chemical make-up. I was born a natural worrier and planner and with that comes excessive thinking, nitpicking, and anxiety. I am the type that finds pleasure in taking personality quizzes or breaking down a situation and figuring out the subtextual context each person was thinking about. But is all this planning and thinking harmful? At what point do I tell myself to stop, and at what point do I actually stop?
Let’s start with the bad. First of all because it is so easy and because that is what most people focus on when they think of obsessive behavior. So yes, “over-thinking” is bad. It causes anxiety which causes a slew of medical conditions (such as high blood-pressure, weight troubles, depression, etc.). Anxiety is felt because the person doing so is often making up hypothetical situations which they can control, but in reality those situations do not play out. Or the situations they create mentally are ones that are out of their control, thus they compensate in reality by controlling things in their own grasp. The best way to describe this is that there are two different worlds in which someone who over-thinks lives: reality and the hypothetical world. Sometimes though reality can seem less “real” than the hypothetical world in which the person operates in.
Now after that…the benefits. I would not like to condone over-analysing to the point of mental exhaustion, but thinking things over once of twice is actually a good thing. I think that people who over-think have the romantic ideal to be more spontaneous and care-free is to be perfectly happy. It’s good to let go once in a while, but having the conscious mind to think things over before you have to make a decision is a blessing. A lot of people don’t have that quality. Amongst my friends, I’m always the one that looks at a situation with a critical eye before making a decision. It has saved us a few headaches.
Thinking is okay it’s human, but don’t let it lead you down the pathway to over-analysing where anxiety and helplessness are just around the corner. Use your natural ability and discretion to analyze a situation to be beneficial rather than self-destructive.
