My personal definition of overthinking involves my tendency toward decision paralysis. If I keep analyzing and processing and gathering data, and analyzing the new data and.... then I end up not making a decision, missing the crucial time when all of this analysis would have come into play.
Not making a decision is a decision.
A classic example of me overthinking has to do with trying to get a document exactly, precisely right. I try to cover all the bases, write up each scenario, document the exceptions, research the edge cases. It takes forever. In the meantime, I have not met the need of the 80 percent of the people who need the good-enough 80% document. While I have been trying to build this elaborate thing, I have allowed the core need to go unmet.
Ooh, that's interesting! You know, I wonder if "overthinking" doesn't mean something a bit different to each person, depending on their MB type or some other factor? I'm an extrovert and creative and have quite the imagination, and am very, very social and people-oriented. My "overthinking" is *always* about other people and what they mean/are trying to say/etc.
It's why communication and honesty are a MUST--I can recognize when I'm being dumb and having wild crazy suppositions about things, but if people are less-than-honest with me or don't fess up to feelings or whatever, I go insane. I need honesty because I make enough stuff in my head, hee.
My husband tells me I overthink all the time, and he's an INTJ. ;-)
I, however, am a self-avowed "feeler" (which makes me sound like an alien. O.o) and definitely someone who feels emotions very intensely. If something bothers me, I will feel it pretty quickly. I'm pretty self-aware and have always been fine with that aspect of my personality, so I am pretty quick to figure out what I'm feeling and then analyze why I'm feeling that way. The concept of thinking first and then feeling is not foreign to me, though; I can think about something and change the way I'm feeling about it, but I just naturally experience things first emotionally and then process them. For the most part, that is. There are always exceptions, as with most things.
Overthinking, to me, means assigning motivations to the actions of others, or coming up with scenarios that might happen if you do this or that, or saying, "But if I go to this party and so-and-so is there, we'll talk, and then later, she'll go to so-and-so and tell them this-or-that, and then this
( ... )
to me it's revisiting something over and over where i can't actually do anything about it so the thinking isn't going to lead to anything productive. like if i'm scared that something will happen and i've identified that i'm scared of that thing and i know it but right now there's nothing else productive that i can do but i keep revisiting it like poking my tongue where a tooth is missing....
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then I end up not making a decision, missing the crucial time when all of this analysis would have come into play.
Not making a decision is a decision.
A classic example of me overthinking has to do with trying to get a document exactly, precisely right. I try to cover all the bases, write up each scenario, document the exceptions, research the edge cases. It takes forever. In the meantime, I have not met the need of the 80 percent of the people who need the good-enough 80% document. While I have been trying to build this elaborate thing, I have allowed the core need to go unmet.
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It's why communication and honesty are a MUST--I can recognize when I'm being dumb and having wild crazy suppositions about things, but if people are less-than-honest with me or don't fess up to feelings or whatever, I go insane. I need honesty because I make enough stuff in my head, hee.
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I, however, am a self-avowed "feeler" (which makes me sound like an alien. O.o) and definitely someone who feels emotions very intensely. If something bothers me, I will feel it pretty quickly. I'm pretty self-aware and have always been fine with that aspect of my personality, so I am pretty quick to figure out what I'm feeling and then analyze why I'm feeling that way. The concept of thinking first and then feeling is not foreign to me, though; I can think about something and change the way I'm feeling about it, but I just naturally experience things first emotionally and then process them. For the most part, that is. There are always exceptions, as with most things.
Overthinking, to me, means assigning motivations to the actions of others, or coming up with scenarios that might happen if you do this or that, or saying, "But if I go to this party and so-and-so is there, we'll talk, and then later, she'll go to so-and-so and tell them this-or-that, and then this ( ... )
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Albert Einstein
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Translation: "You are thinking about this past the point where I want you to make a decision."
From A to A: "I'm overthinking."
Translation: "I am thinking about this and it's not getting me anything I want."
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