How do you stop overthinking?

Good morning! First of all I wanted to say that your feelings are your feelings and they are valid. It is not uncommon to overthink things and you are not alone. With overthinking it may have a lot of different factors. When overthinking, it typically can be a part of your own personality and identifying traits within your own personality are important.

Sometimes individuals inherently may overthink because they are planning or preparing for all possible scenarios that could arise. As a result, this may lead to other areas of the day or moment to be impacted because of the overthinking which sounds similar to what you are saying.

Overthinking, at times, can be a blessing and a curse depending on the extent to which it influences your day to day functioning. Digging into the concepts of overthinking involve a broad scope of when, where, what you were feeling and what transpired after. Often being able to itemize and figure out what elements of a situation are consistent amongst different mediums can aid in understanding when overthinking may occur. Engaging in further discussions regarding your personal experiences may allow for the overthinking to be flushed out and traced back to specific instances within your life.

I think one of the biggest first steps is identifying an area of need, and now that you have, it is important to then explore at what times or events the overthinking mostly takes place. Then from there you can start to remember and determine what emotion may be attached to those scenarios that cause being overwhelmed. Allowing for the processing of these steps could be beneficial for you to understand where the overthinking may arise.

Some important questions or thoughts to think about are: "What situations do I see myself overthinking? What happened before hand? What happened as a result of overthinking? What could I have done different?"  

That being said I think discussing this in a session with a therapist to allow for further discussion could be beneficial so that you have a springboard of ideas with someone and allows for clarification of specifics. I would love to further discuss things with you because I think it is important to have that discussion on a deeper more concrete level.