Overthinking & Rumination: When Your Mind Keeps Trying to Protect You
You send a message and there is no reply.
Within minutes your mind starts working.
Did I say something wrong? Are they upset with me? Should I have said it differently? What can I do now?
Or perhaps you replay a conversation from earlier in the day.
Why did they say that? Why do I always overreact? What should I have said instead?
This is overthinking.
And very often it is not because you enjoy thinking so much.
It is because your mind is trying to protect you.
Your nervous system does not like discomfort, uncertainty or the feeling that something is not quite right. So, your mind steps in and tries to gain control by thinking through every detail.
It goes back over what happened. It analyses the words, the expressions and the silences. It wonders what you could have done differently and what you can do now to make the situation feel better.
Almost as though it is saying:
If I can understand every uncomfortable part of this, perhaps I can remove the thorns that are poking me.
Thinking then becomes a way of trying to control the situation and reduce the discomfort you are feeling.
The problem is that the mind rarely knows when to stop.
What begins as problem-solving can turn into rumination. You keep circling the same thoughts because somewhere inside you believe that if you think hard enough you will finally understand what happened, fix it and feel better.
When a toxic relationship keeps you thinking
This can become especially painful in a toxic or narcissistic relationship.
Behaviours such as gaslighting, mixed messages, blame-shifting, silence, moving goalposts or repeatedly creating a problem without genuinely resolving it can leave you endlessly trying to work out what went wrong. You are like a hamster on a wheel that never stops.
You keep trying to fix the problem, but sometimes the other person was never participating in the relationship with the same intention of mutual understanding and resolution that you were.
Knowing that nugget of truth about your relationship, changes everything.
You may spend enormous amounts of emotional energy trying to solve something that was never being offered to you as a problem to genuinely solve. The confusion itself was meant to keep you emotionally occupied and your nervous system constantly activated and exhausted.
This scenario rarely stays contained within the relationship.
You may struggle to concentrate at work, sleep properly, be present with your children or friends and make ordinary decisions because so much of your mental energy is being consumed by trying to understand the (toxic) relationship.
You cannot simply think your way out of a toxic relationship.
You have to understand its mechanics. Know what makes that individual tick.
When you begin recognising the patterns and seeing what is actually happening rather than continually asking what you did wrong, something begins to shift.
Your attention starts returning to you.
Your nervous system can begin to settle.
You stop trying to control the other person's behaviour and begin regaining control of yourself.
But what are you actually trying to control?
Usually, it is not only the situation.
It is the feeling the situation has created inside you.
Maybe you are afraid of rejection. Perhaps you hate disappointing people. Maybe uncertainty makes you anxious or someone being upset with you immediately makes you feel that you have done something wrong.
These reactions often come from the emotional expectations and beliefs we developed much earlier in life.
I call this your Identified Reality™.
It is the reality you have learned to identify as true because of your past experiences, conditioning and survival patterns.
Someone not replying may simply mean they are busy.
But your Identified Reality™ may say:
They are pulling away. I must have done something wrong.
And once your mind believes that story, it starts trying to fix it.
So, what can you do?
Ask yourself these questions:
What am I trying to make better right now?
What do I actually know and what has my fear added to the story?
Notice whether you are genuinely solving something or simply looping around the same mental circle again.
Give yourself time before reacting. Breathe slowly. Walk. Move your body. Let the discomfort exist for a little while without immediately trying to solve it.
You do not have to remove every thorn the moment you feel it.
Sometimes the deeper work is learning that you can feel discomfort and still be safe.
This is part of the work I explore through my trademarked IRIS Technique™, the Identified Reality Inversion System. The IRIS Technique™ helps uncover the fear-based reality underneath an emotional pattern and helps you recognise the evidence, strengths and inner resources that the old story has hidden from you.
Overthinking is not always a thinking problem.
It is a protection strategy by your mind.
Sometimes it is also the aftermath of spending far too long trying to make sense of something that was designed to keep you confused.
Healing begins when you stop asking your mind to solve everything and begin seeing the pattern clearly.
The situation may still be uncertain. Someone else may still behave in ways you cannot control.
But you can begin to reclaim your clarity, your nervous system, your choices and yourself.
And perhaps that is the control in the thinking you were searching for all along.
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