Overthinking 101 - Your Thoughts Aren’t Always Facts
- Sarah Cosway
- Feb 16, 2022
- 9 min read
Updated: May 25
The first in an 11-part series on the thinking habits that fuel anxiety and overthinking
Table of Contents
Overthinking Starts Here. What’s Really Going on Inside the Thought Factory?
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by your thoughts or got stuck inside your head in a cycle of overthinking, you might start to wonder:
"Why does my brain torment me like this?"
Our minds are thought-generating machines, churning out a stream of mental chatter and generating an estimated 60,000 thoughts per day.
That's a lot of action going on in our overthinking minds!
We can experience this 'noise in our heads' in different ways:
Some people notice thoughts as inner monologues with opinions on anything and everything, including themselves. These monologues comment about everything as they go about their daily business. It's a bit like having a personal narrator following you around, narrating your every move;
Other people perceive thoughts as pictures - these images can be positive and inspiring, but sometimes the images can be troubling or scary, especially if they pop into their minds seemingly from nowhere (a classic overthinking trigger for many!).
What Kind of Overthinker Are You?
Regardless of whether you hear a mental voice or see thoughts as vivid mental images, it’s all part of the normal cognitive experience.
But both flavours of thoughts can create mental loops, whether it's a critical inner voice that fuels anxious overthinking and self-doubt, or images that keep replaying stressful or scary scenarios (classic intrusive thoughts that can fuel overthinking).
Our overthinking minds can develop 'favourite' thinking traps or overthinking patterns, such as overgeneralising, catastrophising, or harsh self-criticism.
If you've ever thought to yourself:
" I can't stop overthinking everything"
then you’re not alone.
The good news is that these patterns can be spotted and softened.
Recognising how your mental storylines are showing up when you are overthinking is a first step towards identifying when they might be leading you down an unhelpful mental path.
Are Your Thoughts Facts, or Just Unhelpful Mental Noise?
Our minds are very good at making us believe that our thoughts (especially the negative ones) are factual representations of reality, but in actuality, thoughts are just a product of our brains' activity (i.e., electrical impulses firing across complex neural pathways).
They’re not objective truths somehow downloaded from the universe.
They are simply mental events in our brains, which are shaped by our unique mix of memories, beliefs, and biases.
Psychologists sometimes call these patterns cognitive distortions: automatic habits of thinking that twist reality in sneaky ways (e.g., all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, or catastrophising, being some of the most common culprits behind overthinking).
It is important to learn to see thoughts for what they are: words or pictures conjured up by our brains.
Some are persistent, some are fleeting, some are positive, some are negative, and some are just downright boring.
The truth is that we all experience unhelpful thoughts at times.
They might sound like:
"I always mess things up", or
"What if something terrible happens?"
They often come across as nagging inner critics, predictable worry spirals, or emotional echoes, but just because they're loud, it doesn't necessarily mean they're true.
We can just automatically believe our skewed interpretations, letting them define who we are or what’s true about us.
This is known as overidentifying with our thoughts, and it’s a fast track to feeling anxious, stuck, or emotionally overwhelmed.
It makes it harder to separate passing, unhelpful mental chatter from meaningful truths.
But, alternatively, we can choose to step back and look at our thoughts rather than from our thoughts, allowing us to see them for what they are - fleeting impressions, not absolute truths!
It's a bit like picking up a remote control, we don't have to press play on every thought.
That small shift in perspective can be enough to stop some of the distorted thinking in its tracks...and for the trickier thinking traps, there are specific tools that we can learn that teach us how to deal with negative thoughts more effectively, especially when overthinking has become a habit.
Quick Mental Glossary
A cheat sheet for decoding your inner chatter.
Overthinking | Replaying worries on loop (minus the helpful solutions) |
Unhelpful Thoughts | A mental detour that leads nowhere fast |
Self-Talk | The way you speak to yourself: can be kind, but sometimes quite the opposite |
Cognitive Distortions | Thinking habits that twist reality in sneaky, usually negative, ways |
Mental Chatter | The constant background narration your brain provides: sometimes helpful, often not...and just won't shut up! |
Mental Loop | That one cringe-moment that your brain won't stop watching |
Cognitive Spiral | A single "what if?" that turns into a 3-part mini-series |
Recognising Unhelpful Thinking Patterns and Why It Matters
We all experience difficult periods in our lives because it's part and parcel of the human condition.
It is impossible to live a life without ever experiencing pain and discomfort on some level, whether that's physical or emotional pain.
Our brains try to protect us from emotional pain. But sometimes they can be overzealous and lead us into repetitive mental loops or cognitive 'rabbit holes'.
As a way of coping with distressing situations, our minds can slip into shortcuts (also known as cognitive distortions), which can backfire, giving rise to skewed beliefs and negative thinking traps that take us further and further away from clarity and calm.
They can end up holding us back and making things feel even harder, creating additional layers of suffering on top of our original pain.
These patterns are so common that they have been categorised and given names, and once you learn to recognise these distorted thinking habits, it becomes much easier to challenge them and reduce their grip on your mood.
Naming the unhelpful thinking pattern is a skill in itself, so let’s start meeting the usual suspects and learning how to spot them.
Exploring the 11 Most Common Overthinking Traps and Unhelpful Thinking Habits
This is the first part in a series that will introduce you to the different patterns (also known as cognitive distortions) and help you start recognising when they show up.
Because once you can notice them, you can start to respond to them in ways to reduce the impact of these unhelpful thoughts.!
Hopefully, this will help you to experience challenging situations from a different, and perhaps more helpful, perspective.
In my next post, I'll be introducing you to the "self-critic".
Not that introductions are probably needed, as I suspect you may well already be very familiar with your own!
We all have that voice in our heads that tells us that we're not good enough, but how can we quieten it and start to be kinder to ourselves?
To help you develop your skills in recognising and naming your common thinking habits, check out the other posts in this series.
They will help you to familiarise yourself with your most common cognitive distortions:
Critical Self - the tendency to paint ourselves in the least flattering of lights
Black & White Thinking - the tendency to see things in extremes, with no space for nuance...a situation is either a complete success or a total failure
Overgeneralising - the tendency to take one negative event and extrapolate it to everything
The Mental Filter - the tendency to focus only on the negative aspects of a situation whilst filtering out any positives
Mountains & Molehills - the tendency to magnify negatives and minimise positives
Mind Reading - the tendency to assume that we know what other people are thinking, and usually then assuming it's something negative
Catastrophising - the tendency to assume the worst possible outcome will happen, even in situations where it's not very likely
Shoulds & Musts - the tendency to hold ourselves to unrealistic expectations and rules, that invariably set us up for failure
Judgements & Labelling - the tendency to attach negative labels to ourselves and others based on isolated events
Emotional Reasoning - the tendency to believe that our emotions are an accurate representation of the reality of a situation
This isn't an exhaustive list of unhelpful thinking habits, but it's a really good starting point for raising your awareness of any distorted thinking patterns.
The key part of this, and probably the hardest part of it, is to catch before you overidentify with those thoughts and spiral into unhelpful conclusions.
After all, we can't do something about something if we don't know what that something is!
Once we become skilled at noticing and acknowledging that we are falling into these patterns, then we can start to consciously step back from them and redirect our attention to more helpful perspectives that serve us, rather than holding us back.
Over time, we can start to see challenging situations not as threats but as opportunities; this becomes empowering and, once we stop treating thoughts as facts, we can start moving forwards in a more positive and constructive way that lightens our mental load.
So what kind of overthinker are you?
If you are frequently pulled into spirals of “what ifs” and worst-case scenarios, you might be getting caught up in a thinking trap like catastrophising, and perhaps would identify yourself as a worrier.
These unhelpful spirals can feel really convincing, but they’re not the full story.
When your thought factory is running overtime, there are ways you can learn to reset the controls!
If you’d like to explore how to loosen their grip and find a calmer, more balanced perspective, you can find out how I can help you here.
FAQ: Understanding and Managing Overthinking
What is Overthinking a Symptom of?
Why Do I Overthink Too Much?
How Do I Stop Overthinking at Night?
How Do I Stop Overthinking About Someone or a Relationship?
Is Overthinking Bad for Your Mental Health?
How Do I Stop Negative Overthinking?
Still feeling stuck in your head? You’re not alone, and help is available.
About the author: Sarah Cosway is a BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist with over a decade of experience working in mental health both within the NHS and in private practice. She offers tailored CBT in a compassionate, collaborative environment, empowering clients to build resilience and manage their mental wellbeing with confidence.
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