As I have said elsewhere, I am a Dana K White super-fan. By my count, she has three podcasts with the word “overthinking” in the title. (I’ve listened to all three of them! Probably multiple times! They are great!)
But for my personality, and how I work, overthinking isn’t the right word. Personally, I have more of a “the only way out is through” attitude towards thinking.
I do realize that it’s possible to get stuck thinking that the best way to get new information is to keep thinking, when in fact acting would give me way more information.1 For me, it has been super important to realize when it’s time to get moving.
But even in those cases, where I have estimated that my theorizing is probably bottlenecked on the sort of information that I’m unlikely to get except by acting, I wouldn’t want to call what I was doing “overthinking”. I started this post by writing that there were two main reasons, but then I started writing them up and realized that two was an underestimate! So the rest of the post will be about the four reasons I thought of today that I don’t relate to the word “overthinking”, (even when sometimes I am “underacting”).
Chances are, even when I’m acting, I’m still going to be thinking a lot!
For much of my life, people told me I was overthinking things. I heard this if I were having trouble learning a dance step. “Stop thinking so hard! It’s interfering!” I heard that when I was trying to figure out difficult social situations “I think you’re overthinking it!”
And according to my hindsight, in literally all of the situations where people were telling me I was overthinking, I was missing key concepts, and learning them was the key to making progress, not thinking less. I cannot remember a single time when thinking less was a key component in solving my problem.
Furthermore, I eventually realized that people’s advice that hadn’t worked for me had also given me a wrong impression that if I were acting fluently, I wouldn’t also be thinking a bunch at the same time. And for me, anyway, that’s not true!
Eventually it clicked with that despite what I thought people had been trying to tell me, I could think about whatever I wanted as I was doing what I was doing. Sometimes, I would be thinking about the details of what I was doing. Sometimes, I would be thinking about something entirely different. But either way, my thoughts were still chugging along as usual.
And I feel sort of silly bringing this up in the context of decluttering, since it’s maybe a little far afield from the more obviously helpful advice, even, which is that taking action is often the bottleneck! But for me something like this did used to be an issue, and something has felt important to me about mentioning it.
After I take action, I’m going to go back and incorporate what I learned into my theories.
Maybe not literally every time? But almost always. If something works for me that I didn’t expect to work, it’s very unlikely I that I will be content to say “Huh. That worked! I don’t know why, but I’m going to keep doing it.”
I will say those sentences to myself, and they will almost certainly be followed by “And I wonder how it worked? When would it work and when would it not work? What implications does this have for others things I’m doing and my theories of when those things are likely to work.”
Not everyone has a very strong drive to make sense of things, but I do! And I’m okay with that. It’s a personality trait of mine makes some things harder, but it makes some things easier, too. And I wouldn’t change it about myself if I could.
If someone had told me what I needed to know, that probably would have worked for me too—after I had thought about it.
I am pretty good at learning things by hearing abstract explanations and thinking about them. Some people don’t prefer to learn that way—they would much rather watch someone in action, or try things for themselves, or see representations of the thing they are trying to understand in a bunch of modalities. Or hang out with a bunch of people who already know something and absorb it even without intentionally observing them.
And I do those things too! But when I’m seeking information, the form I’d usually pick when I get to choose is an abstract explanation. Sometimes with examples so that I can better understand the abstraction, especially if I’m having trouble at first. And then, I’ll turn the the abstraction around and around in my mind until I really get it. Maybe I’ll talk to people about it. I’ll think about it. Often more than seems reasonable to other people.
Once I’ve done all that, I can usually put what I’ve learned into practice. Usually awkwardly at first, but I can bootstrap from there, but if the concepts were really right and I successfully understood them, then I have a pretty high hit rate of being able to actually do the thing.
So, that’s another reason I don’t identify with the word “overthinking”.
Sometimes I’m unwilling to solve my problem unless I can also understand how it got solved.
This might sound absurd to many people, but it’s often true. If I imagine a challenge in my life (e.g. “I’m spending so much time picking up toys, and my house is still messy all the time”, “my kid isn’t fully potty trained despite all the things I’ve tried”, “my dog won’t come when I call when we’re in a large field”), and I imagine a magic button that solves my (supposed?) problem, but I didn't get to know anything about how it got solved, even after the fact, I would often wouldn't push the button.2
Frequently, I care more about the knowledge I would gain from solving the problem than I do about the convenience of having solved it. And maybe that’s perverse of me, or immature, but it’s true. So it almost never works for me to work with teachers and coaches who want me to practice their method without a lot of talking about why it works.
In conclusion,
I like thinking. I almost never want to do it less, and my life experience has been that I don’t need to think less to solve my problems.
Instead, it helps when I:
Think more, and better. Often by explicitly setting aside time for it and talking things through with at friend.
Remember to also act when it’s time to act, in part because it gives me fodder for yet more thinking (which in my experience enables yet more action).
Seek out the best perspectives, models, and concepts, so I my thinking can get where it needs to go faster.
I seem to remember hearing that this was the fundamental mistake Myers Briggs perceivers tended to make when relating to the world, though so far a quick internet search didn’t turn up anything about that.
There are times when I would, of course. When people I care about are sick or hurt, I would press all the buttons so that they got better, even if I had no idea how it happened. When my car has issues, I would press the button, which is pretty close to what I do anyway, since I know very little about how cars work, and I’m okay with that.