When does thinking it through become overthinking?

A conversation ends. The other person moves on. We do not. The mind returns to the moment and runs it again, looking for the line we should have said, or the tone we should have caught.

Or it runs the other way. Tomorrow’s meeting, played out ten different ways before it has started.

It is rarely the whole conversation. It is a few seconds of it, at the traffic light, in the shower, at 2am.

Researchers call looking back this way rumination, and looking ahead this way worry. One replays, the other rehearses. They grew up in separate fields of research and were rarely looked at together, until Edward Watkins at the University of Exeter set them side by side in 2008 as two forms of the same thing: repetitive thought.

The review found repetitive thought on both sides of the ledger. On the harmful side sat depression, anxiety and poorer physical health. On the helpful side sat recovering from upsetting events, planning ahead, recovering from depression, and taking up healthier habits.

It named three things that seem to shape which way it goes: whether the thoughts are negative or positive, the situation the thinking happens in, and how abstract or concrete it is.

The third is the one we can catch while it is happening. In our words, the difference sounds like this.

Harrington and Loffredo measured several forms of self-focused attention in 121 university students, mostly women, with an average age of 31, and compared them against six dimensions of psychological wellbeing and against life satisfaction.

The six dimensions, and what each measure predicted

In one study, insight, the sense of understanding our own thoughts and feelings, was the only measure that positively predicted all six. It was also the only positive predictor of life satisfaction.

Rumination predicted three of the six negatively: autonomy, environmental mastery and self-acceptance. A separate reflection measure predicted one, personal growth.

People who ruminated more tended to score lower on three of them: acting from their own standards, managing daily life, and accepting themselves.

Treynor, Gonzalez and Nolen-Hoeksema interviewed a random sample of adults around San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, then again a year later. At the start, 1,328 people said what they tend to do when they feel down. A year on, 1,130 of them were measured again.

Two habits separated out. Brooding sounded like wishing a recent situation had gone better, or asking why we can’t handle things better. Reflection sounded like going off alone to think it through, or writing down what we are thinking and analyzing it.

Brooding went with more depressive symptoms, both at the time and a year later. Reflection went with slightly more symptoms at the time and slightly fewer a year later. The authors read that as reflection perhaps being hard in the short run and useful over time.

Stöber and Borkovec asked people diagnosed with generalized anxiety to describe the two problems they worried about most. Two raters, blind to who wrote what, scored each one from abstract to concrete.

The 11 clients described their worries less concretely than 23 people without the diagnosis. After 14 weeks of therapy, their descriptions had caught up. The clients whose worry eased most tended to become the most concrete, though that trend fell short of statistical significance.

The researchers read it this way: a worry we can’t quite picture brings up less of the fear, which makes it easier to keep. It is also harder to test against anything real, and harder to solve. A worry about failing next week’s exam can be checked. A worry about being a failure can’t.

None of these studies tested Conscious Living.

• Harrington and Loffredo measured 121 students once, by self-report. It shows which measures travel together, not that insight causes wellbeing.
• Treynor and colleagues also relied on self-report. The link with reflection is small, and each habit was measured by five questions.
• Stöber and Borkovec studied 11 clients and called their findings preliminary. The difference showed up in how people described their worries, not in the consequences they listed, which were equally concrete in both groups.
• Watkins drew together other studies. His three principles are offered as likely explanations, not settled ones.

Every pass carries a promise: one more and it will resolve. Looking back, it does not resolve, because what we are searching for is usually not in the memory. The missing piece is often a feeling we had in the room, not a line we failed to deliver.

Looking ahead, the promise is preparation. A rehearsal that never gets specific has nothing to prepare for.

1. Writing the moment down once, in the words it happened in, so the mind stops holding it.
2. Naming the shape the loop takes. Going over what we should have said is a different shape from auditing ourselves, and they call for different questions.
3. For a worry, picturing it plainly. Who is there, what gets said, what could go wrong first.
4. Asking what we are hoping to find in there.

Try the Overthinking inquiry

“You are meeting what is, not lost to what is.”

Dhyan Vimal, Science of Transformation