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 rumination, and looking ahead worry. One replays, the other rehearses. They came from separate fields of research and were rarely studied together. In 2008 Edward Watkins at the University of Exeter set them side by side as two forms of one thing, which he called repetitive thought.

The review found repetitive thought linked to harm and to benefit. On the harmful side: depression, anxiety and poorer physical health. On the helpful side: 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 notice while it is happening. In our own words, abstract sounds like the first pair below, and concrete like the second.

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

The six dimensions, and what each measure predicted

Insight, the sense of understanding our own thoughts and feelings, was the only measure that went with higher scores on all six. It was also the only positive predictor of life satisfaction.

Rumination went with lower scores on three of the six: autonomy, environmental mastery and self-acceptance. A separate self-reflection measure went with higher scores on one, personal growth.

People who ruminated more tended to score lower on 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.

The answers fell into two habits. 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, who did not know which group each person was in, scored each description from abstract (vague) to concrete (specific).

The 11 people with the diagnosis, who were in therapy, described their worries less concretely than 23 people without it. After 14 weeks of therapy, their descriptions had caught up. The people whose worry eased most tended to become the most concrete, though the study was too small to be sure of that pattern.

The researchers read it this way: a worry we can’t quite picture stirs up less of the fear, so it is easier to keep going back to. A vague worry 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 the reflection tool on this site.

• 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. The consequences they listed were equally concrete in both groups.
• Watkins drew together other studies. His three principles are offered as likely explanations, not settled ones.

Every time through carries a promise: one more and it will settle. One reading, and it is ours: looking back, it does not settle because what we are searching for may not be in the memory at all. The missing piece can be a feeling we had in the room rather than a line we failed to deliver.

Looking ahead, the promise is preparation. A rehearsal that stays vague has little to prepare for.

1. Writing the moment down once, in the words it happened in. Writing it down counted as reflection in the year-long study.
2. Noticing which kind of loop it is. Going over what we should have said is a different loop from asking what is wrong with us, and each calls for its own question.
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 by going over it again.

Try the Overthinking reflection

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

Master Dhyan VimalScience of Transformation