Have you ever wondered why you overthink?
Anxious thoughts zing through your mind, your heart beats so hard it feels like it could escape, and your air comes fast and shallow. All the while, you feel yourself sweating, your mind’s out of control, your stomach’s a mess, and you have no ability to steer your own thoughts.
After, when you’ve finally calmed down, you ask yourself: why do I do that? What’s wrong with me that my mind always goes to the worst possibilities? Why can’t I connect with the pervasive idea that I “should” just think positive?
This self-blame is a normal response to intense anxiety, and while I validate your feeling, I want to challenge it by pointing out that your body is responding to what it feels is a significant danger. Your anxiety is part of a natural body process that–perhaps misguidedly–aims to keep you safe in the way it knows how.
This system is called the polyvagal nerve. Your polyvagal nerve spans from the base of your skull all the way down to your tailbone, which is a significant portion of your body! The polyvagal nerve has the important task of sensing danger, and part of that involves remembering (and reminding you!) of past dangers and anticipating future dangers. When the polyvagal nerve is in charge, it runs the show by taking you physically to a totally new state of mind. Because remember, your mind is a part of your body, and as long as your brain remains in your head, where it should be, it is subject to your physical systems! To begin to understand these systems, keep reading.
At the beginning of this blog post, I described some common feelings a person may have when their polyvagal nerve becomes active. The polyvagal nerve has, at that point, alerted to the possibility of danger, and it then begins anticipating new dangerous scenarios and reminding you of past scenarios. Your racing thoughts are a symptom that your body is trying to keep you safe by rerouting your energy from the daily processes of digestion, immune response, and resting heart rate, to adrenaline, fight or flight, and a speedy heart rate. For anxiety, the parallel emotion is anger, which is why anxiety is commonly associated with irritability, which allows the person to move towards and defend themself from the threat.
When you realize that the danger cannot be handled with fight or flight, you may move from “fight or flight” to “freeze/shut down,” which is where people experience a sense of defeat. “I can’t handle this, I may as well give up,” is a common feeling in this stage, when the body slows down and begins storing energy. My favorite example for this stage is an opossum playing dead, because that’s how it feels! The life threat is so dangerous that the only choice is to lay down and pretend that you aren’t there.
At this point, you may be relating to some of this, but still asking yourself–are my reasons for becoming anxious or depressed valid? Let’s sit with how invalidating that question is for a moment. If you did ask that question, don’t worry; it’s a very human response! One of the first things we do is deny, minimize, and avoid stressors and trauma. “Other people have had it worse” is the shield we hold up to protect ourselves from our true feelings, which acknowledge the actual difficulties we face! We often believe the seductive lie that if we can dismiss, avoid, deny, and minimize our difficulties, they’ll go away. Unfortunately, what really ends up happening is that we take away our own opportunity to feel the truth of being a human being: life can be incredibly difficult and hurtful, and sometimes we are going to have to take the time to seek support from others and ourselves, so we can heal. And that is okay to do! In fact, it is smart, healthy, and responsible.
As human beings, social connection is incredibly important. If a child goes to join their peers and watches them walk away, that experience of rejection can put them quickly into the red zone, where they may feel a mixture of confusion and shame: “Why am I not good enough?” At the same time, they may think, “Well, other kids face worse bullying, so I shouldn’t complain.”
When I hear thoughts like these, I always think of a strange example: imagine a hypothetical car accident. Two pedestrians are hit by a speeding car. Sadly, only one survives, and so, because the car accident was fatal for one person, paramedics decide that the other pedestrian who sustained a broken leg has it much easier and should thus “just deal with it” by themselves and not receive medical attention.
Does that sound utterly ludicrous to you? Yet, it is the lie we tell ourselves about caring for our mental health. So, remember to challenge those self-blaming thoughts, because you deserve to be able to feel your emotions and hold space for the alerts you naturally receive through your polyvagal nerve.
Circling back to the original topic–why we overthink–I want to give a clear-cut answer: we overthink because once upon a time, it was adaptive for us human beings to do so. Our ancestors had to overthink to survive a world that did not have readily available food, shelter, and safety. In the past, we had to band together to survive, we had to be continuously on our toes, and if we weren’t ready to quickly deal with danger, we could die.
What’s more than that, overthinking can still feel like it helps us now; overthinking gives us a semblance of control and power. If we are able to think through all the things that could go wrong, maybe we can prevent them. Often times, this is impossible because there is no way to foresee every single thing, but sometimes overthinking may actually serve you in that manner by reducing feelings of helplessness. Of course, there are far more effective and adaptive ways to handle these situations, but nonetheless there are both historical and present-day reasons for overthinking.
In other words, your body overthinks as a way of helping you, a mechanism that is no longer adaptable in our fast-moving, ever-changing world. There are excellent solutions for desensitization and controlling overthinking in therapy: CBT, EMDR, DBT, and on and on, but before you even plunge into that journey, I have a challenge for you to try.
Say these words: I overthink because it’s my body’s way of trying to protect me, and that is not a character flaw of mine. It is no longer useful, and I deserve to move forward without shaming myself for my past, especially things outside my control.
Resource:
Kase, R. (2023). Polyvagal-informed EMDR: A neuro-informed approach to healing. W. W. Norton & Company. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324030317