Overthinking, also known as rumination, is the tendency to repetitively think about the causes, consequences, and symptoms of one’s negative emotions. It involves getting stuck in a vicious cycle of negative thoughts and obsessing over upsetting events. Many people are prone to overanalyzing situations, rehashing conversations, and worrying excessively. While overthinking can be a sign of anxiety disorders, it is also common amongst the general population. But can obsessive negative thinking actually make you sick? Let’s explore the evidence behind how overthinking affects both your mental and physical health.
What is overthinking?
Overthinking refers to excessive, repetitive thoughts about upsetting events, emotions, or experiences. It often involves:
- Rehashing conversations or events over and over
- Obsessing about what you could have said or done differently
- Worrying excessively about the future
- Ruminating on the causes, meanings, and consequences of a situation
- Focusing on negative emotions like guilt, shame, sadness, or fear
Overthinking tends to be self-critical in nature, with people negatively judging their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It can be driven by a desire to perfectly analyze a situation in order to avoid future mistakes or problems. However, overthinking often becomes unproductive rumination where the same concepts are revisited without gaining new insight.
Overthinking is related to but distinct from negative moods like anxiety and depression. Many mental health conditions involve thought patterns characterized by chronic overthinking. However, people without clinical disorders also commonly ruminate, especially when they feel stressed, upset, or threatened in some way.
Signs of overthinking
How can you tell if you are overthinking or ruminating? Here are some common signs and patterns:
- Repetitive negative thoughts: You keep having the same pessimistic thoughts about a topic over and over.
- Unproductive worry: You obsess about things you can’t control and unlikely worst-case scenarios.
- Rehashing conversations: You compulsively analyze every detail of interactions and wish you acted differently.
- Self-criticism: You constantly second-guess your actions and berate yourself over “mistakes.”
- Preoccupation with the future: You spend more time worrying about what might happen than staying present.
- Feeling stuck: You want to stop thinking about something but feel unable to let it go.
- Seeking reassurance: You repeatedly discuss the same issue with others to get consolation.
- Inability to relax: Your mind feels too busy to settle or enjoy leisure activities.
Overthinkers tend to feel constantly on-edge, tense, or mentally exhausted from their minds being overactive. Their mood is often more negative, critical, pessimistic and anxious. The inability to “turn off thoughts” can make relaxation difficult. Ongoing rumination interferes with enjoying the present moment fully. It can drain mental energy that could be better spent on productive thinking and activities.
Negative effects of overthinking
So what impact does excessive worrying and dwelling have, beyond just being annoying? Science suggests that chronic overthinking can take both a mental and physical toll. Some potential effects include:
Mental health effects
- Increased stress and anxiety
- Low mood and depression
- Poor sleep
- Low self-esteem
- Difficulty concentrating
- Social isolation
The act of overthinking tends to exacerbate many mental health symptoms. Dwelling on negatives can heighten feelings of fear, sadness, anger, guilt, or shame. People may avoid social situations to prevent further “mistakes” to ruminate on later. Blaming themselves for perceived flaws can demolish self-confidence. Preoccupation with gloomy thoughts also makes it harder to live in the present or recall positive experiences.
Physical health effects
- Headaches
- Digestive issues
- Tight muscles and body aches
- Changes in appetite
- High blood pressure
- Weakened immune system
- Increased inflammation
Studies indicate that stressing over problems can produce measurable bodily changes. Dwelling on negative thoughts activates the body’s physiological stress response, flooding the system with adrenaline, cortisol, and other hormones. This can disrupt processes like digestion, metabolism, and sleep. Prolonged, the stress reaction takes a toll through wear and tear on the body and brain.
How overthinking impacts health
Let’s explore some of the specific mechanisms by which overthinking may harm both mental and physical wellbeing:
Increased stress response
Ruminating about upsetting thoughts or events activates the body’s sympathetic nervous system. This triggers the “fight or flight” stress response which involves:
- Increased heart rate and blood pressure
- Faster breathing
- Tensing of muscles
- Release of cortisol, adrenaline, and glucose into the bloodstream
This reaction evolved to help us respond to immediate physical threats. But excessive worrying can continually stimulate the stress pathways, keeping the body perpetually on high alert. Chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system leads to wear and tear on the cardiovascular, immune, and gastrointestinal systems.
Increased inflammation
Stress hormones and neurotransmitters released while overthinking can trigger low-grade inflammation in the body. This involves the immune system’s inflammatory response which is useful for fighting infection in the short-term. But ongoing inflammation can damage healthy cells and tissues, increasing risk for various illnesses. Studies link rumination and worry to cellular markers of inflammation like C-reactive protein.
Impaired sleep
The sympathetic nervous system is supposed to calm down while we sleep, allowing the parasympathetic system to become dominant. This lowers blood pressure and heart rate to help the body fully relax and recharge. But spending the evening overthinking can make it hard to unwind mentally. Insufficient sleep then further strains physical and mental health. Tossing, turning, and reduced sleep quality increase bodily inflammation and impair tissue repair and memory consolidation.
Unhealthy habits
People who ruminate frequently often develop unhealthy coping habits that provide momentary relief at a physical cost. Emotional overeating, cigarette smoking, drug use, and alcohol abuse can all stem from using substances to self-medicate against obsessive pessimistic thoughts. But these behaviors obviously damage health in the long run via added weight gain, toxicity, or dependency.
Inability to concentrate
Overthinking often involves drifting attention inward towards negative obsessive reflection. But this acts against the brain’s limited attentional capability. People trapped in rumination struggle to fully concentrate on work, relationships, academics, or self-care. Unfinished tasks and weakened focus compound mental stress while also limiting productivity and progress.
Neglected health needs
Those lost in overthinking may neglect tending to their physical, mental, emotional, and social needs. They exhibit deficits in:
- Self-care like nutrition, exercise, and sleep hygiene
- Stress management skills and relaxation techniques
- Seeking treatment for medical or psychological symptoms
- Taking prescribed medications properly
- Investing time in rejuvenating leisure and social activities
Allowing health foundations to erode can accelerate the decline from any illness, injury, or disorder already present. For example, an anxious diabetic who forgets to eat or inject insulin while ruminating intensively could end up hospitalized.
Depleted willpower
Resisting urges, focusing attention, and making difficult decisions all draw upon a limited resource called willpower. Self-control helps us regulate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors for optimal functioning. But just like a muscle, our willpower becomes fatigued after excessive exertion. Overthinking is mentally taxing and can become uncontrollable without intention. Those already drained from rumination will struggle to then make healthy choices and avoid detrimental impulses.
Overthinking disorder?
While overthinking itself is not considered a distinct mental illness, it does contribute to many psychiatric conditions like:
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Obsessive compulsive disorder
- Depression
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Eating disorders
- Addictions
Rumination and worry are core features of generalized anxiety disorder. Patients suffer from tension, panic attacks, insomnia, trouble concentrating, and somatic symptoms like muscle tension. OCD also centers on an uncontrollable cycle of obsessive thoughts followed by compulsive behaviors to temporarily reduce anxiety. Similar patterns occur in other disorders where overthinking and its effects become extremely disabling.
But psychiatric researchers have explored classifying a “rumination syndrome” as a separate condition. Proposed diagnostic criteria include:
- Recurrent, repetitive thinking about negative topics
- An uncontrollable and persistently present focus on dysphoric thoughts
- Difficulty redirecting attention away from ruminative content
- Subjective distress from excessive thinking and sense of loss of control
Though not an officially recognized diagnosis in psychiatric manuals yet, many clinicians treat chronic overthinking as its own hindering phenomenon. Viewing rumination as the core problem can help patients better understand and manage their ingrained thought patterns.
Treatments for overthinking
Whether considered its own ailment or a major factor in other mental illnesses, rumination needs direct intervention. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is commonly used to treat anxiety, depression, and obsessive thinking. Techniques aim to break the self-perpetuating cycle of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Key approaches include:
- Cognitive restructuring: Identifying distorted thinking patterns like catastrophizing or black-and-white thinking that intensify rumination; consciously shifting perspective.
- Mindfulness: Practicing present-moment focus; allowing thoughts to pass without judgment or reaction.
- Distraction: Diverting attention towards external stimuli like exercise, music, conversation, etc.; limiting time spent dwelling.
- Relaxation: Pairing tools like controlled breathing, visualization, yoga, or progressive muscle relaxation with triggers for rumination.
- Problem-solving: Breaking worrying topics into specific manageable action steps.
Medications like antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are also used to relieve distressing symptoms and side effects. Those with clinical diagnoses like OCD, PTSD or depression may benefit from medication combined with therapy to decrease obsessive overthinking.
Self-help techniques allow those prone to rumination to personally work to change thought patterns. Useful strategies include:
- Keeping a thought journal to identify rumination triggers
- Listing repetitive thinking topics then limiting time focused on each
- Labeling thoughts as unproductive “mind chatter”
- Going for a walk, listening to upbeat music or calling a friend when ruminating
- Repeating a mantra like “Let it go” when stuck in negative thought loops
Combining professional treatment, lifestyle changes, and self-help tools allows overthinkers to reclaim mental energy wasted on excessive worrying. Redirecting the mind towards positive intentions, forward action, and the present moment can improve both mental and physical health.
Healthy thinking habits
Making fundamental shifts in thinking patterns is key to overcoming rumination challenges long-term. Helpful habits for healthier thoughts include:
- Mindfulness meditation: Focusing fully on the present; letting judgments and emotions pass by.
- Self-compassion: Treating yourself kindly; recognizing thinking critically comes from wanting to improve.
- Growth mindset: Viewing abilities as flexible; mistakes are learning experiences.
- Gratitude: Regularly reflecting on positives; expressing thanks.
- Optimism: Visualizing and affirming positive outcomes; believing they can be achieved.
- Meaning and purpose: Pursuing meaningful activities and goals; reminding yourself of values.
Establishing thinking habits centered on hope, learning, and purpose can help “crowd out” pessimistic rumination over time. Mental and emotional health improves when thinking builds you up rather than tears you down. Combining therapy, meditation, journaling, and training aids this cognitive shift.
When to seek help
Occasional overthinking and worrying is a common experience, especially during times of stress. But if relentless negative thoughts are:
- Consuming large amounts of time and attention
- Causing significant distress
- Interfering with work, relationships, health
- Feeling uncontrollable despite efforts to stop
…then it may be time to seek professional support. A psychologist or counselor can provide objective feedback about whether your thought patterns are excessive. They can also help determine if anxiety, OCD, depression, or trauma are fueling chronic rumination.
Cognitive behavioral therapy with a licensed professional gives long-term aid in identifying and breaking habitual thought loops. Improving mental health through counseling provides physical benefits too by lessening the impacts of stress.
The mind-body connection
Rumination provides an excellent example of the intimate connections between the mind and body. Obsessive worrying is clearly a mental habit rooted in cognitive patterns. But as we’ve discussed, it also has physiological effects by activating the body’s stress systems. This places overthinking squarely at an intersection between physical and mental health.
The bidirectional relationship means that reducing rumination and other negative thought habits aids both the mind and body. As mental health improves, so does physical wellbeing. With support, we can all learn to short-circuit unproductive trains of thought and spend more time in healthy present-moment focus.
Conclusion
Overthinking refers to excessive rumination on negative thoughts, which is extremely common. Though not a standalone psychiatric disorder, obsessive worrying plays into many mental illnesses. The psychological discomfort of being unable to control anxious thoughts takes a physical toll by continuously activating the body’s stress response.
Research confirms that people who regularly ruminate often suffer more headaches, digestive issues, disrupted sleep, and long-term inflammation. Concentrating so much on hypothetical problems also detracts from self-care and reality. Fortunately, treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and medication can all help reduce repetitive thinking.
Learning to catch and let go of pessimistic thought loops improves mental health and physical wellbeing. Take steps to manage overthinking before it manages you. The mind-body connection shows that reprogramming thoughts to be more present, positive, and purposeful benefits the whole self.