The Power of Overthinking
By Anya Makkar
Edited by Anna Kate Mereness
Around 73% of young adults overthink worldwide, so when you start to feel alone while overthinking, remember you are not alone.
Overthinking becomes super powerful because people who overthink tend to ruminate and dwell on the things that get into their heads, even if it's something small. An overthinker is going to take it and run with it, meaning they will constantly think over it. Whether it is a conversation that happened yesterday, an overthinker might think, “Should I have said that?” and continue to think back on the conversation and nitpick every single thing that went wrong in their brain or could have gone wrong, when in reality most of the time nothing was wrong, but one can help to overthink.
Of the 73%, it comes in different ways, so nitpicking a conversation might not occur to some people, but they overthink other situations, such as after taking a test, dwelling on the questions they did not understand or thinking over their answers after turning the test in, and continuing to think about every possible answer they could have gotten wrong: what is the lowest grade they can get? If they missed ‘x’ number of questions, could they keep their overall grade or make it better?
Overthinking is common, but the key is to remember that you are not alone and everything will turn out okay in the long run. What I like to remind myself of if I start to overthink is that I have gotten through this before or something similar, and it turned out to be okay, and the saying you can say when nothing else seems to work is what does not kill you makes you stronger!
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