Why Do You Overthink?
Three engines, and yours is probably only one of them
Overthinking is a description of a symptom, not of a cause, which is why general advice about it never works. Three quite different engines produce the same experience of a mind that will not stop: scanning the future for threats, being unable to tolerate not knowing, and refusing to settle for an option that might not be the best one. They call for opposite responses, so the useful question is not how much you overthink but which engine is running.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how your mind normally works, not about how it works the week before something big.
What it measures
Three engines. Worry is future-focused threat scanning. Intolerance of uncertainty is how badly you need to know before you can rest. Maximizing is the need to find the best option rather than a good one. They overlap but are separable, and each has its own way out.
Based on: Worry (Meyer et al., 1990), intolerance of uncertainty (Freeston et al., 1994) and maximizing (Schwartz et al., 2002)
Possible results
Worry
Running the future to see what could go wrong.
Intolerance of uncertainty
How badly you need to know before you can settle.
Maximizing
Needing the best option rather than a good one.
Common questions
How is this different from the rumination test?
Direction of travel. Rumination goes backwards - it reworks what already happened. Everything here goes forwards: what might happen, what I cannot know yet, which option I should take. Plenty of people are high on one and low on the other, and the two have different exits, which is why they are two tests rather than one.
Is overthinking not just being careful?
Sometimes, and the test for telling them apart is whether the thinking ends. Careful thinking produces a decision, a plan or a written conclusion and then stops, because it has done its job. Overthinking revisits the same ground and produces the same output, which is why you can spend an hour on it and have nothing to show. If you could write down what you concluded, it was analysis.
Why does reassurance stop working?
Because it answers the wrong question. Reassurance addresses the specific worry; the engine underneath is the intolerance of not knowing, which is untouched and immediately produces a new worry to attach to. This is the reason asking one more time makes the next hour better and the next month worse - each answer teaches the system that certainty is available on request, which makes the gaps between answers harder to sit in.
Sources
- Meyer, T. J., Miller, M. L., Metzger, R. L., & Borkovec, T. D. (1990). Development and validation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Behaviour Research and Therapy.
- Freeston, M. H., Rhéaume, J., Letarte, H., Dugas, M. J., & Ladouceur, R. (1994). Why do people worry?. Personality and Individual Differences.
- Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note This is not a screening test for anxiety and a high score is not a diagnosis. The first two engines come from the research on worry and are well established: intolerance of uncertainty in particular is treated as one of the things that keeps worry running, and it is the target of treatments with good evidence behind them. The third is on shakier ground. The original finding that maximizers are less happy and more regretful has not replicated cleanly - later work using different versions of the scale found maximizing unrelated to regret and in some samples associated with optimism, so read that bar as describing how you decide rather than as predicting how you will feel about it. If the thinking is affecting your sleep or stopping you doing things, that is worth raising with a doctor.