Fourth evening comparing the same two models. You have a spreadsheet now. Most affirmations for overthinking tell you that you can choose what to think about, which is both untrue and a tidy way to make you feel worse.
Why most affirmations for overthinking backfire
They ask you to suppress. Told not to think of a white bear, people think of it more, and then more again once the instruction lifts. One part of your mind avoids the thought while another keeps checking whether it has gone, and the checking is itself thinking about it. So a line ordering your mind to be quiet adds a job rather than removing one. The lines below give the loop an ending instead.
When a decision has run out of new information
The research is done. You are now rereading reviews you have already read.
Another hour of reading will not choose it for me.
I have enough to pick, even without being certain.
A good enough choice made today beats a perfect one in March.
When the same thought keeps arriving
It comes back every twenty minutes, unchanged, like a notification you cannot dismiss.
This thought has nothing new in it today.
It can be here without me following it.
I am allowed to be undecided until Thursday.
Planning for something that has not happened
You are rehearsing four versions of a conversation that is scheduled for Tuesday.
I can prepare one version and improvise the rest.
Most of what I am planning for will not come up.
I will know more on the day than I do now.
Small things, at the wrong scale
Somewhere along the way the tiles, or the wording of a reply, became a referendum on your judgement.
This is a small thing that I have made large.
Nobody else will remember which one I chose.
Getting this wrong is survivable and reversible.
The loop that feels like deciding
Overthinking is convincing from the inside because it wears the costume of diligence. You are weighing things. You are being careful. Surely one more comparison improves the answer.
The research says otherwise. Going over things repeatedly makes negative thinking stronger and measurably impairs problem solving, so the extra passes are not buying you a better decision. Past a point they are buying you a worse one.
There is a simple test for where that point is. If the last three rounds produced no new information, you finished deciding a while ago and have been rehearsing since.
Worth separating two things that get lumped together. Looping about a conversation that already happened is a different problem with a different fix, and it has its own page. This one is about decisions and events still ahead of you.
What to do instead of pushing it away
Suppression fails, but two alternatives hold up better and neither requires you to feel calm first.
- Give it a deadline. "I will choose on Thursday evening" ends the loop legitimately, because the question now has a scheduled answer rather than an open one.
- Give your attention something substantial. In one of Wegner's studies, people told to think of a red Volkswagen instead of a white bear managed far better than those told simply not to think about it.
- Narrow the criteria. Three requirements you can check beats an open comparison of everything, and it turns a mood into a short list.
- Write down what is genuinely undecided. Most loops shrink once the open question is on paper at its real size.
The common thread is replacement rather than removal. Your attention will be on something. The only question is whether you chose it.
One way this may fit into a day
I spent four evenings in a row choosing a washing machine. Reviews open on my phone, a table of models in my notes. The moment one started to look good, I would find a comment about noise or a breakdown and go back to the beginning. Even in a shop on the way home I caught myself thinking about bearings. Meanwhile the old machine was standing there with water inside it.
Partway through yet another video I stopped and said: "One more review will not choose for me." I closed the video and left three things on the list: size, capacity, and the amount I could spend. Then I went to measure the alcove in the bathroom. One of the two models I had been agonising between turned out to be too deep. Until then I had only been looking at width.
I placed the order the next day. Before it arrived I kept wanting to read more, especially the bad reviews of the model I had chosen. I opened one. I closed it when I noticed I was rereading the same thing. How long the machine would last I could not know then. When it was installed, the first thing I did was wash the towels. That evening I started the film I had put off back at the beginning of all this.
Deciding is allowed to happen before certainty does.
A line to return to
Where this stops being useful
A line with a deadline in it can end an evening that would otherwise have gone the same way as the three before. It cannot make a genuinely hard decision easy, supply information you do not have, or stop your mind producing thoughts. Nothing does the last one, and pages promising a quiet mind are describing something outside anyone's control. If the looping is constant across months rather than evenings, or it is reaching into your sleep and your work, that is worth taking to a professional rather than to a better sentence.
Sources and further reading
These references support the research and practical guidance discussed in this article.
- Suppressing the 'white bears'American Psychological Association on Wegner's work. Told not to think of a white bear, people think of it more, and more again afterwards. The reason no line here instructs you to stop thinking.
- Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression: A Meta-AnalysisPools the evidence on what happens when people deliberately push a thought away. Supports treating suppression as a strategy that costs more than it returns.
- Rethinking RuminationNolen-Hoeksema, Wisco and Lyubomirsky, 2008. Going over things repeatedly impairs problem solving, which is why the loop that feels like deciding is not deciding.
