The term “overthinking” refers to a pretty familiar experience for a lot of us. That thing of lying in bed and just going around in circles, looping over the same stuff, or getting caught up in kind of anxious predictions and thinking of the worst scenarios and going through all the bad cases, etc. It’s often something that people bring into therapy as an expression of their anxiety, and I think it’s a really good word for it.

We can expand the idea of overthinking as a kind of defining human characteristic. If you think of us compared to other, say, mammals, who think in the sense that they are conscious and aware of their impulses. They might feel hungry and act on being hungry, but unlike humans, they’re not thinking that they are hungry. There’s no kind of ability to say, “Oh, I’m hungry, this is going on.” This is what’s called in psychology a metacognitive ability: to think about thinking, or to think about feeling.

So metacognition is a very human thing. It’s maybe what sets us apart. It’s also the source of “overthinking” as a problem: getting unbounded in our thinking, it running away, having no kind of tethering to reality.

It’s also potentially the place where we can find solutions to anxieties. In other words, we can use our metacognitive capacity to look at ourselves and think about what we’re doing. What are we up to with these compulsive thought patterns?

Our very ability to overthink is both a curse and a gift. It requires us to pay attention to ourselves and do some work to harness that very human capacity and master it rather than suffer it.