The last camera blinked off a few hours ago, and I am still sitting with what happened in that room. Sunday afternoons are supposed to be sleepy. Ours was anything but.
Earlier today I closed a two-and-a-half-hour live workshop on the psychology of overthinking, with participants joining from India, Mauritius, Kenya, Singapore and beyond. Almost every one of them arrived carrying the same quiet confession: my body is tired, but my mind will not switch off. What follows is an honest report of what we explored, what broke open in the room, and the method I taught for how to stop overthinking without switching off your intelligence. If your mind kept you company at two in the morning this week, this article is for you. Consider it the seat you did not book.
A room full of racing minds
I opened with a story about a woman lying awake at 2:14 a.m., replaying one sentence from a meeting nine hours old and rehearsing a conversation that might never happen. I watched the recognition travel across the cameras. Nobody needed the concept explained. They were living it.
That recognition matters, because overthinking convinces each of us that we are uniquely broken. We are not. The loop is nearly universal, and it hides best in the most competent, most conscientious people. The first relief of the afternoon was simply discovering the company.
The tax nobody audits
The idea the room held onto hardest was one I call the rumination tax: the quiet, compounding cost your overthinking charges every day against your sleep, energy, focus and decisions, collected in advance, before you have done anything at all.
Psychology gives the underlying pattern a name. Rumination is simply repetitive dwelling on distress and its causes, and clinicians note it can feed anxiety and low mood rather than resolve them. Harvard physicians have observed that the habit wears down mind and body alike. In the workshop, I drew the line more bluntly: thinking moves towards a decision and then rests; ruminating circles the same ground and never lands. One serves you. The other taxes you. Most of us have been paying for years while calling it diligence.
Why the mind loops
Any honest answer to how to stop overthinking must begin with why the mind loops at all. Two reasons stood out for participants.
First, we are the descendants of the worriers. The ancestor who assumed the rustle in the grass was a predator outlived the one who assumed it was the wind. Your alarm system is an inheritance, now pointed at emails and imagined futures.
Second, the mind is never truly off. When you stop concentrating, a circuit called the default mode network, the brain’s idle engine, begins to wander, and left unguided it drifts towards worry. Which is why doing nothing can leave you more tired than doing something, and why the pain of an event hurts once, while the replaying of it hurts nightly. The event is life. The replay is the tax.
Four moves back to a quiet mind
The heart of the afternoon was the Still Point Method, four small moves I have watched change how people relate to their own heads.
Catch the loop: you cannot change what you cannot see, so the first skill is noticing the spiral as it starts. Name to tame: putting a feeling into precise words, what researchers call affect labelling, measurably calms the brain’s alarm centre; vague dread is loud, a named worry has edges. Drop anchor: you cannot think your way out of thinking, so we return to the body, one long exhale, feet on the floor, until the nervous system decides it can stop scanning. This is self-regulation in its simplest clothing. And finally, decide and release: is there something to do here, or something to accept? Do the smallest next thing, then open your hand.
We practised each move live. The silence during the anchoring breath was the stillest moment of my week.
The sentence that stopped the room
Three times during the session, participants wrote in their notebooks. The second reflection asked them to describe their loop, name the feeling underneath it, and then write one kind sentence they would say to a dear friend caught in the same spiral. More than one participant admitted some version of the same discovery: I would never speak to anyone I love the way I speak to myself.
Before you read on, three questions worth answering only in your own head. What does your mind replay most often? What has that replaying cost you this year? And who taught you that circling a problem counts as solving it?
Overthinking is not deep thinking. Thinking moves, then rests. Overthinking circles, then bills you: a tax collected in advance, on a life not yet lived.
Deciding without drowning
We closed the teaching with decisions, where the tax collects hardest. Psychologists distinguish the maximiser, who examines every option and is haunted by the roads not taken, from the satisficer, who sets a clear bar for good enough, takes the first option that clears it, and moves on. Both choose well. Only one feels free. Good enough, I argued, is not a compromise. It is a strategy for protecting your energy for the few things that deserve all of it.
What they carried home
Every participant left with a Certificate of Achievement, accredited by the International Coaching Institute, Singapore, but the certificate was the smallest thing in their hands. They left with a daily practice of five quiet minutes, a written commitment in their own handwriting, and, I hope, a gentler voice in their own heads. Details of the workshop remain online, and future editions will appear under my upcoming sessions.
If today’s report named something you have been living with, do not let it become one more thing you merely think about. Book a free fifteen-minute conversation with me and let us look at your loop together, calmly, and only once.
