Struggling with overthinking? Neuroscientist shares tips to beat 'indecision overwhelm'

Ever spent too much time on a thought that it becomes all-consuming, you start worrying and you end up spiralling and overthinking everything?

Us too.

But when exactly does ordinary thinking cross the line into overthinking, which can exhaust our mental energy and leave us feeling overwhelmed, and what is the distinction?

“Thinking is sort of the ability to use our mental energy to solve a problem or make a decision,” explains Dr Faye Begeti, an NHS neurology registrar and neuroscientist who’s known online as ‘The Brain Doctor’. “Where that sort of moves into overthinking is when we expend a disproportionate amount of mental energy compared to the consequences of that decision. So it really depends on the individual and the decision at hand.

“So if I was to give you an example,” she continues. “If you were to move house, you’d have to spend a lot of mental energy trying to decide where you want to live. Maybe you’d have to move your family, you’d have to change jobs - it’s a really big decision, right? But if I was in my day job as a doctor, if I was to agonise over what pen I’m going to write the prescription with, then that would definitely be overthinking.

“One has very large consequences, and the other one doesn’t, and of course, there’s a whole entire spectrum in between. So it’s really interesting the way we sort of apply our mental energy and thinking, and we do tend to overthink to a degree because we’re faced with such a large amount of choice.”

Dr Begeti’s conversation with indy100 follows an independent survey of 2,000 UK adults – commissioned by the travel app Skyscanner – finding that 84 per cent of people have been left in “indecision overwhelm” while choosing the perfect holiday destination, with a similar amount (85 per cent) admitting that overthinking the planning stage ends up delaying decision-making.

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“I think we’ve all experienced that,” shares Dr Begeti. “I think when people are so mentally depleted, sometimes they find it hard to make really easy decisions, like not even being able to decide what to have for dinner. It has happened to many people, and I think trying to tune in yourself and recognise sometimes you may have excluded a choice, and then you go back to it. It seems like you’re going round in circles and ruminating; you’re not making any progress.”

Dr Begeti’s advice for dealing with this feeling references a common phrase, which it turns out has a neuroscience basis behind it.

“What I suggest is making sure you have adequate rest,” she explains. “Sleep restores the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that we said gets fatigued, so that’s important, as well as mental rest. That’s why we say with a decision, sometimes we say, ‘we’ll sleep on it’, right? This is why, there’s a neuroscience basis behind that.

“So try again the next day,” the doctor continues, “don’t be too hard on yourself. Again, think about what is your big criteria, what is it that you really want to gain? Focus on those decisions first, when your mental energy is high. When you complete things, you should practice letting them go.”

That may be easier said than done, though, as research from York St John University in 2018 – which involved analysing data from more than 40,000 American, British and Canadian university students between 1989 to 2017 – found rising levels of perfectionism in young people, with the extent to which they “attach an irrational importance to being perfect”, set unrealistic expectations for themselves and are “highly self-critical” increased by 10 per cent.

The key to being satisfied, Dr Begeti explains, is to tap into our internal motivations.

“I think it’s worth realising that there are always trade-offs between overthinking, our time, and the consequences of each decision,” she says. “So this is something that people can work on when somebody is stuck in that ruminating cycle. What is actually happening is that the thinking part of the brain is actually quite depleted and exhausted, and what it’s actually having trouble doing is letting something go, sometimes filtering out irrelevant thoughts. Sometimes it has difficulty bringing everything to a conclusion or regulating any emotions that might come with it.

“It’s important to have a degree of self-compassion,” continues Dr Begeti, “because this is very difficult and we’re all different. But it’s something to practice in terms of, for example, if you are ruminating a lot and you’re thinking about things that you’ve decided are inconsequential or less consequential than a big decision, you can say to yourself, ‘give my brain a rest now for the next hour, I’ll schedule some time where I can worry about this.’

“And what happens, actually, the brain tends to relax. So when we’re actually really actively looking to get that mental satisfaction, we’re always chasing it, it doesn’t really come,” Dr Begeti says. “I think we have to get into a habit of ‘I’ve made a decision based on the information that I’ve got in front of me, any mistakes or possible negative consequences are unforeseen to me. So if something negative, let’s just say, was to arise, that would not be my fault’, and then you can slowly start to let things go and have a sort of mental training, mental pattern that you can apply to those situations.”

It's advice reminiscent of illusionist Derren Brown’s book Happy, in which the entertainer’s take on the philosophy of Stoicism boils down to “the wisdom of not trying to control those things you cannot”.

The importance of mental rest is also highlighted by Dr Begeti – and it’s different to resting in the physical sense, too.

“I like to move [people] through an exercise where, what is it that they would do, if they didn’t have to be productive, and there were no more time constraints - that is a good place to start with,” she explains, “because most people think they’re taking a rest, but they’re actually asking me, ‘Dr Faye, how can I be productive in my break? How can I do housebreak? How can I complete this?’

“What would you do if you had no responsibilities for a short amount of time, whether it’s caring responsibilities or something else? What would you do if you didn’t have to be productive? And it’s fine if that’s sitting down, watching TV, it doesn’t have to be, ‘oh, what I would do is start a really impressive hobby’.”

It’s certainly some food for thought…

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