What Overthinking Is Actually Doing for You

By Ian Traynar, Executive Coach

Most people who overthink know they overthink. They can describe it accurately, they know it rarely changes the outcome, and they have usually been told to stop. None of that touches it.

The people I work with are often very good at thinking. It is part of how they got where they are. So when the thinking turns on them and will not switch off, the obvious conclusion is that something has gone wrong with them. Usually nothing has. The thinking is doing a job, and until you understand that job, asking it to stop is asking the wrong thing.

One structure, two outlets

Overthinking and micromanaging look like different problems. I am not always sure they are.

Both usually come from someone trying to reach certainty before they can feel safe. They just look for it in different places. One asks, have I thought of everything. The other asks, is it being done properly. The first looks for certainty inside their own head. The second looks for it in other people’s work as it happens.

They often show up in the same person. One structure, two outlets.

A Saturday lunch

A senior partner I worked with described himself as someone who could not switch off. He had already had coaching on boundaries. He knew the sensible advice, had turned off notifications, had left the work phone at home at weekends. It worked for a while, and then something would set him off, and the loops would start again.

He gave me an example.

He was out for lunch with his wife and friends on a Saturday. The work phone was deliberately at home. Somewhere in the conversation, somebody said that you have to trust people to do what they say they will do.

That was enough.

His mind went straight to an important client proposal he had handed to one of his team the day before. Had they followed it up. Had he explained it clearly enough. What if something had been missed.

He eventually excused himself, went to the toilet, and checked his work email on his personal phone.

Everything had been handled perfectly. He felt relieved, and slightly ridiculous.

What was underneath it

It would be easy to call that poor boundaries. What I wanted to know was why his mind had decided checking was necessary.

It wasn't that he couldn't delegate. There were senior people on his team he trusted completely, and he could hand them something important and barely think about it again.

The difference appeared when he felt personally responsible for the outcome and wasn't sure the other person would anticipate everything that could go wrong.

Underneath that was a rule he had never put into words. Being competent and dependable meant anticipating problems and preventing them. So if something went wrong on his watch that he felt he could have foreseen, it did not simply mean a mistake had happened. At some level it meant he had not been on top of things. Beneath that lay the real question: whether he was as dependable as he believed himself to be.

What struck me was that he had twenty years of evidence that he was. He had no doubt about his competence. The rule attached to it made the overthinking logical.

Why I did not try to remove it

Checking was not a bad habit he needed to break. It was one way he maintained something that mattered enormously to him: being someone people could rely on.

Take that away, and you are asking a person to give up a quality they have built a career on. No wonder it does not hold.

So we did not remove it. We widened it. He already had excellent judgement about people and about risk, and he used it every day without noticing. Being dependable could mean making a sound judgement about the person, the risk, and how much oversight was actually warranted.

When we put him back in that restaurant, the thought about the proposal still turned up. But this time he could look at it. Had he made a reasonable judgement about the person he gave it to? Yes. Had he given them what they needed? Yes. Was there anything he genuinely had to do before Monday? No.

What he said was, I have done my part. And his attention went back to his wife and his friends.

The cost nobody counts

That is the part people underestimate.

Overthinking usually doesn't stop you from functioning. It takes hours, and it takes your attention, and it takes them from the life happening in front of you while some part of you insists that continuing to think is the responsible thing to do.

Nobody schedules that time. It does not appear anywhere. It just goes.

So when somebody tells me they overthink, I am not very interested in teaching them how to think less. I want to know something else.

What does all that thinking do for you?

Because once we find that, it is usually possible to keep the thing that genuinely matters, in his case being dependable, while giving the person a great deal more freedom in how they go about it. Same value. Different structure. Considerably less effort.

Common questions

Why can’t I stop overthinking, even when I know it isn’t helping?

Because knowing something is unhelpful and changing what produces it are different things. The thinking is usually protecting something, and as long as that remains true, stopping feels unsafe rather than simply difficult. The effort to stop often reads as a risk, so the pattern holds on harder.

Is overthinking the same as being thorough?

Thoroughness has an end point. You reach a decision, and the thinking stops. Overthinking carries on past the point of usefulness, often long after the decision is made, because it's driven not by the decision itself but by what the decision has come to mean about you.

Why hasn’t understanding where it came from changed it?

Understanding the history of a pattern and changing what keeps producing it are two different pieces of work. Knowing that a parent was critical explains the origin. It doesn't change what getting something wrong means to you now, and that meaning usually runs the pattern.

What does overthinking actually cost?

Mostly time and attention, and almost never on the balance sheet. It takes hours that nobody has accounted for, and it takes people out of the room they are physically sitting in. Most people only notice the cost in retrospect, when the thinking stops and the hours come back.

If you want to find what a pattern like this is actually doing for you in your own life, the full process, including an exercise you can run on yourself, is laid out in The Effort Myth.