Overthinking

Show Notes

Summary

Alex talks about overthinking as an anxiety response, why this happens and how to combat it.

Please support, me, my art and this podcast on my Patreon.

Transcript

There are a few reasons why this podcast is coming out less frequently. Some of this I discuss in the last episode, and I’m not going to rake all that depressing stuff up again. Suffice to say that my brain decided to stop playing ball. One consequence of what amounts to an onslaught of acute depression and anxiety, is a marked dip in self-esteem. This is a very common cause and/or side effect of such mental illnesses. I’m not going to go into neurological foundations of this, but suffice to say, that humans that are feeling like they are some sort of god-like genius don’t tend to be depressed. That’s not to say narcissists can’t be depressed, it’s just that depressed people are, by definition, not feeling very confident.

With low self-esteem, comes the constant questioning of everything you do. That nagging sense of “what’s the point?”. “No one cares”. “I was never very good at this stuff anyway”, “everyone hates me”. These thoughts are usually illusions. The malignant mirages of a malfunctioning brain. But they seem pretty real at the time and are hard to ignore. The little demon on your shoulder, whispering nasty nothings. For viewers of Big Mouth, this is the Shame Wizard.

This lovely fellow was at work while attempting to compile no less than three editions of this podcast, subsequently aborted. I keep getting half way through writing them, and start thinking to myself “where am I going with this? This is indulgent nonsense. Who is going to care?”. I was just in the middle of a slightly maudlin and self-pitying piece about how a tortured soul like me can’t sell any of my tormented masterworks to simple folk who just want something pretty for their dining room wall, when such a fit of self-criticism struck. I literally stopped dead in my tracks and thought “this is a self-indulgent piece of dull nonsense that no one is going to want to hear.” Now, this might well be the truth, but since it is the third such occasion that this has happened it gave me some pause.

I need to get another episode out, I thought to myself. I decided, yet again, to try something else. So I referred to my list of “subjects to cover in future episodes” list and it took me literally seconds to stumble across an item simply titled “overthinking”. Bingo!

If you hadn’t noticed, as well as providing a medium for me to spout my ill conceived ideas on art as therapy, I also use this podcast as a way to think through various issues, to order my thoughts, even to exorcise my demons. So I immediately recognised an opportunity to work through my thoughts on overthinking, since that’s exactly what lead me to this point. Will I overthink this one too? I guess we’ll find out!

Overthinking is a trauma response. It is a form of anxiety that happens when your general anxiety levels are high and you’re afraid of negative consequences from something that you’re doing. It’s a type of perfectionism and can completely paralyse you from a creative and productivity perspective. It manifests as a need to make sure that what you’re going to make or you’re going to do, or what you’re going to say is perfect, and you become very worried about what might happen if that’s not the case. This often involves internally “play acting” the role of another person and how they might react to what you present to them. This usually leads to assuming the worst about how they’re going to react, or what they might say. It may not be obvious to you that that’s what’s going on at the time, it all seems very rational and logical. But that’s the most pernicious thing about overthinking - it seems to you at that moment in time to be perfectly reasonable and rational, and that the paranoid thoughts you have about the task you have to do or the interaction you have to partake in, is really as fraught with danger as you think it is.

If you’re suffering from depression or anxiety, you’re going to be more prone to having negative points of view or negative outlooks on anything that’s happening in your life. Anxiety perpetuates anxiety, so it can be that anxiety in one part of your life - perhaps you’re worried about something you said to a friend that you thought might be a little bit hurtful - and when when you try and write some poetry or paint a picture, you may start to worry about that. About whether anyone’s going to like it, or maybe you even think someone might find it hurtful or offensive. And you freeze, delay, procrastinate. You start to worry about the other areas of your life. And every time you try and get back to the project, you start to meander again, and speculate and fret.

But is this overthinking really a problem? A little bit of reflection once in a while is a good thing right?

Let me me explicit about this - overthinking is poison to spontaneity. And art, regardless of how you approach it, is underpinned by spontaneity. The strokes or the marks you put down on canvas or paper, the notes that you lay down on a piano, there’s always a level of spontaneity that happens to create the thing in front of you. You are not a machine, you are a sentient being, and therefore the job of creation is a process, and it’s necessarily spontaneous.

Now that’s not to say that you’re never going to produce something that is, in fact, offensive or boring or just plain bad. Sometimes you will realise after the fact, or maybe during the creation of something, that it’s not something that people are going to want to see, or maybe it’s plagiarism. Maybe it just sucks balls.

There have been times when you’ve created something that you’ve looked back at and gone, “yeah, this is not great”. Maybe you paint it out, CTRL-A Delete, throw it away, whatever. You just moved on, and you didn’t freak out, the world didn’t end, you just moved on, did something else. This is part of the learning and maturing process and a constant part of the creative process. After all, you can’t be a genius all the time! You trust yourself to make such judgement calls, because when you’re creating, you’re making lots of little judgement calls all the time. About what to put where, about in what order to do things, what materials to use, and so on and so forth. You trust yourself, you trust that you know, in your experience, or from you’ve been taught, that if I do thing A, then I get thing B. But we all make mistakes, we all make decisions that seem right at the time, and don’t turn out to be optimal, and then we just fix it, or we discard it, and we move on. You trust yourself, and in the skills that you have in the endeavour that you’re on.

It’s all very well, however, to, y’know, just decide to not overthink things. But it’s often hard to know that you’re overthinking, because, by it’s very nature, it feels very real. This is just a basic fact of anxiety, because if all your worries seem as ridiculous as they tend to when reflecting on them after later, you wouldn’t be anxious. This is the pernicious nature of anxiety. You might well be in a precarious situation. Maybe, like me, you’ve lost your job, and your finances are getting tighter. Maybe someone close to you is ill. Maybe you’re in a difficult relationship. Sometimes very bad things do happen, and we need to accept and prepare for those. We need to keep scanning the horizon for danger. This is a fact of life. No big deal.

But when you’re feeling anxious or depressed you start to see bad things threats everywhere. You start to look at every slightly adverse situation as a harbinger of something bad. You start to worry that you’re going to run out of money, that you’re going to be turfed out onto the street, that the world is going to end, and, of course, that’s possible. But you don’t think about the fact that any number of other things could happen to alleviate or avoid this and probably will. You forget that you have options, and there’s usually people around you who care about you and can help out. And that positive chance events happen as likely as negative ones. The chances are the situation isn’t as bad as you think it is, but when you’re in a precarious situation where lots of things are not going well, and we all find ourselves in this position from one time or another, those things that might seem like threats to you are going to seem more, much more imminent, and much more likely than, in fact, they really are. And that’s why talking to people like a therapist or a friend often helps. If they’re the right type of person, they’ll help you frame that problem in the terms of the reality that’s around you that you’re struggling to see. You don’t get to forget about the problems, they don’t magically disappear. But more often or not, when you look back on a time in your life where things were not going at all well, and there was lots of potential problems on the horizon, so few of them came about. Things didn’t go at all how you thought they would. The worst-case scenario, or even close to it, is usually much less likely than you think.

Either way, you have no idea what of what’s coming down the line. You can control what you control and the rest is down to fate. And when the really bad things do happen, they often don’t unfold as you think they’re going to, and provided the bad thing wasn’t fatal, you generally have a route to fight back. The only way is up from rock bottom.

This amplification of risk perception tends to infect everything you do. Suddenly that relationship problem, those money woes, that issue at work, starts to get in they way of doing literally everything. What’s happening is your nervous system has switched to fight or flight mode. You become perpetually hyper-alert to risks of any sort. So instead of leaning into that short story you’ve been looking forward to writing, you’re suddenly questioning whether anyone would want to read it. You start worrying that you’d be ridiculed if anyone did so. You nitpick and analyse and it all seems perfectly logical. Because you’re an experienced and mature creator, you look at you’re own work critically, which is just what you’re doing right? But this is the literary equivalent of thinking you see an intruder in the dark shadows of your house. You’re not any less capable than you were a couple of weeks ago, but suddenly it seems to you that every thought you have is amateur drivel.

And so here I found myself, struggling to write one podcast episode after another. I think to myself, no one wants to hear me talking about this stuff. I came up with a subject, and I thought, sounds great, but I’ve got nothing interesting to say on this, and there’s a little voice at the back of my head that’s being drowned out by the shouting little demon, a little anxiety demon, the shame wizard, that’s saying, mate, you do this podcast because you’ve got good things to say. People listen to you in all sorts of circumstances because you have good things to say, and you tend to save them very, very well and very articulately. You know, I know I’m no genius at this, I’m not just about to get offered a job as a BBC TV presenter or whatever. Quite frankly, I’m only okay at this, but I’m better at than many or perhaps most people are, and I can use it to help myself and other people because I find talking quite therapeutic, and I think some people find listening to people like me talking therapeutic, and that makes me feel good. And from that I get the opposite of the anxious spiralling feedback loop. And if I can bring some light by using the abilities that I have into someone else’s world and relieve them of some of their burden, I can’t think of a better way to use this ability.

But I couldn’t hear the sane voice. Only the shame wizard sounding sane and logical and telling me I suck. Call it writer’s block. Call it low self-esteem. Call it procrastination. Call it what you want. I stopped.

I’ve talked about procrastination before, and I think procrastination and overthinking are very, closely related, but not quite the same thing. With procrastination, you’re avoiding doing something, usually by doing something else, which may or may not be productive. Whereas with overthinking you obsess over something you’ve got to do. You can’t seem to get it out of your head. You worry about it. You question it. You overanalyse it.

This, in my mind, is all more serious than perhaps it sounds. Unhealthy thought loops are one of the main signs of pervasive, unhealthy anxiety, and precisely what therapies like CBT exist to combat. Sometimes this manifests as ruminating over a single thing. Sometimes you ruminate about anything and everything. Either way, you’re central nervous system gets stuck in panic mode which triggers all sorts of other physical and psychological effects most of which, over time, can cause lasting damage and worse.

For creativity to be therapeutic, it needs to be relaxing, or at least absorbing. If it’s creating anxiety, then that exactly the opposite of what you need it to do. Maybe you’re not in the position to defuse all your other worries, but getting on top of your creative anxieties will set you on a good path do exactly that.

So what’s the remedy for this? Well, the risk of sounding obvious, it’s to stop overthinking. Now, I know that’s harder than it might seem, and it’s sort of a bit of a contradiction in terms, but I think the reality is that you’ve got to do something.

Most specifically, you’ve got do anything. The cure for overthinking is action. And in many ways, it doesn’t matter what action, just that you progress somehow,

My most common form of overthinking when it comes to art, is obsessing about coming up with that new idea. The next signature piece. Something that will dazzle. Paradoxically, this usually comes off the back of a prior success and is delivered with a flavour of imposter syndrome. Were all my prior successes just accidents? What if I never do anything worthy again!

The solution on such occasions is to do something else. That might sound a little bit glib. Almost a bit defeatist. But it’s a bit like when you’re trying desperately to remember something, or to solve some tricky problem. Sometimes you’ve just just gotta stop trying. Go do something else. Sleep on it. Then, bam! The answer comes to you when you’re doing something totally unrelated.

From a creative perspective, I don’t necessarily mean go do something completely different, like washing the car or whatever. You’ll likely end up just obsessing more. You need to do something else absorbing, and preferably something creativity related that you can relax doing. You’re not being lazy or weak by doing this. It’s just part of the creative process. And an essential one. Creation should feel natural, intuitive. If you force it, then your work will likely seem forced to other people. You’ll also be eroding the joy that you naturally take from that process, a feeling that will likely stay with you through future works. This stuff accumulates over time, like dirt and grit in an engine. Eventually the engine seizes up.

But that if you don’t come back to the original project? Well, unless you had committed to it, then maybe it wasn’t something that you should have been doing. Or maybe just not now.

If you do come back to it, you’ll likely find yourself looking at it with new eyes, a new perspective, and renewed enthusiasm. Your anxieties forgotten, or perhaps even woven into your work.

And please don’t start stressing about whatever you end up doing to distract yourself! The point is to do something that you’re comfortable with, and that you enjoy doing, even if it doesn’t feel like much of a step forward.

What if you’ve committed to something and the reason you’re stuck in a loop is that you’re afraid you’re going to deliver something terrible? Perhaps you’re already part way through a project and it’s not panning out how you thought. Now you’re worried that you’ve got to go back to your client with something crap, or nothing at all!

This is when you need to check in on yourself and apply a bit of logical thinking, as well as taking a break from it. Sometimes it’s worth taking stock of your worldview from a probabilistic perspective and looking at it soberly and in a detached way.

Maybe you’ve agreed to paint a portrait of someone. And this is a particular anxiety of mine, because I have messed these up once or twice in the past. You’ve agreed to make a portrait of someone’s beloved and it just doesn’t go well. We can all be geniuses all of the time! Well, it’s not a good look and it’s a bit depressing and embarrassing. And it really knocks your self-confidence. Most most of us have messed up a bit in our professional lives or in when we’re dealing with other people. It’s just part of life.

At times like this you’ve gotta trust yourself. So maybe you have messed up in the past, but how many times have you nailed it? So if you’ve done, say, 50 portrait commissions in the past and one of them went astray. That’s one in 50 chance of screwing one up, which is pretty small odds of you doing that again. The odds of flubbing it are actually much lower because once you’ve messed up once, you’re not going to mess up in that way again. And of course, that was past you, who was much less capable and awesome than now you!

These things never go smoothly anyway. How many times have you got half way through a project and thought to yourself “what is this ridiculous assemblage of canine excrement?!” only to go on to craft a masterwork? And as every author knows, many works need a couple attempt to get it right.

Every time any of this happens, you learn from it, move on, and are better for it. There’s a reason there’s been 50 odd anxiety free works between the last misdemeanour and now - you’re damn good at this! So just get on with it!

It’s like being afraid of flying in case the plane crashes. And as we all know, many tens of thousands of flights happen every day and there’s a crash, like, once every couple of years. There’s a lottery winning order probability of getting you getting on a plane that takes a dive. I put my foot through the floor of my first floor studio a couple of weeks ago, so I suspect that, for me at least, the act of creation is more perilous than flying!

So I think that sometimes you’ve just got to take a step back and think about yourself and your situation soberly and objectively recognize that, almost certainly you’re being too pessimistic and over over weighting the likelihoods of negative outcomes.

And that the core of all of this. Anxiety happens when you’re brain loses track of the real likelihood of bad things happening. Of course, sometimes our problems are real, but sometimes our worries about those real problems bleed into other part of our lives.

So remember this: overthinking is a form of anxiety, and as rational and sensible as your ruminations and self-criticisms seem, they’re often just another symptom of incipient anxiety. And what better way to relive anxiety, than the act of creation?

So the question is, did I end up overthinking this one too? Well, I finished it, which I guess counts for something. But perhaps it’s for you to decide!

On the subject of not overthinking - I have a draft for the second instalment on my “how to be creative” series, so maybe you’ll see that next. Or maybe I’ll get distracted by something else.

Now a shop on website