The Overthinking Trap: When “Being Rational” Becomes Self-Sabotage

“I'm stuck.”

I hear this in conversations about careers, relationships, leadership, team development, community work, basically wherever we humans are trying to do brave things.. while having nervous systems.

Here is what I came to believe: stuckness often isn’t a lack of options. It’s not even a lack of courage. It’s a devotion to thinking, specifically, the belief that if we think long enough, we’ll eventually earn certainty… and then we’ll move.

Except we don’t move. We spiral. We rehearse. We litigate. We build a full case against ourselves with pages of footnotes. And somehow we insist on calling it “being responsible.”

Thoughts vs. thinking (a distinction that changes a lot)

There’s a helpful distinction (popularized by Joseph Nguyen) between thoughts and thinking: thoughts arise; thinking is what happens when we grab them and start grinding them into a story.

A thought can be:

• creative, fresh, perceptive

• anxious, dramatic, catastrophic

• wise, ridiculous, both

  
  

If thoughts are weather, thinking, in the stuck sense, is when we try to control the weather by yelling at it.

And to be clear: this isn’t a personal flaw or a reason for shame, it’s a very human protective strategy, socially and systemically reinforced (much like negativity bias is amplified by media and culture), and naming it is simply my way of helping us loosen its grip.

Psychology has a clinical word for this: rumination, repetitive thinking that loops around themes of distress, causes, consequences, and “what this says about me.”

Buddhism uses a more poetic phrase: “(drunken) monkey mind”, the restless, capricious mind swinging from branch to branch.

The three ways we fall into the overthinking trap

1) We treat thinking like it’s objective truth

Overthinking can masquerade as rigor.

It sounds like:“I’m just being rational.”“I’m gathering information.”“I’m just trying to make the right decision.”

But much of what we call “rational analysis” is actually fear management pretending to protect us. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has a simple sentence that can feel like a tiny liberation:

thoughts are not facts

Your mind produces interpretations. Some are useful. Some are ancient fear scripts with great branding.

2) We pay for the spiral with our nervous system

Here’s the part we don’t name enough in leadership circles: overthinking isn’t just cognitive, it’s physiological.

When we ruminate, the body often behaves as if the threat is still present. Stress chemistry stays in play.

Stress is already part of life, but rumination is how we replay it in high definition. When we keep the threat story running, we keep the body’s stress machinery running too (our stress-response communication loop, with cortisol as a key messenger).

In the short term, cortisol helps us mobilize. Over time, though, that “always on” pattern becomes wear-and-tear, what stress researchers call allostatic load, and it’s linked to dysregulation across systems we really need for leadership and life: sleep, mood, immune function, cardiovascular and metabolic health.

So two hours of “analysis” can be two hours of stress rehearsal. No wonder everything feels heavier afterward. (Hence we don't move)

3) We worship “rational decisions” in a mind that mostly runs on autopilot

We love the myth that our best decisions are purely rational. It feels adult and responsible.

But our minds don’t work like a calm jury meeting.

Daniel Kahneman describes two modes of thinking: System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, effortful, deliberate). System 1 is the one that’s always on, scanning, judging, reacting.

System 2 is the one that can reflect, weigh options, and override… but it has limited energy and attention. It’s not in control. It’s more like a thoughtful advisor who gets called in after something already happened, and then writes a very convincing memo about why it happened.

Kahneman puts it plainly: “System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings.”

Here is an example: You meet someone new at work and within seconds you feel: “I don’t trust them” or “I like them.” That’s System 1, rapid pattern recognition, shaped by past experience, bias, mood, stress, even whether you slept.

Later, System 2 steps in and does what we do best: it builds a story. “I don’t trust them because they’re vague.” Or: “I like them because they’re confident.” 

Sometimes that story is accurate.

Meaning: a lot of what drives our choices begins outside deliberate awareness, and then we explain it afterward like we meant to do it all along.

So the problem isn’t “intuition is bad” or “thinking is bad.” The problem is pretending we’re purely rational, and using “more thinking” as a way to delay the discomfort of choosing.

The alternative

The antidote to the overthinking trap is not “think less.” (Good luck with that. Brains think like lungs breathe)

The antidote is: stop granting your thoughts the status of the holly scripture.

Then do something radically practical:

1. Notice the thought.

2. Name the process: “I’m ruminating.” (Not “I’m solving.”)

3. Regulate first: settle the body enough to access choice (walk, breathe, stretch, drink water, step outside).

4. Return to values: what matters here, really?

5. Make one small decision you can stand behind.

6. Let reality educate you. (Reality is an excellent & honest coach)

   
   

This is creative leadership: not waiting to find the perfect decision, but having the courage to create a direction, and adjust with humility.

Closing: stuckness is often intelligence misused

Overthinking is often a sign of brilliance… aimed at the wrong target.

It’s intelligence trying to protect you from discomfort by offering you something safer: more thinking.

But decisions are how we leave the trance, how we move out of being stuck.

Not giant, cinematic decisions. Just small, values-aligned moves, repeated until momentum returns, until the path appears under your feet like it was there all along.

PS: We can change the stories we tell ourselves by expanding self-awareness.

When you slow down enough to catch the story your mind is running (“I’m stuck,” “They’ll reject me,” “If I decide wrong, I’m doomed”), you create a small gap between autopilot and choice.

Self-awareness doesn’t delete the fast, automatic mind, but it increases the chances the slower, wiser part of you notices what’s happening early enough to steer.

The simplest rewrite isn’t arguing with the story. It’s naming it, “My mind is running the I’ll fail story”, and taking one small step/experiment that gives you new data.

That’s how the script changes:

notice → name → choose → try → learn → repeat

Slowing down creates the gap where choice lives

When you recognize the story:“I’m stuck,” “They’ll reject me,” “If I decide and it’s wrong, I’m doomed”, you create a small but powerful gap between:

• the first impulse (reaction, prediction, protective story)and

• the chosen response (values, reality-testing, perspective)

This gap is where change lives.

One last wise caveat

System 2 gets tired. When we’re stressed, hungry, sleep-deprived, or emotionally flooded, we lose access to the override button.

So “slow down” often needs to start in the body: breath, a short walk, water, a pause, a little regulation.

Otherwise you’re trying to do philosophy in a burning house.

Invitation

If you’re feeling stuck, and your mind is very loudly presenting its “reasons, reach out

As a Creative Leadership coach, I genuinely love helping people get unstuck without forcing or abandoning themselves or waiting for perfect clarity.

We’ll work with both: your mind that wants safety, and the part of you that wants a bigger life.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!