In Defense of Overthinking

I've got a bone to pick.

I’ve got a grievance to register, a concern to bring into public view.

I’m pushing back against this whole negative connotation around so-called “overthinking.”

In fact, I think it’s probably a contributor to some of our broader social dysfunction that we attempt to shame people for “overthinking.”

What the heck does that even mean?

Seriously.

What do you mean by overthink?

In order to define overthinking, we would first have to define thinking. There are books—volumes, in fact—that have been written on that subject.

Basically, thinking is an intentional pursuit of patterns and associations.

In my book Brilliant Teaching, I refer to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, who says that “analogy is the engine of thinking.” I take him to mean that all thinking is a cognitive inquiry around a fundamental question: What is this like? Or perhaps: What does this make me think of?

That’s the analogy part, the part that drives pattern recognition.

And then there’s thinking as a mechanism for identifying associations: As in, What comes with this?

What does this make me think of? and What comes with this? are questions we can use to offer a simple representation of thinking.

Which, by the way, Artificial Intelligence is getting pretty good at mimicking. AI uses the superpowers of language to mimic the human use of oral and written communication to share thinking. What AI is not able to do—and hopefully will never be able to do—is experience the physical world. And it is experience that grounds the use of language itself. (See the work of Lawrence Barsalou on Grounded Cognition.) And the other elemental ingredient of humanity is emotion. Machines can describe emotion. But they will never know it firsthand.

So, there is great value in thinking because through thinking we are able to explore and interrogate those patterns and associations. There’s great value in this. It helps us understand the various concepts in play—and the concepts inside the concepts.

Careful thinking yields not only a better recognition of the patterns, associations, and concepts that are shaping our conscious and nonconscious judgments about situations and circumstances. What some might call overthinking enables us to generate adjacent conceptual possibilities that expand and deepen our emerging understandings. Overthinking can reinforce the grounded, experiential and emotional anchors for what we understand.

Thinking is a good thing.

It clarifies.

It sharpens.

It connects.

It enlightens.

It reveals the seeds and shadows of understandings we already possess.

So if we define thinking this way, how can overthinking even be a thing? Much less a bad thing?

When someone says, “You’re overthinking,” they can’t possibly mean that you should settle for your second thought on a matter over your fourth, sixth, eighth, or two-hundred-and-eighth thought. What they really mean is something else. They mean that you need to be better at regulating your response to the emotions that are stirred up by thinking.

Because human cognition is never a matter of cognition alone. We are not Vulcans. (Not even half-Vulcans, like Dr. Spock.) We are not creatures whose thinking is driven by pure, unfiltered, uncut logic.

Emotion is an inextricable part of what makes us human, and emotion is always integral to thought. No human being has ever had a thought entirely devoid of emotion.

When you follow the work of neuroscientists like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, you’re convinced that the suggestion that emotion can be disentangled from what we think of as objective reasoning is a myth—a total farce.

Thinking is emotional. Sometimes the emotions attached to thinking are pleasant. Sometimes they are not. Thinking taps into memory. Memory is encoded within emotional contexts.

So overthinking cannot mean that it is bad to think. Overthinking has to be re-considered.

What people usually mean is that thinking carries with it a responsibility: the responsibility to regulate our response to the emotions that arise through the thinking process. Those emotions are inherent in thought, especially when we are thinking about situations and circumstances of great personal consequence.

So I’m officially starting a campaign against the shaming of overthinking. We need to rebrand overthinking to what we’ll call responsible thought. And if we can define responsible thought, we’ll be better at modeling it. We’ll be better at teaching it. And that strikes me as a timely response to the social, political, and historical moment we currently occupy.

DrYemiS