Four dangerous effects of overthinking

In this article, four dangerous effects of overthinking are listed.

Anxiety

To understand this one, we first have to understand what thoughts do. Your thought creates emotions of fear, anger, happiness, or excitement. Extremely anxious people are, in fact, overthinkers.

They create so many scenarios on what is going to happen in their brains. It is easy to be plagued with negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress by overthinking on a certain matter.

Worry about the future prevents you from being in the present moment. Too much anxiety can make you miserable and mentally exhausted; therefore, you will feel exhausted and sometimes depressed because your life is being caged in your emotions that were created by your thoughts.

Even worse, anxiety can also lead to suicidal ideations and suicide itself. Yes, you can literally think yourself to death.

Depression

Anxiety comes from worrying about the future, and depression comes from worrying about the past.

Of course, there might be other causes of depression, like an illness or a disorder. At its core, depression comes from you thinking about your past repeatedly, which makes you very miserable.

Some people always carry a heavy bag of bad experiences on their shoulders. They carry too much on things that ‘could have happened differently.’

The biggest lesson depressed people have to learn is that nobody can alter the past. The best we can do is to learn from our experiences and move on with a stronger and more knowledgeable mind.

Just like anxiety, depression can also lead to suicidal thoughts, or even worse, suicide.

Insomnia

Have you ever experienced wanting to go to sleep, but your active mind prevents you from doing so? Your body might be tired, but your mind is still jumping around.

What people often do is forcing themselves to go to sleep, but that will never work. Falling asleep is something that your mind cannot control. By overthinking about going to sleep or even just other anxious thoughts in general, you will lose sleep quality, and it will significantly affect your mental and physical health.

Sleep is the best recovery, which we are granted every single day.

A common symptom is waking up at around 4 AM and failing to fall back to sleep, even when you have only slept for 4 hours.

Sleep comes when you are fully relaxed and at peace. You will naturally fall asleep when your body and mind are both at its most peaceful state.

Paralysis

Overthinking can lead you to be unable to make decisions. Maybe you have thought of a thousand ways a thing could go right or wrong, but you are afraid to make the decision just in case something goes wrong.

Maybe you are starting a business, a YouTube channel, or asking a girl out on a date, you keep overthinking, and it prevents you from actually taking any actions.

Yes, she may say no, yes, your business might fail, and yes, your YouTube channel might lose subscribers. It is like shooting a basketball; if you don’t shoot, there’s zero chance that you can make it, but if you take the shot, you will be more likely to succeed.

The article has been taken from health journal medium.com