The Trap of Overthinking

The Trap(trap) of Overthinking

By Leo Babauta

For someone who doesn’t see a lot of possibilities, sometimes a choice is easy — you just choose the one that looks obvious(ˈäbvēəs).

But for someone who has an abundance(əˈbəndəns) of intelligence(inˈteləjəns), there are many more doors than that. And choosing can seem impossible. So this person starts creating a decision tree in their mind: “If I choose this, then this might happen, which means I need to decide if I want this, and then that might happen … but then this other option brings three more decisions …”

They also will research every option, which leads to more research. It becomes an endless cycle(ˈsīkəl) of thinking through options, researching it, and through the research finding even more things to think about. No decision can ever be made!

It’s also impossible to analyze(ˈanlˌīz) so many endless options, because each option contains a lot of uncertainty — you can never know how each will turn out, how important every factor(ˈfaktər) is, what the probability is of each possibility happening.

The uncertainty(ˌənˈsərtn(t)ē) in this kind of thinking is what keeps us stuck in indecision(ˌindəˈsiZH(ə)n). We fear(fi(ə)r) the uncertain outcome, and would rather have cold hard data, and much more certainty.

But we can never have the kind of certainty we’d like. We’d have to run experiments or do scientific research on every single thing before taking action, which means we’ve just missed out on opportunities as we did that research! Spending a lot of time analyzing comes with opportunity cost.

So how do we deal with this? By cutting through the overthinking with action.

https://zenhabits.net/overthink/