Overthinking is something that everyone is known to do at one point or another in their lifetime. We're all guilty of it and I for one am no exception.
I overthink everything and anything. And it gets me in a lot or trouble and uncomfortable situations most of the time. Every single time I overthink something and I have an idea of what is happening in my head, I'm ALWAYS wrong. Not almost always wrong, not some of the time wrong, but always wrong.
I don't know where it all started from but I have countless times where I almost completely fudged up my friendships because of overthinking. One example involves one of my best friends, and in this example, I'd been hanging out with her a lot and I had texted her at like 10 o'clock the night before asking if she wanted to hang and she never answered me back. I started over thinking it and started to question myself.
"What if she thinks I'm being too clingy?"
"What if I'm annoying her and my other friends too?"
"What if she doesn't actually want to have movie night with me?"
"What if I'm forcing her to be friends with me?"
So for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to text her and say something along the lines of this:
"I think I've been a little annoying lately. About hanging out and stuff because we don't run in the same circles and don't have any classes together. So I'm sorry for that - I'm just gonna distance myself a bit because I know how much work u have to do and study for and idk if I'm overreacting (i probably am) [I WAS] but I'm not trying to start drama and i still want to be friends and I value our friendship which is why I'm freaking out but me freaking out probably isn't going to make you want to stay friends with me so I'm just gonna stop now."
Long story short, she fell asleep and forgot to text me back. And I was so insecure about myself that from her not texting me back I derived that I was annoying her and she didn't want to be friends with me anymore.
The tiniest thing can set it off and it sucks because one person may see it as something small but another person can take the smallest of actions and attach assumptions to it like it's gorilla glue. And when people sometimes see their friends overreacting or overthinking something they say, "just stop overthinking it." But saying that to someone who overthinks everything is basically the equivalent to telling someone not to stress out about midterms during midterm week. It just makes it worse.
For me personally, I look at the facts before I start overthinking something.
... or at least I try to. Sometimes it doesn't always work but looking at the facts of a situation may actually really help. Take my situation with my friend; if I had looked at the facts before I sent her that text it would have looked something like this.
Okay facts:
1. She was fine the night before.
2. She didn't show any indication that she was angry at me.
3. She's probably studying with her phone on airplane mode to get ahead.
4. She has a 7:30 tomorrow so she might be sleeping.
If I had done that, then I probably would have just texted her the next day asking if she wanted to grab lunch. But I'm me and I just assumed I was doing something wrong. Looking at the facts is a great way to avoid overthinking, despite how hard it is to master sometimes, and other times to avoid overthinking, people just have to realize everything isn't about them in the sense that not everything that happens is their fault.
