Wow… is it worth it… it would be better…

Every month, 38-year-old Angela, a sales manager at a pharmaceutical firm, gives a product presentation, praising it in every way in front of a full hall of doctors. And every month, at the end of the presentation, she is overwhelmed by a stream of thoughts: “You shouldn’t have started the speech like that, they probably didn’t understand anything! And then I forgot to say about the new packages, I had to write it in red on my papers! What if they ask the lab to send another manager? Maybe ask them how my performance seemed to them … And if you talk about it with the boss? He will laugh at me, I can directly hear his laughter! In five minutes, Angela managed to work as a screenwriter, actress and director of the film, which she alone shot, edited and scrolled in her head. For Kira, a 32-year-old mother of two, a similar process of reflection was triggered by the remark of her son’s teacher: “I think it’s difficult for Misha to concentrate … Is everything all right at home?” Since then, Kira has not stopped thinking: “What did she mean? I knew that leaving Mishka on an extension was a bad idea. But I listened to his father… As usual, I succumbed to the influence!” At XNUMX am, Kira is still solving a problem that may not even exist. If you recognize yourself in these anxious women, and their anxiety is familiar to you, this is not surprising: the mental slip from which they suffer, the endless repetition in the mind of the same thing has become a common problem in our time. In English, there is even a special term for it: overthinking.

Between worry and contemplation

The Russian language also reacted to this phenomenon. He does not really approve of those who “bother” and “go in cycles”, “complicate everything”, “cling to trifles” and “make an elephant out of a fly”. It is to such people that relatives and friends usually say: “Relax”, “Forget it”, “Never mind!”. The scientific analysis of the mechanism of problems was carried out by professor of psychology at the University of Michigan (USA) Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. In particular, as a result of a study in which 1300 randomly selected adults participated, it turned out that 63% of young (20–30-year-olds) and 52% of our 40-year-old contemporaries * bother. What is this hyperactivity of the mind that drives people to alcohol and antidepressants who cannot recover from everyday stress? The American researcher considers it a manifestation of hypersensitivity, which provokes “streams of worries.” As soon as we fixate on some thought, some feeling, they swell like yeast. At first they concern an event that has just happened, then gradually spread to other situations, past and present, lumping together our most painful self-doubts.

“Often, endless scrolling replaces action: the more we want to do something, the more we tend to indulge in all sorts of reasoning,” says Gestalt therapist Nina Golosova. – We seem to push away from ourselves everything that is really important, but can cause us unpleasant experiences. That is why our “thinking” is so unproductive and, as a rule, does not lead to any result.”

The main property of endless chewing is the chaos in the head that accompanies it: the confusion unwinds in a spiral, quickly grows and turns into an excited mixture of ideas and concepts. While this condition can develop into depression or chronic anxiety over time (see p. 180), it cannot be reduced to mere sadness or anxiety. “In contrast to people who are anxious, people who bother do not ask themselves the question “What can happen?” They are absolutely convinced that the worst has already happened,” says Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.

This phenomenon has nothing to do with the process of deliberation and reflection, although intellectuals are often busy puzzling over some problem. To think means to be able to distinguish, name and correlate. “And the endless scrolling of thoughts makes it difficult to highlight what is really important and meaningful for us,” says Nina Golosova. “To the point where it becomes impossible to distinguish between really serious worries — like a serious illness of someone close — and non-essential ones, like “what does my partner think of me?” (see p. 184). “These are thoughts that have escaped from their channel, a stream that covers us and which cannot be brought into the banks, while the mind knows how to classify,” agrees the French psychoanalyst Norbert Chatillon (Norbert Chatillon). When Angela and Kira replay their problems in their heads, they try to think, but fail. Why? The answer, perhaps, is to be found in how they experience their emotions.

Listen to your emotions

For psychotherapist Catherine Aime-let-Perissol, a specialist in the most ancient part of the brain (the reptilian brain responsible for emotions), any confusion is a signal: “It indicates that we have moved from a state of openness to a state of protection. “. The unconscious feeling of being threatened (of being abandoned, ostracized, devalued…) awakens in us a deep fear and a need to immediately run away… At this moment, five hundred ideas rush through our heads in one second, and all of them are designed to mobilize us in search of a solution.

But for most of us, this ancient mobilization mechanism is overwhelmed. “Instead of listening to our fear in order to determine what needs it expresses (and fear is always justified) and respond to it, we endure it and withdraw into ourselves,” regrets Catherine Emele-Perissol. – In such “tolerance” one sees the years that have returned like a boomerang, when the restrictions that bind us were challenged (perestroika in Russia, the events of May 1968 in Europe): we made a revolution and became freer, but, having broken the cage, we at the same time destroyed everything else – our guidelines and our values. Now what to do with emotions that can be freely expressed? This is a serious issue of our time.” Norbert Châtillon agrees that fear is the prime mover to spin in the head: “This kind of ‘thinking’ allows us, paradoxically, to shield ourselves from our deepest existential anxiety.” Each of us has our own techniques to overcome such periods of mental chewing on the same thing (see p. 188). But let’s not forget that this time is sometimes very creative: bursts of intuition and awareness of important things may appear on the surface of the mental whirlpool.

*Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2000, vol. 109.