How hypnotherapy can help you stop overthinking
Overthinking is when you’re replaying for the umpteenth time a conversation in your mind - from three days ago. Or digging deep into what someone else has done or said and trying to work out what they meant. It’s when a decision you’ve already made comes up again and again - and you re-argue the points with yourself.
You might tell yourself that you’re “overthinking things” - and you might even tell yourself to stop - but, somehow, you just don't stop.
Instead, you keep going.
Overthinking is often talked about almost as a personality quirk or a role we take on.
I hear people tell me “I know I’m overthinking this, but...” or “I’m an overthinker – that’s just the way I am”.
In a way, it’s become part of their identity.
But underneath, it's often anxiety trying to find certainty in a situation that simply doesn't have any to give.
‘Overthinking’ is not the same as ‘thinking things through’
Many people who overthink and ruminate also happen to be thoughtful and conscientious - but they get the two things mixed up.
There is a distinction.
Thinking something through - so being thoughtful - has a direction. You weigh it up, you reach a view, and, even if the view is you’ll make a decision tomorrow, something moves.
Overthinking has no direction at all. It's the same worry, dressed slightly differently each time it comes round. You can spend forty minutes on it and know no more than you did at minute one.
Overthinking tends to show up in two forms.
One looks backwards: replaying a conversation, picking apart something said, wondering if you came across badly. The other looks forwards: rehearsing everything that could go wrong with a decision, a meeting, a relationship, before any of it has actually happened. Both feel, in the moment, like problem-solving. But neither one of these is.
Why the mind won’t drop it
Overthinking isn't a character flaw – or an inability to see things clearly. It's your nervous system trying to do its job.
When we experience anxiety, we are looking for threats – and threat detection doesn't like unresolved information. If there's a possibility of something going wrong, some part of your brain registers that as an open file - a job not yet finished - and keeps pulling it back to the front of your mind to check on it again.
This isn’t your brain trying to be mean; it believes that if it keeps you circling back, it will help you to eventually land on the version of events where you're not embarrassed, or you know what happened, or you have a plan in which nothing can go wrong. None of that is possible, but the search continues.
If you’ve ever lain awake at 2am and your mind whirrs with ‘what ifs’, and ‘if onlys’, you’ll know this. At that time, there's nothing else to distract the threat-scanner.
Why “just stop thinking about it” doesn’t cut it
You might have well-intentioned friends who tell you to ‘just’ stop thinking about it. And, in fact, you might tell yourself that too.
It’s not that simple.
Something known as the white bear effect kicks in. In a study, people who were told not to think of a white bear for five minutes ended up thinking of almost nothing else (Wegner, 1987). Actively trying not to think about something requires you to keep checking whether you're thinking about it, which means you're thinking about it.
So "stop overthinking" is never realistic advice. The aim isn't to switch the thought off. It's to change what the thought is doing to you while it's there.
Two reasons why overthinking keeps going
It might help to notice what overthinking is quietly doing for you - because it must be doing something - and perhaps that’s why it's so hard to drop.
The first is that it offers a false sense of control. If we keep mulling a problem over, it feels like we’re managing it or doing something, even when nothing is actually changing. Stopping can feel like giving up or not caring, even if that overthinking is not producing anything of value.
The second reason is that overthinking offers a kind of pre-emptive armour. If we imagine every single way in which something could go wrong, some part of us believes we'll be prepared for it, or we can put in place a plan to mitigate problems. It's an understandable strategy. After all, at school and at work, we’re encouraged to forward-plan, to build contingency plans, and to work out how we’re going to approach any task. And it's also an exhausting strategy – and it might be that we suffer the bad outcome twice, once in our head and once for real. But often the ‘bad’ things we imagine don’t happen and yet we have already experienced the pain of them.
What helps
Because overthinking is driven by the nervous system rather than by logic, arguing with the thoughts directly tends not to get very far. You can win the argument and still feel just as anxious five minutes later. What tends to work instead is addressing the state the looping happens in, not just the content of the loop.
That starts with settling the body.
A nervous system that's in threat-mode will keep generating ‘unfinished business’ thoughts regardless of how sound your reasoning is. But calming the physical sense of alarm - through breath, movement, grounding, or hypnotherapy - often does more than any amount of reasoning with yourself.
It also helps to give the mind something concrete to do instead of endless circling.
I find a useful reframe in asking: is there an action available right now, or not? If there is, take it, however small, and let that be where the thinking stops for today. If there isn't - if the thing you're circling is genuinely out of your hands, or hasn't happened yet, or already happened and can't be changed - then the task isn't to solve it; it's to notice that your mind is trying to solve the unsolvable, and gently redirect it. That's a skill, not a switch, and like any skill, it gets easier with practice rather than with force.
You're not stuck here
If you overthink, it doesn't mean there's something that needs fixing. It simply means your mind has learned that circling equals safety, and hasn't yet learned that it's allowed to stop.
But that won't happen by simply trying harder to think your way out of it - that's the very same move that got you into overthinking. Instead, by giving your nervous system the go ahead to put down the thought, overthinking can be reduced.
How hypnotherapy helps
Hypnotherapy can be useful because it works below the level of the debate we are having with ourselves.
Rather than trying to out-argue an anxious thought while still in an anxious state, it works with the nervous system directly, so the sense of alarm underneath the thoughts has somewhere to settle.
Once that happens, the thoughts that felt urgent and unfinished tend to lose their grip much faster, because the body isn't insisting there's still danger to account for.
If you’ve not yet experienced hypnosis as part of hypnotherapy, you might have a mix of feelings about it such as curiosity, excitement and nervousness as well as questions about what happens. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.
And, if you’re thinking of booking a hypnotherapy session with me, you can find out what expect in the first session by reading my article.
Your next step
If overthinking is something you recognise in yourself and you'd like some support to reduce this, I'd be glad to talk it through - do get in touch.
References:
Wegner, D.M., Schneider, D.J., Carter, S.R. and White, T.L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), pp.5–13. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5
Common Questions About Overthinking
Why can’t I stop overthining, even when I know I’m doing it?
Because knowing doesn't switch it off. Overthinking isn't controlled by logic, it's driven by your nervous system, which registers unresolved worries as an open file and keeps pulling your attention back to check on it. Telling yourself to stop just adds another layer of checking, which is why "just relax" rarely works. What helps is calming the physical sense of alarm underneath the thoughts, not arguing with the thoughts themselves.
Can hypnotherapy actually help with overthinking?
Yes, because it works with the nervous system directly rather than trying to reason you out of a loop while you're still anxious. Once the underlying sense of threat settles, the thoughts that felt urgent and unfinished tend to lose their grip much faster, since your body isn't still insisting there's danger to account for.