7 Signs of Overthinking (A Therapist Explains)

If you feel like your brain is always running in a way that feels exhausting, overthinking might be the cause! And if you’re not sure if overthinking is something you’re struggling with, there are 7 signs of overthinking all the time in my therapy practice. Once you know the signs, you’ll be able to understand where your overthinking comes from and get the support you actually need.

The Top 7 Signs of Overthinking I See as a Licensed Therapist

1.  Your thoughts seem to loop over and over again.

The clinical term for this is rumination, and it's one of the most exhausting experiences my clients describe. Ruminating thoughts tend to zero in on past events: a conversation you had yesterday, a decision you made last year, or a social interaction that didn't feel right.

Then they replay on a loop while your nervous system activates right along with them. Your heart rate climbs, your palms get sweaty, and your breathing gets shallow, even though whatever you're replaying already happened.

What makes rumination so hard to break is that it feels productive. Your brain is trying to solve something, to figure out what went wrong or how to prevent it next time.

But rumination doesn't actually lead to solutions. It leads to more rumination. If you've ever laid awake at 2am replaying a conversation from three days ago and ended up feeling worse by morning, that's rumination doing what rumination does.

2. Assuming the worst-case scenario will always happen. 

This is called catastrophizing, and it's less about being a pessimist and more about your brain genuinely believing that the worst outcome isn't just possible. It's inevitable. I sometimes describe it to clients as your brain writing a disaster movie script and then insisting it's a documentary.

A common example: you send an important email and don't hear back for two days. A non-overthinking brain might think, they're probably busy. An overthinking brain starts building a case: they're ignoring me, I said something wrong, I'm going to get fired, I'll never recover professionally.

Each thought feels more certain than the last, even with zero evidence. The fear isn't just that something bad could happen. It's that you feel sure it will. That certainty is what separates catastrophizing from ordinary worry.

3. Not being able to commit to a decision. 

This one often gets mislabeled as indecisiveness, but in my experience, it's not that my clients can't make decisions. It's that they can't trust the decisions they make. You might decide something, feel okay about it for a moment, and then immediately start questioning whether it was right.

Then you decide again. Then you question that. By the time you've gone back and forth fifty times, you're exhausted and no closer to peace.

Clinically, this is called decision paralysis, and it often shows up around decisions that feel high-stakes. But over time, it can creep into smaller choices too, like what to order at a restaurant or which route to take to work.

The size of the decision stops mattering. What matters is whether you can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing if you chose "correctly."

4. Assuming you can’t be trusted to make the right decision. 

There's often a deeper belief underneath decision paralysis, and it sounds something like: other people know better than me. This belief can come from a lot of places: being criticized heavily for past choices, growing up in an environment where your judgment was frequently questioned, or simply receiving the message (directly or indirectly) that you weren't capable.

When this is part of the picture, overthinking becomes a way of trying to outsource your decision-making, even internally. You might spend a lot of time imagining what someone else would do, asking multiple people for their opinion and feeling more confused after, or putting off decisions entirely because the idea of getting it wrong feels genuinely unbearable.

5. Making decisions based on what you think other people will approve of. 

This goes one step further than seeking input. This is structuring your choices almost entirely around what will keep other people happy or prevent them from pulling away.

Underneath this pattern is often a fear of abandonment or rejection: if I make a choice they don't like, they'll leave, or stop loving me, or think less of me.

One thing I see a lot in my practice is clients who are so focused on managing other people's reactions that they've lost touch with what they actually want. They genuinely struggle to answer the question "what do you want?" because that question has felt irrelevant or even dangerous for a long time.

This pattern tends to be especially strong for people who grew up in unpredictable or emotionally volatile households, where reading the room and adjusting accordingly was a survival skill.

6. Not being able to tell the difference between a difficult experience and a mistake. 

This one is subtle but really important. When you're in overthinking mode, there's often a belief running in the background that if something went badly, you must have done something wrong.

It's a way of trying to maintain a sense of control. If everything that goes wrong is your fault, then theoretically you can prevent bad things from happening in the future by just doing better.

The problem is that life is full of genuinely hard situations that no one could have navigated perfectly. Sometimes relationships end not because of what you said, but because of timing or compatibility. Sometimes projects fail because of circumstances outside your control.

But when overthinking is your default, your brain will go into what I call Performance Review Mode, scanning for every possible mistake you made and every way you could have done it differently, rather than allowing the possibility that sometimes, things are just hard.

7. Feeling like your mind is a prison you can’t break out of.

This is usually where clients find me, after they've tried everything. They've journaled, they've meditated, they've made lists, they've talked to friends. And the overthinking is still there, still louder than everything else, still winning.

Overthinking at this level is usually a sign that your nervous system has been in a threat-detection state for a long time, and the strategies that work for mild worry often aren't enough to touch it. The hamster wheel feeling, where your brain simply won't stop no matter what you do, is a signal that something deeper needs attention.

“What do I do if I can’t stop overthinking?”

Here are two options that you truly can’t go wrong with!

Option 1: Check out this post on How to Stop Overthinking for some practical tips you can start using today. I’d recommend you either bookmark it, or take a screenshot some of the tips and make it your new phone wallpaper.

Option 2: If you live in Colorado or Oregon and are curious about therapy, you can schedule a no-pressure consultation call with me. This gives us a chance to chat and to see if it makes sense for us to move forward with booking a full appointment.

If you live in another state or country, you’ll need to search for a therapist who’s licensed to practice where you currently live.

Hey there! I’m Halle, an anxiety therapist based in Longmont, Colorado.

But I’m actually licensed to practice in both Colorado and Oregon! If you’re ready to stop overthinking, I’d be so stoked to support you.