How to Stop Overthinking Everything

There is a chess coach in my city who teaches teenagers, and the first thing he does with a promising student is take away their time. Not add it. He sets a clock with far less on it than they are used to and makes them play a dozen games under it. The students hate this, because they have been told their whole lives that thinking is good and more thinking is better. Then they look at the games afterwards and discover something inconvenient: their fast decisions were, on average, about as good as their slow ones, and their very slow ones were noticeably worse.

He has an explanation that goes well beyond chess. In any position, he says, you see the strong candidate moves in the first thirty seconds. That is what pattern recognition is for, and it is doing most of the real work. The next few minutes are useful: you check the obvious refutation, you calculate a line or two. But past a certain point you are no longer analysing the position. You are analysing your own anxiety about the position, and the mind, offered nothing new to work with, starts generating reasons to distrust the good move you already found. The third hour of deliberation does not produce a better decision. It produces a worse one with more paperwork attached.

Overthinking, in his account, is not thinking too much. It is thinking past the point where new information stops arriving. That distinction matters, because it gives you a test that is actually usable. When you catch yourself going round again, the question is not am I being indecisive. The question is: has anything entered my head in the last twenty minutes that I did not already know? If the answer is no, you are not deliberating. You are pacing.

The remedy he teaches is unglamorous and works. First, decide in advance how much time a decision is worth, and be honest that most decisions are worth astonishingly little. A ten-minute decision given a week is not treated more seriously; it is treated more anxiously. Second, write down the two or three real options in one sentence each. The act of writing collapses the fog, because a worry can circle indefinitely inside a head and cannot survive being made specific on paper. Third — and this is the part his students find liberating — ask what the actual cost of being wrong is. In chess, the honest answer is usually a slightly worse position, not defeat. In life it is usually a wasted afternoon, an awkward email, or a month you would have spent somewhere else.

He also insists on distinguishing the reversible from the irreversible, and says most people get the proportions exactly backwards. They agonise for weeks over choices they could undo in an afternoon — a job they could leave, a course they could drop, a flat with a six-month lease — and make genuinely irreversible ones, about who they spend their years with and what they do to their health, almost by drift. If you are going to be a careful thinker, spend the care where the door actually locks behind you.

The line of his I remember best came after a student lost a game she had spent nineteen minutes on a single move to reach. He did not tell her the move was bad; it was fine. He said: you spent nineteen minutes buying certainty, and certainty was not for sale, and now you have neither the certainty nor the nineteen minutes. Most overthinking is an attempt to purchase something the world does not stock. You put the money down anyway, and the only thing you reliably lose is the time.