Why Do I Overthink Everything?

A chess coach has a term for what his students do when they stare at a board for eleven minutes and then play the move they saw in the first thirty seconds. He calls it stirring. Nothing new is being cooked; the pot is simply being agitated. He says the ability to distinguish thinking from stirring is worth more rating points than any opening he could teach, and that most adults never learn it in chess or anywhere else.

The diagnostic he uses is disarmingly practical. Thinking produces new information: a line you had not seen, a threat you had missed, a consequence two moves out. Stirring produces the same information at higher emotional volume. So he tells students to notice, honestly, whether the last two minutes generated anything they did not already have. If not, the analysis is finished, whatever the feelings say, and the correct action is to move.

He is precise about why the feelings say otherwise. Overthinking is not an excess of rigour; it is usually an attempt to reach certainty in a position that does not contain any. Chess is full of moves that are simply unclear — good enough, unresolvable before the clock runs out — and the student who refuses to accept unclear will spend the resource they actually need, which is time, in pursuit of a guarantee that was never on offer. In his experience the players who take longest are not the deepest thinkers. They are the ones least willing to be uncertain in public.

There is a second engine, which he sees in stronger players. They over-analyse decisions that do not matter much, because those decisions are safe places to be diligent. Deciding between two roughly equal bishop moves feels like work and cannot really be got wrong, which makes it far more comfortable than the genuinely frightening question of whether the whole plan is misconceived. Effort migrates towards the trivial. He suspects most of adult life is arranged the same way, with the four-hour deliberation over a sofa and the eleven-minute decision about a career.

What he does about it is mechanical rather than philosophical. Every decision gets a budget set before the thinking starts, sized to what is at stake, and the budget is not renegotiable once the clock is running, because the person asking for extra time is not a neutral party. He also insists on writing the candidate options down — three at most — because unwritten deliberation loops, forgets what it has already rejected, and re-examines the same option four times while feeling productive. On paper, the loop is visible and dies of embarrassment.

The part that surprised me was his view of regret. Students who overthink believe they are protecting themselves from a bad outcome, but he finds they suffer more afterwards, not less, because a long deliberation creates an expectation that the result should be correct. The player who spent thirty seconds and lost shrugs and learns something. The player who spent eleven minutes and lost is devastated, because they were not really buying a better move. They were buying immunity from having chosen, and it is the one thing no amount of thinking has ever been able to sell.