Overthinking: contemplating a task or an issue with more thought than it requires.
To my ears, this sounds like a symptom of disease much deeper. And, I can tell you there is more truth to this than one might think.
Being indecisive about the pettiest things is one thing I did as a little girl confused by the multiples of choices of sweets laid before my eyes. But as a growing person, I did not expect this trait of mine to play with my mind.
We are all victims of this phenomenon of overthinking because we all striving towards perfection. In the hustle to the perfect life, I have never had the time to define perfection. Perhaps I never made time, because the standards of a perfect life, body, diet, and whatnot have already been decided by the world I have been born in.
We all overthink. Whether it is your next business move or the next paragraph in your articles. I am sure there are writers out there, who can relate to me. Editing your own work is perhaps the most difficult part of being a writer. Wanting to improve my work, I wish to delete a sentence but also can’t bring myself to wipe away those words. My compulsion is I want to perfect my work but not depart with those words, that I feel are necessary to tell the story I need to convey. It may not make sense, but ask another writer, they can explain what I mean.
Reflection on my personal productivity levels, I can tell you the following things led to procrastination for me. Chronic procrastination or let’s just say months of feeling lack of motivation, leaving me feeling inadequate and incompetent as a person. But I now realize the problem wasn’t with motivation or lack of it.
This is what led me to procrastinate.
Overthinking
Overthinking everything to perfection was my road to disaster. But now, I have accepted that I can’t make anything perfect if don’t make anything in the first place. So before thinking about how to perfect your work, you should just do the work.
Negatively overthinking is the problem. This is where we are questioning every little move before we take the step.
Constantly asking questions like What if I fail? What if I become a laughing stock?
These are not constructive questions. Rather destructive they allow us to break ourselves, they’re unproductively critical questions to ask.
Burnout
As discussed in the point above, asking destructive questions about ourselves and our work is counterproductive.
When you ask such conflicting critical answers within yourself, you are only paving a path to an emotional crisis. It is definitely much better to discuss such things with at least one other person, or perhaps even just write such thoughts down in a journal.
But whatever you choose to do, do not sit with such thoughts in your head.
Keeping such thoughts to myself left me conflicted but, also felt overwhelmed. Deep questions can unintentionally become heavy emotional burdens to carry.
Such a burden is tiring. Such thoughts co summered too much of my emotions to continue working. Or even produce work to my normal standards.
Burnout caused by overwork is curable with a break but not emotional burnout.
Such burnout confuses us to think that we are not ‘motivated’ enough to work. When that is not entirely true, we are just emotionally tired.
Resistance
In other words procrastination.
This word is thrown around a lot and we think it is only the lazy people who procrastinate on their work.
But procrastination is not an isolated thing that exists on its own. Anyone procrastinators out here will validate for me.
When procrastinating on a certain task whether that is last week’s laundry, essay due next week or just studying for the exam a week ahead, we do not sit numb. Rather we find ourselves busy with other tasks like doing a deep clean out or planting flowers in the backyard. Meaning we are willing to engage ourselves with the things that do not need doing just to avoid things that are needed.
So that tells us that procrastination is not a problem with lacking energy or motivation. But it is fear and doubts that are keeping us away from putting our time and energy into things that matter.
Imposter syndrome
The last straw but that’s not the end. Especially if you do not recognize where this self-doubt is coming from.
If we fail to find where these problems are coming, from it’ll just become cyclical.
These doubts that question our abilities, lead us to overthink because we do not trust our self enough to just get on with the work, hence we busy ourselves in thinking about how we can avoid mistakes and produce perfection. But we fail to realize that we need to produce something before we set out to perfect it.
This much unnecessary thinking will cause burnout even before we do any meaningful work and we will inevitably experience resistance to getting on with the work.
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Previously Published on medium
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