Overthinking Is a Trauma Response
And How to Move Beyond It
I know, I know—before we start the discussion of the collective pathologizing of everything, take a breath—catchy titles work for a reason. You’re here aren’t you?
You’re overthinking is both a superpower and a curse—and more than likely born out of necessity in your more formidable years.
If you’re anything like me, growing up with a highly volatile loose cannon cohabiting your family home, my guess is that you’ve developed a unique set of skills the average person doesn’t possess (and not the Liam Neeson kind of skills—well maybe for some of us).
Some may call it heightened spatial awareness. Some may call it hyper-vigilance. Some may call it learning the language of your oppressor.
Regardless of what you name it, the experience is relatively the same.
Your sense of hearing, sight and ability to sense non-verbal cues such as body-language, facial expressions, emotions and even energy is ushered forth in an early and often unsettling initiation.
You learn the nuance of someone’s footsteps and what it reveals about their current mood. You interpret the subtleties of muffled voices to gauge their physical location in the house. You excel at scanning your environment to clean-up traces of you to ensure you’re not caught in the crosshairs.
And in this process, you learn that seemingly simple, easy, benign things can now become the target for persecution and punishment—and this is where the foundation of your reality really begins to crumble.
You see, when a seemingly simple experience of a friend helping clean-up your new puppy’s accident sets the stage for an inquisition rife with blame, shame, disgust and your blatant disregard for responsibility—you begin to learn that everything and everyone is a potential threat to you and your safety (even if your friend meant well).
If something you didn’t believe was dangerous before (such as eating the last mozzarella stick at family dinner—yes, these are all real experiences) is now the catalyst for anger, shame and targeted aggression—your entire world has been effectively altered.
It’s in these moments that your mind is forced to bend. To contemplate where you went so terribly wrong to end up here—surely there were signs, surely this could have been avoided? Your mind begins to reel, frantically searching for the clues you missed that would have prevented this entire altercation.
Everything and everyone is now being called into question, being assessed, being evaluated, being categorized as safe vs. unsafe.
And thus emerges the experience of cross-examining, over-analyzing and overthinking as a necessary and critical survival tool—the hatchet of the mind, if you will.
Overthinking & Unresolved Trauma as an Adult
The overthinking spiral is deadly when it’s fully online.
From constant looping thoughts, to replaying conversations in your mind, to questioning every decision, and attempting to predict every possible outcome of a situation—your mind is locked into a perpetual Indie 500 race with no end in sight.
This endless monitoring sends an internal signal that danger is everywhere and ceasing our vigilance could result in harm, or worse—death.
An overactive mind heavily impacts how you move through the world, the kinds of relationships you’re having and how you engage with your environment.
When everything is deemed a possible threat, the tendency is to self-isolate. To minimize the level of exposure. To create a false sense of safety by decreasing the probability of potential harm.
So you stop meeting your friends for dinner. You stop connecting with your family.
You opt out of any activity deemed non-critical. You avoid new and unfamiliar places.
You overindulge in food or alcohol on the rare occasion you do make beyond the threshold of your home.
And you continue to shrink in on yourself, reinforcing the belief that isolation = safety.
Because at least when we’re alone, the voices within are more quiet than before.
What Eastern Teachings Tell Us About Trauma
Our root chakra (the energy center located at the base of the spine or your sexual center) is connected to your sense of safety and rootedness within the earth, your environment and your sense of self.
When energy is allowed to flow through this center as intended, it reinforces our sense of security, creating secure relationship attachments and evoking a sense of home.
Conversely, when our safety has been compromised or violated, our body’s natural response is to shut down or pull away. During traumatic experiences, the flow of energy in the root chakra can abandon its post and force its energy to higher energy centers in the body—and in the case of overthinking, mainly to the third eye.
Our third eye is connected to our inner vision, the ability to see truths that cannot be witnessed through the naked eye alone. It’s where our memory, imagination, dreams, intuition and gut feelings come out to play when our energy center is in alignment.
When the third eye is out of alignment, we can find ourselves fixating on certain experiences or ideas, lean into obsessive thinking and get locked into our own mental patterns while simultaneously isolating from the outside world.
This disharmony impacts the ability to access your intuition and inner wisdom, while distorting your sense of reality—creating a distrusting inner-world and fractured sense of self in the process.
The Paradox of Overthinking
In our desperate attempts to quiet the noise within by eliminating all potential threats, we fall into the belief that we are in control.
If I carefully select my environment, the people I’m around, the activities I join and the places I go, I can create a sense of safety and give my racing mind a rest.
When in reality, you are enabling an abusive relationship. Make no mistake, your overthinking is in the driver’s seat.
You are being fooled by the illusion of choice. Every choice you are making is in service of softening the overthinking. The choices available to you are only on the table because you know it will quell your internal experience.
It begs the question—if you weren’t making choices through the lens of silencing the internal chatter, what other options would be available to you?
Your overthinking is brilliantly influencing you into believing you’re taking aligned action when really you’re acting on its behalf, keeping you entrenched in its demands.
Breaking Free from the Overthinking Cycle
Each individual’s experience of overthinking is highly nuanced and uniquely layered with their own lived experiences.
So while there is no “one size fits all” approach to fixing* your overthinking, there are strategic tools you can use to begin engaging with this part of you in a productive way.
*(I use the term ‘fixing’ lightly here—there is nothing to fix, you are not broken.)
Let’s get into it…
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Step #1—Awareness
Recognizing When You're Stuck in a Thought Loop
Don’t knock the power of awareness. Our default mode, both as a species and as a society, is to avoid discomfort at all costs.
There is power in acknowledging your discomfort and voicing your experience—and I mean this quite literally. Speaking your experience out loud establishes a connection between the two hemispheres of the brain and can immediately soften your discomfort.
The next time you find yourself in the common pitfalls of overthinking, such as:
Replaying past conversations or scenarios repeatedly.
Overanalyzing decisions, big or small.
Feeling mentally exhausted but unable to shut your mind off.
Seeking constant reassurance from others before making a choice.
Consider this your invitation to pause and bring focused presence to your experience. (Keep a journal nearby to support you further on in this process.)
Begin by stating aloud, “I am aware of my overwhelm and overactive mind. I am not my thoughts. I am the experiencer of my thoughts.”
If it feels safe to do so, soften your gaze or close your eyes—I find it’s easier to connect with your inner world without external distractions.
Notice and voice aloud the bodily sensations attributed to your present state, such as, “I feel a tightness in my forehead, I have anxiety prickles up my legs, My mind feels fuzzy.”
Go through these first two steps as slowly as you can, there is no rush.
Envision pulling your whole self out of the chatter.
See if you can witness the chatter as its own independent being.
Simply be open and get curious about what you’re noticing. There’s no right or wrong way to experience your own internal chatter.
Step #2—Pressure Release
Thoughts are energy. Energy needs an outlet. Writing is thoughts made manifest.
Your overthinking and rumination does zero good without an outlet. Journaling is the outlet for the over-thinker. Using the technique of a “stream of consciousness” writing approach, the invitation is to quite literally capture every single thought in your mind with no breaks or pauses.
This isn’t the time for grammar, correct spelling or using the Oxford comma—no, this is a dedicated place to dump the sludge of your mind onto the page without judgement or critique. This is an invitation to be the most unfiltered, raw version of yourself and give you a safe place to move the energy from your mind out of the body and onto the page.
Overthinking is typically tightly coupled with perfectionism—so know that I see you, and am aware that this invitation to freely write without rules or guardrails can feel like an unknown, a threat. I’ve been there too—you’re not alone. Give it a try anyway.
After you’ve taken intentional time to pause and bring presence to your experience—capture everything that you experienced on the page.
I recommend using the “stream of consciousness approach” from above, but if you need a little nudge, below are prompts to get you started.
Did anything shift within you once you named your overwhelm?
Does the internal chatter have anything it needs to say?
What bodily sensations did you experience?
Were you able to witness your internal chatter as its own being?
If so, what was it like to witness this part of you?
What feelings or thoughts do you have about your overthinking part specifically?
What differences do you feel from before this exercise vs. now?
Take as much time as you need here—again, there is no rush. I personally let my body lead in this experience. There is almost an energetic exhale and physical relaxation signal indicating I’ve done enough and am complete with my process.
This writing technique comes from Julia Cameron’s work in The Artist’s Way. I have been using her methods for the past two years and highly recommend it. (Pro-tip: go checkout your local bookstores for a copy and support your community.)
Step #3—Create a Non-Hostile Relationship
Your overthinking was born out of necessity. While it may be presenting itself as more of nuisance and burden today, it was once a loyal protector keeping you safe.
It had a big role to play and from its perspective is doing its job perfectly, even now. The invitation here is to begin building a different relationship with your overthinking.
Please note, this is a more advanced step in the process and you may not be ready for it right now—that’s great, kudos on your awareness! Keep working the first two steps.
When you’re overthinking kicks its way through the door, can you greet it differently? Can you pause and say, “Ah.. there you are, old friend—what wisdom and concerns do you have for me right now?”
This isn’t about creating a forced relationship. This isn’t about forcing acceptance of this part of you.
This is about understanding, and eventually experiencing, that all of the “not so great” aspects of you truly believe they are helping you in their own (sometimes f*cked-up) ways.
The more space we can create internally for these parts of ourselves, the less likely they will hijack you going forward.
Continue utilizing the first two steps in this process for awhile and I’m willing to bet Step #3 will naturally emerge for you over time.
As you begin to witness your overthinking for what it is—a devout protector in service of keeping you safe—you can begin to ask yourself these questions in your writing practice:
What does my overthinking believe it’s protecting me from?
How old does my overthinking believe that I am at this moment?
What does my overthinking need to feel safe?
What’s one action I can take today to support my overthinking to feel more safe?
Rejection, isolation and avoidance are all tools that do not work in building healthy relationships—and the same is true for your internal world relationships. The more you can cease fighting and rejecting parts of yourself, the more your internal world will move into harmony.
And where there’s harmony, there’s authenticity.
Final Thoughts
You were never meant to spend your life trapped inside your mind, endlessly circling the same fears, doubts, and "what ifs."
Overthinking may have been a necessary survival tool, but it was never meant to be a permanent way of being.
The more you create space to witness it rather than be consumed by it, the more you reclaim your ability to move through life from a place of trust, rather than fear.
Your mind is powerful—but your body holds the key to your liberation.
With love & presence,
Lauren
I’d Love to Hear From You…
If this resonated with you, share your thoughts in the comments:
Do you resonate with overthinking as a trauma response?
What’s one decision you’ve been overanalyzing lately?
How does your body respond when you’re deep in overthinking?