Why do I overthink everything? What the Big Five says

Thinking hard, moving nowhere

It's 11 at night and you are still replaying a conversation from lunch. Or you have reread the same email six times and it still isn't sent. Or you weighed two options for so long that the deadline chose for you. You are thinking hard, and nothing is moving.

Most pieces about overthinking hand you a list of tricks. This one starts a step earlier, with the question underneath: why does your mind do this more than other people's seem to? The Big Five, the personality model academic psychology actually uses (how the science works), has a fairly clear answer, and it isn't that something is wrong with you.

Psychologists call the looping kind of overthinking rumination, or more broadly repetitive thought. There is no dial called overthinking. What the dials do is make it more or less likely, and change what it is about. Traits predict; they don't determine. Read what follows as a map, not a verdict.

The main dial: Neuroticism

Neuroticism is how strongly and how often you feel the hard emotions, and how long they take to fade. The name is old and unkind. The dial is ordinary: everyone sits somewhere on it, and neither end is the good one.

Research has long found it closely tied to rumination, and one set of three studies looked at why. People higher in Neuroticism tended to feel more hard feelings at once when they were down, and that crowding went strongly with rumination (Hervás & Vázquez 2011). It may be why overthinking rarely feels like one worry. It feels like four, arriving together, each asking to go first.

The dial also shapes what the overthinking is about. In a meta-analysis of 77 studies, Neuroticism went with perfectionistic concerns, such as worry over mistakes and doubts about your own actions (r ≈ .50) (Smith et al. 2019). Rereading the email you already sent lives here. If things land harder on you in general, this dial has a piece of its own: why am I so sensitive.

Rumination and reflection are different habits

Not all going-over is the same thing. Trapnell and Campbell split thinking about yourself into two dispositions, rumination and reflection, and found them unrelated, with different motives behind each. The split may explain an old puzzle: people who think about themselves a lot tend both to know themselves better and to feel worse (Trapnell & Campbell 1999).

This is where Openness comes in. Openness is how far your mind reaches for ideas, including ideas about yourself. In Trapnell and Campbell's data, the curious, turning-it-over kind went with Openness, and the anxious, on-repeat kind with Neuroticism (Trapnell & Campbell 1999). If your Openness is high, some of what you call overthinking may be your mind doing what it likes to do.

The difference matters, because the brooding kind has a poor record. A review of the research on rumination found evidence that it makes problem solving worse and gets in the way of acting (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco & Lyubomirsky 2008). It feels like work. Mostly, it isn't.

When it sounds like high standards

Conscientiousness is the dial for order, follow-through and care. It brings its own flavor of overthinking, and the research draws a useful line through it. In the same meta-analysis, perfectionistic strivings, such as high personal standards, went with Conscientiousness (r ≈ .44), while the concerns went with Neuroticism (Smith et al. 2019).

So high standards on their own aren't the loop. Our reading is that the loop starts where the standards meet the doubt: high Conscientiousness wants it right, and high Neuroticism isn't sure it ever will be. If that sounds like you, the move isn't to lower your standards. It is to decide, while you're calm, what done looks like, so the doubt has somewhere to stop.

What the worry is for

Overthinking has a job, and sometimes it does it. In four studies, people higher in Neuroticism were more likely than people lower on the dial to choose to worry more before a demanding task, though not before an easy one, and the last study suggested the worry may have helped them perform (Tamir 2005).

A review of repetitive thought found that the same habit can lead to planning and preparation, or to more worry and low mood. One of the things that separates the two is how abstract or concrete the thinking is, and the review argues that the concrete kind is the constructive one (Watkins 2008).

In plain terms, abstract thinking sounds like why: why did I say that, why am I like this. Concrete thinking sounds like what and how: what exactly happened, and what is the next thing I could do. That line is the most practical thing in this piece.

What helps, in small pieces

None of this means you should try to stop thinking. It means steering the thinking toward the kind that goes somewhere. The moves below are our reading of the findings above, not a tested method.

When you catch yourself asking why, swap it for what. Not why did that meeting go badly, but what exactly happened, and what is one thing to try on Thursday. When a decision keeps going round, give it a finish line before you start: two options, one evening, then pick. When the doubt is about quality, write down what done looks like before you begin, and hold the work to that instead of to the feeling.

Can the dial itself move? A little. Emotional stability is the trait that shifts most in intervention studies, and even then modestly: about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months (Roberts et al. 2017).

What moves it is doing, not deciding. In a 15-week study, completing weekly challenges predicted trait change, and accepting them did not (Hudson et al. 2019). One small, concrete thing, done often. That is the whole design of a Daily Action inside the Journey, our paid subscription, and it is why we don't promise a transformation.

When it's more than overthinking

A personality dial describes a tendency. It can't see the year you've had, and sometimes the thinking is loud because the situation is hard, not because of you. Our twenty questions are also a short form, noisier than a long one, and we say so on the science page.

If the thinking won't switch off most nights, or it has started to crowd out sleep, work or the people you love, please talk to a doctor. A personality test is the wrong tool for that.