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5 Strengths of Overthinkers

Productive and unproductive thinking are like brother and sister. There are only subtle differences between them, yet the experience and outcomes are very different.

For example, research shows that ruminators and innovators both think about work outside of work. For innovators, their productive pondering results in creative problem-solving and great success. However, ruminators (e.g., people who spend an hour replaying a negative interaction they had at work) experience poor recovery from work and stuckness.

What You May Never Have Considered
Overthinkers have many of the same inherent strengths of innovators. If you ruminate or worry frequently, you may be sitting closer to the boundary of order and chaos, of misery and greatness, than you perceive. A few tweaks in how you approach repetitive thinking may be all you need to transform how well it’s working out for you.

At the end of the post, I’ll give specific pointers on how people struggling with unproductive overthinking can channel their base strengths differently to experience more of the fruits of their cognitive labor. First, let’s look at what productive and unproductive deep thinkers have in common. Understanding these principles is key to making the most of your nature.

Strengths of Overthinkers

1. Willingness to exert cognitive effort. Overthinkers don’t always recognize that other people are much less willing to exert cognitive effort than they are. Inherently, this is a strength. People don’t have productive ideas without putting in effort to do so. For example, the most creative people spend more time deliberately attempting to be creative.

Interestingly, recent research has shown a link between willingness to exert cognitive effort and higher anxiety. Endless worry is highly effortful.

2. Willingness to revisit topics repeatedly over long periods. Ruminators repeatedly replay events and experiences in a negatively toned way. Innovators also revisit and wrestle with their ideas.

Innovators know great ideas are rarely conceived and fully formed in one shot. Creative people revisit their unfinished ideas repeatedly, sometimes over months or years, as their experiences trigger more connections. Productive thinking often occurs like a jigsaw puzzle. First, there are only a few pieces in the correct spots, and the overall picture is unclear. As more puzzle pieces are slotted in, the overall image reveals itself.

The innovator may not have the right tools to solve their problem initially—for example, if, at first conception, the technology doesn’t exist to bring their idea to life. Tim Berners-Lee famously followed this pattern in inventing the internet. Years before the web existed, he created a system for linking information. Later, when computers and networks evolved, he revisited and expanded on those ideas, leading to the web.

Inherently, being willing to revisit topics is a strength. If you ruminate or worry frequently, the tips at the end of the post will help you revisit topics more productively, using patterns derived from research on innovation.

3. Willingness to contemplate experiences out of context. Productive learning requires knowledge transfer: learning a principle in one context and using it in another.

We don’t deepen our learning if we don’t consider what we learned outside of the context in which we learned it. For example, if you watch an online lecture, for optimal learning, concepts from it should pop into your mind later that day, that week, or that year.

Embedded in the concept of rumination is that the person contemplates experiences outside the context in which they occurred. If you’re thinking about why a colleague was unfriendly to you hours after it happened, that’s what you are doing. The productive and unproductive, inspiring and miserable, versions of this thought pattern are closely related.

I explained how to improve your knowledge transfer here, in the context of giving strategies for how to excel at self-improvement.

4. Willingness not to rush to cognitive closure. Cognitive closure is rushing to draw a conclusion or decide a course of action. For example, you go with your first idea, without giving it further thought.

People are more effective problem solvers when they merely consider more ways of doing something. This could be as simple as considering three potential subject lines for an important email or, even better, generating five versions. The person who considers more options before deciding on one will tend to end up with the better product, the better decision.

Hopefully, it’s quite obvious how an overthinker can selectively channel a willingness to keep thinking of new ideas beyond their first couple. The key is to apply this effort to important problems. Label more decisions as unimportant and decide quickly. Label other decisions as important and entertain more options before deciding.

5. Self-observation. Unproductive thinkers often engage in a lot of self-referential thinking. Once again, there are helpful and unhelpful versions of this, and the two types exist in closer proximity than you might be aware.

For example, to channel self-referential thinking productively, you might observe when, where, with whom, etc. good ideas come to you so you can reverse-engineer these conditions more often.

Without experimentation, ideas remain untested; it’s through action that we see if our thinking leads to meaningful results.

How to Transform From Unproductive to Productive Thinking

I’ll end with two meaty, practical takeaways you can use to move from being a ruminator to an effective, creative problem-solver:

  • First, you’ll need more, and more diverse, inputs to your thinking. Imagine a restaurant owner who draws inspiration for their menu from YouTube. Our restaurateur will have many more ideas, and higher-quality ideas, if they draw inspiration from 100 YouTube channels than from one. Research consistently shows that idea quality is a direct function of idea quantity, as I delve into in Stress-Free Productivity. There are three main ways you can have many more ideas: (1) deliberately trying to have lots of ideas, (2) utilizing more and more diverse inputs (e.g., 100 YouTube channels, not one), and (3) looking for connections between different ideas. Rumination is heavily characterized by too few inputs. The person thinks over and over about the same inputs.
  • Second, you need to pair cognitive effort with experimentation, by trying different approaches and learning from the results. Overthinkers should aim for faster cycles of experimentation. If you only experiment with a new approach every two weeks, gradually bring this time down. Netflix famously worked on this in its early stages. This helps prevent the “overthinker’s paradox,” where you’re building solutions for the universe of your brain, not the universe of reality. I wrote a blueprint for defeating the overthinker’s paradox here. In that post, I argued that overthinkers should learn from doing, not thinking. This is not because thinking is not a strength and source of resilience. It is. However, overthinkers rarely need that reminder. For your thinking to be effective, upcycle your thinking processes, as outlined here, and add faster experimentation with new approaches.
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