Incarcerated In Overthinking

Sometimes I wonder if we've confused having more choices with having more peace.

If you had asked a woman fifty years ago what freedom looked like, her answer might have been simple. The chance to go to university, a career she actually wanted, the ability to decide whether or when to marry, the freedom to leave a relationship that made her unhappy, to earn her own money and to build a life on her own terms. In many ways, those dreams have become reality.

Today, women are leading companies, launching businesses from their kitchen tables, earning degrees, travelling the world, raising families, choosing not to have families, buying homes, writing books, changing industries, and creating lives that previous generations could hardly have imagined. We've gained opportunities our grandmothers never had and yet, somewhere in the middle of all this progress, many of us have quietly lost something else,peace. Not because life is terrible, not because we've failed but because our minds rarely let us rest. Have you ever noticed how quickly a perfectly ordinary day can turn into an emotional marathon?

Your boss ends an email with, "Can we talk tomorrow?" Suddenly your stomach tightens. You read the message again. Was the tone different this time? Did you do something wrong? Before you know it, you're imagining losing your job, disappointing your family, and wondering whether you should have taken that other position two years ago. Or maybe a friend seems distant during lunch, they don't laugh as much as usual, and their replies are shorter than normal. By the time you get home you've replayed the conversation so many times that you've convinced yourself you've offended them somehow. You consider sending an apology, even though you have no idea what you're apologizing for. Sometimes it doesn't even take another person. You wake up at three in the morning for no particular reason. The house is quiet, everyone else is asleep. Then, without warning, your brain decides now is the perfect time to remind you about something embarrassing you said in a meeting six years ago. You cringe, you turn over in bed then another memory appears, then another. Now you're thinking about your career, your relationship, your children, your savings account, your health, your unfinished to-do list, and somehow you've ended up wondering whether you've wasted the last ten years of your life.

It's astonishing how quickly the mind can travel from one small worry to questioning your entire existence. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. I've spoken with women who seem to have everything together. They are kind, capable, intelligent people. They manage households, run businesses, care for ageing parents, support friends through difficult seasons, and somehow still remember to buy birthday presents for everyone else. People describe them as "strong." What nobody sees is what happens when the day finally becomes quiet, that's when the conversations begin. Not with another person, with themselves. The strange thing about overthinking is that it doesn't feel like overthinking while you're doing it. It feels responsible, it feels productive, it even feels necessary. You tell yourself you're just trying to understand the situation, you're trying to make sense of things, you're trying to prevent future mistakes. But somewhere along the way, thinking quietly stops serving you, instead, it starts controlling you.

I've learned that there is a huge difference between reflecting on your life and becoming trapped inside your own thoughts. Reflection helps you understand, overthinking keeps you circling the same questions until you're too mentally exhausted to do anything about them. Reflection creates clarity, overthinking creates confusion disguised as clarity. One moves you forward, the other keeps you standing still while convincing you that you're making progress. Maybe that's why overthinking is so difficult to recognise, it doesn't look dramatic. It looks like a someone lying awake in bed long after everyone else has fallen asleep, it looks like someone rereading the same text message five times before pressing send, it looks like replaying a conversation on the drive home, it looks like smiling through dinner while silently questioning every decision you've made that week. From the outside, nothing seems wrong. Inside, however, there's a storm that rarely stops and the hardest part is this: after living with that storm long enough, you begin to think it's simply who you are. You start saying things like, "I've always been an overthinker." As though it's part of your personality. I think overthinking is something many of us learned, we learned it because we wanted to avoid making mistakes. The problem is that what once protected us can eventually imprison us. The good news is that anything we can learn, we can also begin to unlearn. Not overnight, not with a few positive affirmations. But one honest thought at a time. That journey begins by recognising something simple but life-changing: Just because your mind says something over and over again doesn't mean it's telling you the truth.