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Overthinking is like your brain’s attempt at being helpful — except it’s that overly intense friend who won’t stop replaying a conversation you had three days ago, convinced you offended someone because you said “thanks” instead of “thank you.” It’s the mental equivalent of spinning your wheels in mud: a lot of effort, zero forward movement. Whether it’s mentally rehearsing every possible outcome of an upcoming meeting or catastrophizing because someone took two hours to text back, overthinking gives the illusion of control while mostly just draining your energy and confidence.

At its core, overthinking is anxiety dressed up as logic. Your mind insists that if you just think it through one more time — maybe the perfect answer or the guaranteed safe path will appear. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. What you usually end up with is a headache, a self-criticism hangover, and no real solution. In therapy, we look at overthinking not as a personality flaw but as a mental habit — one that can be noticed, interrupted, and eventually replaced with approaches that are actually helpful (and less exhausting). You don’t need to think less — you just need to think differently. Using CBT, we focus on building awareness of these loops, challenging the beliefs that fuel them, and practicing more balanced, realistic thinking. The goal isn’t to shut your thoughts down — it’s to help you feel more in control of them, so they stop running the show and start working for you, not against you. 

Spiraling is what happens when your brain grabs one mildly concerning thought — like “I forgot to reply to that email” — and, within five minutes, has somehow arrived at “I’m going to lose my job, end up alone, and live in a van down by the river.” It’s like your mind hits a slippery slope coated in worst-case scenarios and just goes for it. Rational thought packs its bags, and anxiety takes the wheel, careening through an avalanche of imagined disasters with zero evidence but lots of conviction.

It’s the mental equivalent of getting lost in a maze you built yourself, blindfolded, while holding a megaphone that only broadcasts self-doubt. Logic tries to speak up, but anxiety shoved it in the closet hours ago. By the end of the spiral, you’re not even sure what the original problem was—only that it definitely means something bad is about to happen and it’s probably your fault.

What makes spiraling so convincing is how fast and emotionally charged they are. Your brain treats them like breaking news alerts: This just in — you’re failing at life! In therapy, we learn to spot these mental chain reactions for what they are: anxious storytelling, not prophecy. The goal isn’t to fight the spiral with forced positivity, but to slow it down, zoom out, and remind yourself that one bad moment doesn’t have to turn into a catastrophe. 

Therapy can help you slow down the spiral and recognize it as a pattern—not a prophecy. Together, we’ll practice tools to get grounded, challenge anxious thinking, and stop the mental tornado before it sweeps you away.