by Robert Leary
The pressure only gets stronger as we enter college, if that is your path. Balancing social life with academic life is a struggle that many lose, resulting in a student dropping out of college. Remaining focused and achieving good grades and that long-awaited bachelor’s degree grants passage into the realm of professional work, where a whole new world of social pressure and expectation awaits.
As you can see, much of our overthinking may very well stem primarily from a distorted perception of ourselves in relationship to others in our professional or social environments. This pressure begins early in life and continues as we are constantly bombarded with images and messages in the media dictating what success should look and feel like.
Let’s take a look at some more possible triggers for overthinking.
Relationships
Depending on your age, overthinking in romantic relationships can range from things like, “Does she like me?” to “I just know he’s coming home late from work all the time because he’s having an affair.”
Much of the overthinking that occurs in the minds of people in relationships turns to emotionally painful sources of such feelings as jealousy and low self-esteem. Just as we are bombarded with images of “success” in the media, we are also bombarded with what it should look like to be in a perfect relationship. A young girl who obsesses over her looks in high school may later struggle in a relationship because she perceives other beautiful women as constant threats. Young boys who worry about making money may later struggle in a relationship because he thinks making money and working are more important than quality time spent with a partner.
Overthinking in relationships can cause a lot of problems, and many of them can be quite emotionally draining. When the thoughts taking over one’s mind begin to cloud reality, you have the beginning of a self-destructive cycle of negative emotions and perceptions. Outside influences have a way of wheedling themselves into our minds and we begin comparing our relationships to those we see around us, on Facebook, or in other media sources. This is a mistake because every person and relationship is unique—there is no one-size-fits-all system for how a perfect relationship should work. You know you are overthinking when you get mad at your partner because he or she doesn’t look at you the same way some famous celebrity looks at his or her partner. Comparing your romantic life to that of others is a great way to miss out on what makes yours special. I’m not saying you should ignore problems in your relationship. I’m saying you shouldn’t try to compare those problems with others’ problems as a way to solve them.
Each of us is unique, and we all deal with emotions and problems in different ways. Different doesn’t mean wrong, but in a society that hides the challenges of a relationship behind the façade of a perfect one, people may experience quite the brutal slap in the face once they move past the “honeymoon phase,” and begin to realize it’s not all roses and stuffing cake in each other’s faces. Relationships aren’t supposed to be easy and breezy like the couple makes it seem on all those vacation resort commercials. Comparing and overthinking just makes the challenge more difficult—when the real necessity is communication.
Let’s look at two more big sources of overthinking. The first is past trauma.
Trauma
Never a fun topic to broach, but a very important one if this is the cause of overthinking. As mentioned before, we’ve all experienced some degree of worry when it comes to the safety of ourselves or our loved ones. We worry about our children and their safety, about our spouses, and our aging parents’ health, etc. The problem arises when these worries become an ever-present source of stress and anxiety—when the overthinking becomes chronic.
Many adults are affected for the rest of their lives after experiencing some kind of trauma. Many times, the death of a parent can lead to lifelong mindsets and perspectives that can hinder a person’s openness and ability to move past painful emotions. Abuse as a child is a serious threat to a person’s mental wellbeing and usually needs to be addressed throughout the person’s life through treatments such as therapy. When a trauma occurs, it takes ahold of the mind in a way that is very difficult to forget or move past. As a result, the individual may overthink in terms of comparing or viewing other events throughout her life through the lens of that trauma. For example, abuse of a child by an older male may distort a person’s ability to deal with men in the future without feeling things like fear, hatred, or aggression. These reactions encompass a much greater threat to overall wellbeing. Many adults manage to compartmentalize as we talked about earlier, or else completely forget or ignore the trauma until it crops up unexpectedly later in life. This is an example of what we call “thought suppression.” Sometimes, things are too painful to face, but many believe that the lifelong struggle to contain such pain will only lead to roadblocks in the progress of a person’s life. In other words, eventually, the pain must be addressed.
On the level of overthinking, past trauma introduces thoughts and feelings about future events that have no bearing on the present. The fact that you were in a car accident and sustained horrific injuries as a teenager does not mean that every time you get in a car for the rest of your life, you’re probably going to get in another accident, but it feels this way. We let the influence and strength of those past emotions and fears seep into the events of our lives, even before they’ve happened. Overthinking in anticipation of something bad happening is a trademark symptom of chronic overthinking.
Finally, I must mention arguably the most universal influence on overthinking—social media addiction.
Social Media
We are all familiar with the recent rhetoric surrounding how everyone is getting addicted to social media. Many of us can’t go more than an hour without checking Facebook or our Twitter feeds to see what’s new and who liked our latest posts, etc. What you may not realize is that addiction to social media is a powerful source of overthinking. We’ve discussed such habits as comparing ourselves to others throughout our lives. One of the easiest ways to cultivate this habit is through social media.
When we look at a friend’s Facebook page, odds are, we are seeing the pretty, superficially imposed perfect life that they want us and others on the internet to see. We see pictures of people that seem like they are off-the-cuff. But most people take a lot of time preparing their selfies, positioning themselves just right. Many women put on makeup then mess around with the filters until they present the most ideal versions of themselves they can imagine. You don’t see the challenges and stress in that person’s life, you just see what they want you to see. This can lead to many of us, once again, comparing our lives to the lives of others who seem prettier, more successful, happier, richer, etc. Those negative feelings like jealousy and self-doubt creep up on us again, just like they did when we were younger and comparing ourselves to the prom queen or the football captain.
All of these thoughts build up over time, and eventually, they may take control, leading to a negative and self-destructive habit of overthinking.
Now that we’ve pinpointed some of the major triggers for overthinking, let’s take a look at the phenomena that all that internet surfing and Facebook scrolling contribute to—information overload.
Chapter 3: Information Overload
Have you ever experienced a sensation of feeling burned out after being inundated with images, text, and video in social media or from news sites? I’ve known many people over the years who admit that they sometimes spend several hours a day, as many as 4 or 5 straight hours surfing the internet, reading up on the latest celebrity news, maybe a couple of world news stories, scrolling through the entire Facebook feed on their phones, watching the most popular YouTube videos or latest music videos from their favorite bands, reading all the nasty Twitter feeds between celebrities that hate each other, blah, blah, blah. After a while, your eyes may glaze over and feel like glass from taking in all of that information.
Social media addiction is kind of a buzz term that has gained in popularity a
s professionals in psychology and social sciences observe the effects of social media on human minds and on society as a whole. We’ve become hopelessly addicted to the feeling of “present-ness” that accessing social media can afford. When we read a new story on someone who is considered high profile, we feel like we are part of something going on here and now that is relevant and immediate and full of kinetic energy. The truth is, we really don’t know those celebrities, even if they choose to share every single intimate detail of their day-to-day lives with us. They want us to feel that way because this means they retain a huge number of followers and can get paid the big bucks for their visibility and access to huge markets. These entrepreneurs of social media are called “influencers,” and the realm is no longer limited to movie stars or billionaire playboys and girls. Now, we have thousands of niche groups who follow a specific person in social media because of their appeal as role models in fashion, their humor, or other facets of themselves they’ve chosen to market successfully.
So why do I bring up this social media phenomenon here? Well, this is a great example of how taking in a constant barrage of information from the internet can lead to information overload. While information overload has a quite scientific and precise definition regarding its effect on the brain, it may also be identified through a discussion of how social media affects our inner lives and thoughts, contributing to our overall sense of self and self-worth in an overwhelming world.
Let’s follow this line of thinking down the rabbit hole and see where we end up.
Our brains are complex to a degree that we are only beginning to understand. The information we take in on a day-to-day basis is largely forgotten and discarded shortly after processing it. When we spend time on social media, we are taking in an endless stream of information that is simultaneously having a profound effect on the way we think and being discarded as ultimately useless information once we’ve seen it. As mentioned before, we experience a high when we read new information on social media that seems to be happening “now” because everyone wants to feel like they are a part of the cutting edge of reality. No one likes to be the “last to know” or to feel like we are behind the times, so to speak. In a more general sense, a lot of the time we just feel bored and want some entertainment, right? Well, let’s look at this a bit deeper.
Why is it that those teenagers at the mall can’t seem to handle a single face-to-face conversation without checking their phones every few minutes? Well, it’s part of the social media addiction, sure. But how did that addiction form?
When we inundate ourselves with information like this, we tend to need more and more stimuli to satisfy that desire and maintain that high. You may feel this yourself with a little experiment.
If you know you are one of those people who likes to check Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or whatever else on an hour-by-hour (or minute-by-minute) basis, take your phone from your purse or pocket or from where it’s sitting next to you on the counter and go put it in a place in another room and make sure it is on silent. Leave it there and come back to this book. Let’s see how you feel a little later. Maybe this will give you some insight into your own relationship with social media!
Social media or technology addiction forms the same way drug addiction forms. That little sound indicating we’ve got a message on our phones triggers the same areas of pleasure that certain drugs activate in our brains. The more we form a routine and habit of checking our phones and feeding our brains with images and texts, the more our brain asks us for more…and more, and more. Eventually, we may get to a point where we really don’t know what to do with ourselves if our phone breaks or dies or we lose it somewhere at a party. Those few hours or days without a phone feel like a traumatic disconnection from life and the world.
But the important thing to realize is that—it’s all an illusion. Those social media sites and feeds are designed to keep you wanting more and to keep you addicted. Professionals in marketing know just how long to make those ads on Facebook that nestle themselves in your feeds after you’ve bought something similar on another site. Tabloid stories know how to phrase the title of a story to get you to click on it and earn them views, which translate to dollars. Influencers learn what their followers like and give them more of what keeps them coming back, whether its tips on makeup, sketch comedy, parodies or famous celebrities, video game professional feeds, etc. There is something for everyone out there. It is an amazingly addictive and inevitable result of modern technology.
So what’s so bad about information overload? We like to watch YouTube and keep up with people’s lives on Twitter, what’s so wrong with that? Well, let’s take a deeper look at what’s happening in our brains as a result of information overload and how it can affect important aspects of our ability to make decisions.
Information Overload and Decision-Making
Did you know that, according to a survey conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, 25% of work time for the average worker is spent managing email? I’ll be honest, when I first read this, I was not surprised. Many of my friends are professionals in various fields and receive hundreds of emails a week. Staying on top of this mountain of communication sounds overwhelming to me, let alone trying to do your job at the same time.
We’ve talked about information overload in regard to social media, and I started with this topic because it might be the most accessible way to broach the topic. Now, let’s look at information overload from a different angle many of us can relate to—information overload at work.
In the email scenario, I can’t personally imagine trying to sort through that much email, especially if half of them are expecting a response. Let’s go ahead and add to this scenario, though. You work in an office, receiving tons of email a day, but your position also dictates that you answer the phone throughout the day, directing each caller to the appropriate extension, answering questions about the business, etc. On top of this, you are expected to sort through a large stack of paperwork and fill out forms regarding customers’ financial information and accounts. Sounds like quite the job, doesn’t it? Let’s imagine you are quite overwhelmed at first, but eventually you figure out a way to handle all of that information. And you know what? It feels good. It feels great to feel like you can handle that much of a workload and walk out at the end of the day with your sanity. But…how much sanity do you really have left at the end of the day? There may be something going on that you don’t even realize yet.
Information overload has a chronic effect on our ability to make decisions. And much of the time, we don’t even know it’s happening.
I used to work in a coffee shop as a teenager, and one of the things I prided myself on was my ability to multitask. Eventually, I started working long shifts by myself, handling lines of customers that sometimes stretched out the door and down the hallways! I soon learned to work very, very quickly. I would juggle making drinks and handling cash like some kind of food service ninja. I was proud of it, too. I felt like I was working really hard and accomplishing something that demanded skill and finesse. And it certainly does. The problem was that after a while, I started to notice symptoms of “burnout,” which is the eventual result of information overload, which is associated with chronic multitasking.
Much like burnout resulting from watching too many YouTube videos at once, the demand I was putting on my brain’s processing power was getting to be too much. At a certain point, this burnout manifests into making mistakes. Perhaps I get tired toward the end of my shift and make incorrect change for a customer, who subsequently becomes very upset, exacerbating and transforming physical and mental fatigue into emotional fatigue. You may be starting to see where this is going.
Information overload leads to burnout leads to poor decision-making, oftentimes when we don’t even suspect it’s happening.
We’re all familiar with the image of a “workaholic,” someone who seems to work nonstop, obsessed with the idea that they can be a perfectionist at what they do, never taki
ng a break. What we learn very quickly, as either an observer or as the workaholic himself, is that this is not sustainable. Eventually, our brains start to send signals of fatigue. At this point, we can either accept that we need to slow down or ignore the signal and keep going. This is where bad decision-making comes into play.
Bad decision-making can refer to a lot of different things, not just related to work, but in our relationships with others. As discussed earlier in the chapter on sources of overthinking, an inundation of information related to how a relationship should look can lead to poor decision-making and belief systems when it comes to our personal lives. At a certain point, it becomes very difficult to step outside of the information we’ve been flooding our minds with in order to see our own situations clearly.
As divorce rates show, many people seem to start out with a conviction that they know what they want and need from a person, then somewhere down the line, that changes. Is this shift influenced by what we see in other people’s relationships? Those superficial and doctored portrayals of happiness and perfection in social media? I personally think there is a good chance that this plays at least a partial role in the gradual breakdown of many relationships that may have started out strong. It’s not surprising that in a society that markets to people with the message that “you’re worth it” and that you should never settle for less than the American dream—perfect marriage to a beautiful, sexy spouse, perfect kids, big house, dream job, and a nice car—the challenges of a real relationship prompt some to give up. Maybe we decide that there just has to be someone else out there who will give us that perfect, easy, uncomplicated life we see in movies.