You know that thing where your boss sends you a vague email — “Hey, can we meet Friday?” — and suddenly you’ve already rehearsed being fired three different ways before you’ve even opened your laptop?
Yeah. That’s overthinking. And if you’re here reading this, you probably know the cycle way too well.
The good news is that overthinking isn’t some personality flaw you’re stuck with forever. It’s a habit. A deeply grooved, annoyingly automatic habit — but a habit nonetheless. And habits can be changed. That’s exactly what licensed therapist Emma McAdam breaks down in her popular video 6 Therapy Skills to Stop Overthinking Everything, and honestly, it’s some of the most practical mental health advice I’ve come across.
Let’s get into it.
First, What Even Is Overthinking?
It shows up in a few different flavors. There’s rumination — that thing where you replay a past mistake on a loop like a bad song you can’t unhear. There’s worry — anxiety about the future dressed up as “being prepared.” There’s decision paralysis — overanalyzing every option until you’re too exhausted to choose anything. And then there’s the classic social anxiety spiral: “Why did I say that? Why do I talk like that? Does everyone think I’m weird?”
Sound familiar? Thought so.
Here’s what’s important to understand: your brain isn’t broken. It’s actually doing exactly what it’s designed to do — scan for threats, prepare for problems, keep you safe. The trouble is, it can’t always tell the difference between real danger and a mildly awkward conversation from three weeks ago. So it keeps running the simulation, over and over, just in case.
The result? You’re exhausted, distracted, and stuck — not safer.
6 Skills That Actually Help (According to Therapy, Not Instagram)
1. Notice and Name It
This sounds almost too simple, but stay with me.
Most of the time, we’re deep in an overthinking spiral before we even realize it’s happening. We’re just… thinking. Feeling bad. Worrying. It doesn’t feel like a “habit” — it feels like reality.
The first step is learning to catch yourself in the act and say, out loud if you can, “I’m overthinking right now.” That’s it. Just name it. You can even ask a trusted person in your life to gently call it out when they notice it in you.
There’s something surprisingly powerful about labeling what’s happening. It creates a small but important distance between you and the thought — suddenly you’re the one watching the spiral, not just lost inside it.
2. Schedule Your Worry (Yes, Really)
I know. It sounds a little absurd. But this one actually works.
Instead of fighting your brain every time an anxious thought tries to sneak in, you make a deal with it: “Not now. We’ll deal with this at 6 PM.” Then when 6 PM comes, you actually sit down, think through your worries deliberately, and then close the laptop on them.
What this does is give your brain permission to let go temporarily. You’re not suppressing anything — you’re just postponing. And when you do your scheduled “worry session,” you often find that half the things felt urgent in the moment but aren’t actually worth 20 minutes of focused attention.
It also helps you realize how many of your worries are completely hypothetical. You start to see the pattern.
3. Change the Channel in Your Head
When overthinking kicks in, the instinct is to just try harder to stop thinking about it. Which, if you’ve ever tried telling yourself “don’t think about a pink elephant,” you know doesn’t work.
Instead, the goal is to redirect — to actively shift attention to something outside your own head. The external world. What’s in front of you. Your senses.
This is essentially what mindfulness is, minus all the intimidating spiritual packaging. Notice the chair beneath you. The sounds in the room. The temperature of the air. It pulls you out of the thought loop without requiring you to win a mental battle against your own brain.
The more you practice this, the quicker the redirect becomes.
4. Stop Fusing With Your Thoughts
This is a concept from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and it’s genuinely one of the more mind-expanding ideas in modern psychology.
“Cognitive fusion” is when you treat your thoughts as if they are reality. Your brain says “He’s definitely mad at me” and you just… believe it, completely, because it feels true. The thought and the fact blur together.
Defusion is the skill of stepping back and seeing a thought for what it is — just a thought. Not a prophecy. Not a fact. Just your brain generating a story, which it does approximately 60,000 times a day.
A helpful mental trick: instead of thinking “He’s mad at me,” try “I notice I’m having the thought that he might be mad at me.” It sounds awkward, but it creates breathing room. You’re no longer inside the thought — you’re looking at it.
5. Come Back to Right Now
One of the most underrated antidotes to overthinking is something that’s available to you literally every second of every day: the present moment.
Overthinking is almost always about the past (what happened) or the future (what might happen). The present is rarely where the anxious mind wants to be — because the present is, usually, fine.
There’s a good analogy for this: imagine words written on a window. When you stare at the words, everything behind them goes blurry. But if you deliberately shift your focus to what’s beyond the glass, the words are still there — they just don’t dominate anymore.
Your thoughts are the words. The world is what’s beyond the glass.
Getting present doesn’t mean the thoughts disappear. It means you stop letting them take up the entire frame.
6. Use Distraction — But Carefully
Distraction has a bit of a bad reputation in therapy circles, and honestly, that’s fair. Endlessly scrolling TikTok or binging three seasons of something to avoid your feelings isn’t healing — it’s just postponing the spiral.
But used wisely, distraction can genuinely help interrupt a thought loop long enough to break the pattern. The key is doing something that you actually value — a walk, cooking something new, calling a friend, exercising. Something that engages you, not just numbs you.
The goal isn’t to never think about your problems. It’s to stop letting those problems crowd out the rest of your life.
So Which One Should You Try First?
Honestly? Start with just noticing. Before you can change the pattern, you have to see it clearly. Spend one week paying attention to when and where your overthinking tends to spike. Is it at night? After social interactions? When you’re alone? When you’re bored?
Once you can predict it, you can prepare for it.
Then, layer in one more skill. Just one. These things compound slowly but they do compound — and over time, what once felt like an out-of-control mental spiral starts to feel more like something you actually have a hand in steering.
A Final Thought
Overthinking isn’t a character flaw. It’s not proof that you’re anxious or weak or broken. It’s just a pattern your brain fell into — probably because, at some point, it felt like it was helping. The problem is it stopped helping a long time ago.
The brain is plastic. It can learn new defaults. And that’s not a motivational poster — it’s actual neuroscience.
You don’t have to get this perfect. You just have to get a little better at noticing. The rest follows from there.
If you found this helpful, the video that inspired it — “6 Therapy Skills to Stop Overthinking Everything” by Emma McAdam of Therapy in a Nutshell — is worth a watch. She’s a licensed therapist and one of the more honest, grounded voices in the mental health content space.
And if overthinking is seriously interfering with your daily life, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional. Therapy works. There’s no medal for struggling through it alone.