Overthinking: Taking long over choices — what it can look like

You weigh choices carefully, sometimes past the point where it helps, and can keep wondering after you've chosen.

This is one of the patterns a 3-minute self-reflection on overthinking can land on. Overthinking, as used here, is an everyday thinking habit and not a condition, and this reflection cannot tell worry that is a normal part of life from worry that needs support. If replaying or worrying is taking over your days, or making it hard to do what you want to do, a doctor or therapist can help.

If your answers landed here

A decision can get far more research from you than it's worth, and you put off deciding because you want to be sure it's the right one.

Then, after you've booked or bought, you go back and look at the options you turned down.

The research name for aiming at the very best option is 'maximising', as opposed to 'satisficing', which means choosing one that's good enough.

What we'd recognise in this is how seriously you take a decision. You think about the people and things it will touch, and your choices are often well researched.

Where it costs you is when small choices get the effort of big ones, and when whatever you picked keeps carrying a faint sense that it could have been better. After you've chosen, does the looking back tend to settle anything for you?

Something in your answers made us think of regret: the wish never to look back and find you chose wrong. Does that sound familiar?

Deciding in advance which choices deserve your full effort can free the rest to be good enough; that's where the practice starts.

What it can look like

• Having twelve tabs open for a purchase that costs very little.
• Putting off a decision until it gets made for you.
• Asking five people what they'd do, and still not knowing.
• Wondering afterwards whether the other option would have been better.

What is genuinely useful in it

• You take decisions seriously, and your choices are often well researched.
• To us the care here reaches beyond you: you think about the people and things your choices affect.

Where it can cost you

• Time and energy go into small decisions that don't repay them.
• Second-guessing can take some of the enjoyment out of what you chose.

One small practice: Set a good-enough line

1. Before you start researching, decide how much this choice matters: small, medium or big.
2. Give it a time limit to match, such as ten minutes for small and a day for medium.
3. When the time's up, pick the option that clears your bar, and let yourself stop looking at the others.

Questions to sit with

• Which choices truly deserve my full effort, and which don't?
• What am I afraid will happen if I choose something merely good?
• What would I tell a friend who was stuck on this same choice?