Over-thinking & Fear of Feeling

or Why We Stay Stuck in Our Heads

We’ve all had those nights. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying a conversation from earlier—over and over. What did they really mean? Should I have said something different? Was that laugh too loud?

Or maybe it’s not a conversation, but a decision you haven’t made. A job change, a breakup, a difficult email. You go around in circles, weighing every angle, every possibility, like a washing machine stuck mid-cycle.

Overthinking might seem like we are facing our problems, but it's actually a form of avoidance.

This mental replaying—what we often call rumination or overthinking—can feel like problem-solving. It can feel like we’re being productive, getting closer to clarity or control. But often, we’re not. We’re stuck. And beneath that stuckness is something quieter and more uncomfortable: emotion.

Rumination as Emotional Avoidance

At its heart, rumination is a strategy. Not a good strategy, necessarily, but a strategy nonetheless. It’s a way of doing something instead of feeling something.

• Rather than sitting with sadness, we analyze.

• Rather than facing fear, we plan for every outcome.

• Rather than feeling shame, we replay the moment to “fix” it.

In psychological terms, rumination is a kind of experiential avoidance—a concept from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999). Rather than directly experiencing a painful emotion, we try to think our way around it. But the mind is a poor substitute for feeling. And in the attempt to avoid discomfort, we end up creating more of it.

Imagine your emotions as wild weather moving through your inner world. Grief is a thunderstorm. Anxiety is a rising wind. Shame might be a cold, persistent drizzle. Rumination is like drawing the curtains, putting on noise-cancelling headphones, and obsessively rearranging the furniture—believing that if you just get the layout right, the storm won’t get in. But of course, it already has. You just haven’t acknowledged it.

What We’re Really Avoiding

Rumination often centres on the past or the future, because that’s where the mind goes to escape the discomfort of the present.

If you’ve made a mistake, your mind might offer you an endless loop of “Why did I do that?” not because you’ll find a better answer, but because sitting with guilt is hard.

If you’re unsure about a decision, your mind might obsessively analyse all possible outcomes because uncertainty feels unbearable.

In both cases, the thinking feels necessary—but it’s a shield. It protects you from feeling raw vulnerability, powerlessness, disappointment, or grief.

Why It’s So Hard to Stop

Telling someone to “just stop overthinking” is like telling someone to “just stop itching” when they have chickenpox. It’s not helpful. Rumination isn’t always a conscious choice; it’s a habit, often deeply embedded. And, in some cases, it might have once been adaptive.

If you grew up in a home where feelings weren’t safe or welcomed, your mind may have learned early on that thinking was safer than feeling. Maybe you weren’t allowed to cry. Maybe your anxiety was dismissed. Maybe you were praised for being “mature” or “rational.” So you built a home in your head, and when things got hard, you retreated there.

The trouble is, over time, that home becomes a trap. The same mental habits that protected you once now keep you from living.

Beginning to Feel Again

The way out of rumination isn’t to think harder. It’s to soften your grip on thinking and gently turn toward what’s underneath.

In ACT, we learn to notice our thoughts without fusing with them. To say, “I’m having the thought that I messed everything up” rather than “I messed everything up.” It’s a subtle shift, but a powerful one. It creates space—space in which emotion can arise, be felt, and eventually pass.

Mindfulness helps, not in the sense of sitting on a cushion for hours, but in the simple, grounded acts of daily life:

• Putting your hand on your chest and naming what you feel

• Noticing tension in your body when the overthinking starts

• Asking yourself: What feeling might I be avoiding right now?

It takes courage to feel. To let sadness be sadness, or uncertainty just be there, without trying to “fix” it. But that courage is how we grow.

Rumination’s Message

If we can get curious, rumination can become a signal rather than a trap. Instead of seeing it as a flaw in our thinking, we might see it as a flag that something inside us needs care.

What if, next time you catch yourself looping through thoughts, you gently ask:

“What am I not letting myself feel right now?”

“What emotion might be under this story?”

“What would happen if I allowed that feeling to be there, even briefly?”

Often, that’s all it takes to begin loosening the grip. Not fixing or solving—just allowing.

A Final Thought

Your mind is trying to help you. It wants to keep you safe. But healing doesn’t come from thinking your way to safety. It comes from making space for the parts of you that are scared, sad, or uncertain.

Rumination is a form of protection—but protection isn’t the same as connection. If you want to move forward, you’ll need to learn to feel what’s there. Not all at once. Just a little at a time.

And in doing so, you may discover that what you feared wouldn’t end, does pass. What you thought you couldn’t hold, you can.

You don’t have to live in your head forever. There’s a life outside the loop—and you’re allowed to live it.

Reference:

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. Guilford Press.

If you want support in working with overthinking there are many approaches and techniques that work. Set up a free consultation to discuss further.