How Do I Stop Overthinking Everything? A Therapist’s Guide Rooted in Emotion
How Online Therapy Can Help You Break the Overthinking Loop
“How do I stop overthinking everything?”
If you’ve ever typed that into Google at 2:14am while staring at the ceiling and mentally reliving a conversation from three days ago - hello, fellow human. You’re not alone.
And you’re not broken.
As an online therapist supporting clients across the UK and Europe, I see how common, and misunderstood, overthinking can be.
Overthinking can feel maddening. It loops. It spirals. It takes the most mundane text message (“Okay.”) and spins it into an entire rejection narrative complete with imagined voice tone and facial expression.
But here’s the thing:
Most overthinking isn’t really about “thinking too much.”
It’s about feeling too much — and not knowing where to put it.
What Overthinking Really is (Through an Emotional Lens)
In Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), we don’t treat overthinking like a malfunction to be silenced or corrected. We treat it like a signal - a creative, if exhausting, attempt to handle emotional discomfort.
Overthinking = Emotional Avoidance in Disguise
That endless mental processing? It’s often your brain trying to solve an emotional problem logically, because feeling it directly feels too vulnerable.
Instead of letting yourself feel hurt, you replay the conversation to “figure it out”
Instead of feeling uncertain, you analyze 27 possible outcomes
Instead of feeling sadness, you get stuck in “What if…?” loops
It’s protection. And it’s incredibly human.
Why You Can’t “Just Stop Overthinking”
If someone’s ever told you to “just stop overthinking,” congratulations, you’ve met someone who doesn’t understand your nervous system.
Trying to stop overthinking without tending to the underlying emotional load is like trying to fix a smoke alarm by taking out the batteries, rather than attending to, and putting out the fire!
Your mind races because it’s trying to keep you emotionally safe, and maybe because, at some point, it learned that feeling your feelings wasn’t safe, welcomed, or understood.
What Emotion-Focused Therapy Offers Instead
Rather than trying to shut down overthinking, EFT invites you to get curious about it.
We ask questions like:
What feeling is this thought trying to protect you from?
What part of you is trying to make sense of something painful?
What would happen if we felt the emotion, rather than tried to fix it?
EFT helps you move from:
“I need to figure this out” → “Something in me is scared, or sad, or uncertain, and it needs space.”
You Don’t Need a New Thought Reframing Exercise. You Need Emotional Permission.
Overthinking isn’t solved by affirmations or clever reframes (though those can help).
It begins to settle when the underlying emotion gets felt, named, and cared for.
Maybe your anxiety isn’t a problem to be fixed, it’s a story that hasn’t been fully heard.
Maybe your spirals are the only way you learned to self-soothe when feelings got too big.
You don’t need to be told to “calm down.”
You need someone to say: Of course your mind is racing, this matters to you. Let’s slow down and find out why.
What You Can Do Next
If this resonates with you, know that overthinking is not your identity, it’s a pattern, often built from pain, self-protection, and a desire to make sense of the world.
Therapy, especially EFT, offers a space to:
Understand the emotional drive behind your mental loops
Develop self-compassion instead of self-criticism
Learn to trust your emotions, not fear them
You’re Not “Too Much.” You’re Just Carrying Too Much Alone.
If your mind is tired, I’m here.
As a Therapist working online across the UK and Europe, I support people who are ready to explore the deeper emotional patterns behind anxiety, overthinking, and overwhelm.
Alex 🧡