Overthinking is kind of like Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.

It is the best of things, it is the worst of things.

But what is the difference between thinking about something and overthinking? I pride myself on the words that appear on the top banner of every blog post and page here at RJsCorner. It is important to analyze instead of just taking what is said to you as truth. But, where is the line that is crossed? Where does thinking become overthinking?

I realize I tend to overthink things. Even the simplest things must be analyzed from different directions before I can come to a conclusion. I would like to think that at least some of you exhibit this characteristic? Overthinking is probably the major cause of my nightly sleep disturbance. I wake up in the middle of the night and just can’t get back to sleep until I think something through. Sometimes that only takes a minute or two, but others take it seems forever.

I often overthink even about the past. I think of something I wrote on a published blog post that should have been worded differently. To make matters worse, I do what I call “Leaves of Grass”. That is, I go back into previous posts to change a word or two that does a better job of saying what I wanted. Walt Whitman wrote the book “Leaves of Grass” in 1855 and spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. I suspect I will be doing the same thing here at RJsCorner.

Another frequent example of post-editing/overthinking is I wake up in the middle of the night with something on my mind that I said to someone the previous day and decide I should have said it differently. I then spend hours revising words that are long since vanished and can’t be taken back. But, that does not prevent me for thinking of another way to have said it. 🙄

It does seem strange that while there is a direct link between my brain and my mouth, sometimes the opposite is true between my brain and my pen. I would like to blame my autism for this, but I will have to overthink that for a bit, before I can say that. 😵‍💫