When we over analyse or overthink something with anxiety, we end up anticipating the worst or a negative outcome.
When we do this, we are simply guessing or surmising an outcome which is almost always wrong. Doing this will cause nervousness, stress, and avoidance which significantly impacts on our mental well being and quality of life.
The problem is that if we guess something right just once in a lifetime, we believe that we will be right all the time. This, of course, is absolute nonsense because we are fantasising the outcome based on our core beliefs instead of fact or truth.
If we don’t have solid evidence to support a belief then we shouldn’t second- guess it.
Core beliefs come from learnings which can often be wrongful learnings. For instance: You have been bitten by a dog or been taught that dogs are dangerous and now you think every dog is dangerous or bites. The reality, of course, is that you will encounter many hundreds of dogs in a lifetime and actually be unlucky to be bitten or receive aggressive behavior even once and even then it would be unlikely that you would be harmed.
The way to deal with this is to create an imaginary jury and present evidence to each situation so that you can conclude what the outcome may be using truth and fact only, and not your core belief. Remember that every situation is different, even if it has a similarity to a previous one it will have a different outcome.
We all analyse situations and have anxious worries to some degree about certain things. Healthy analysing is to not overly worry about anything and everything. If you do this change your mindset to thinking about what the best outcome could be instead of the what the worst outcome will be and also be very acceptant that you do not know what will or might happen and so and let it go and hope for the best.
Remember we never know what the outcome to any event or situation will be, so unless you can think positive about it and then dismiss it – stop yourself.