Thinking about overthinking
I was recently talking with one of my friends on the topic of thinking too much. We're both the kind of people who like to rationalise everything we do with frames of reference - decisions aren't taken lightly.
He threw up the concept of a 'mental map' during our conversation. As it represents a model for your perception of the world, I wanted to know how my friend went about upgrading this map.
We decided there were two steps to this process:
Spend time retrospectively analysing your knowledge and experience. This allows you to come to a deeper understanding of your life, thus upgrading your map.
Spend time acting based on the knowledge provided by your map at present. This gains experience for further analysis through the same process as the step above.
The most effective way to upgrade your map is to strike the right balance of time spent in each of these steps.
Too much analysis and you'll become too comfortable and unstimulated. Even further, you'll begin to overthink or distort your map. This breeds delusion by inventing complexity that doesn't exist.
Too much action and you'll become overwhelmed. You won't have the time required to develop an improved response for the next time a similar situation occurs.
The balance that you want to strike between thinking and acting will vary from person to person. It's dependent upon targets, purpose and character.
Some people must think about things deeply before they build the desired depth of understanding to want to take action. These are normally thinkers, Thoreau for example - those who spend time limiting distracting inputs for the sake of depth of analysis.
Those working on physical mastery, take your favourite sports player for example, spend less time thinking. Their time is instead dominated by seeing what works in real-time and adjusting based on feedback.
What matters is not how much time you spend in a state of reflection or a state of action. What matters is continuing to strike the balance between the two that's most going to help you upgrade your understanding of the world.