Three Years Later

Exactly three years TODAY, I created a blog post called Inside the Mind of an Overthinker. To this day, it remains the most-read article on this website by a wide margin. Apparently, there are a lot of us living inside our own heads. LOL!

As I revisited that post, I found myself smiling. Some of the things I wrote still ring true. Some of them make me laugh because they sound exactly like conversations I STILL have with myself. And some of them remind me just how much recovery has changed the way I relate to my own thinking.

Or perhaps more accurately, how much recovery has changed the amount of trust I place IN my thinking. Because if Alcoholics Anonymous has taught me anything, it is this: My problem was never that I didn’t think enough. My problem was that I thought too much and trusted those thoughts completely.

The Illness Between My Ears

When most people think about alcoholism, they think about drinking. 

The Big Book does not. (at least from my experience with it)

Certainly, alcohol creates wreckage. Certainly, physical craving is real. But the chapter More About Alcoholism spends surprisingly little time talking about alcohol itself. In fact, Step One is the only Step that discusses alcohol. Instead, it spends page after page talking about our minds. The chapter repeatedly describes the strange mental state that precedes the first drink. The alcoholic knows better. The alcoholic remembers the consequences. The alcoholic understands the risks.

And yet somehow the mind presents a convincing argument for doing the very thing that has repeatedly proven destructive. The Big Book calls this “the peculiar mental twist.” That phrase has always fascinated me. Not because it describes insanity. Because it describes reasoning. The alcoholic doesn’t typically take the first drink because they stop thinking. They take the first drink because they think themselves into it.

Overthinking Is Not the Problem

For years, I thought my problem was overthinking. Recovery has taught me that overthinking is often just a symptom. The real problem is over-trusting my own conclusions. There is a difference. 

• I can spend hours analyzing a situation.
• I can examine every possible outcome.
• I can replay conversations.
• I can create imaginary future scenarios that never happen.
• I can build entire cases in my head with evidence, witnesses, exhibits, and closing arguments.

And after all that work…

I can STILL be completely wrong. The issue isn’t necessarily the quantity of thinking. The issue is believing that more thinking will automatically produce clarity. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it produces confusion. Sometimes it produces fear. Sometimes it produces self-centeredness dressed up as careful consideration. And sometimes it produces exactly what the Big Book warns us about: a mind that becomes convinced of something that isn’t true.

The Committee Meeting Never Ends

Many alcoholics joke about “the committee” that lives in their heads. Mine still meets regularly (dang it). The chairman calls emergency sessions. The vice-chairman specializes in worst-case scenarios. The treasurer keeps track of old resentments. The historian reminds me of every embarrassing thing I have ever done. And somehow they all get voting privileges. LOL!

What recovery has shown me is that not every thought deserves equal consideration. That’s an important lesson because over-thinkers tend to assume that if a thought appears, it must be examined. If it appears twice, it must be important. If it appears ten times, it must be true. But thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are simply thoughts. The mind generates them constantly.

• Some are useful.
• Some are garbage.
• Some are fear.
• Some are ego.
• Some are intuition.

Learning the difference is part of spiritual growth.

More Thinking Rarely Solves a Spiritual Problem

One of the great discoveries of recovery is that many of the problems I tried to solve intellectually were actually spiritual problems. Fear, control, resentment, self-pity, approval-seeking, the need to be right, the need to know, the need to manage outcomes.

None of those are solved by additional analysis. Yet that was always my strategy. If I could just think about it long enough, surely I could fix it.

The Steps offered a different solution.

• Pray.
• Inventory.
• Talk to another person.
• Make amends.
• Help someone else.
• Seek God’s will.
• Take action.

Notice how few of those involve sitting alone and thinking harder.

The Great Humility of Recovery

One of the most humbling realizations in A.A. is discovering that my mind is not always a reliable narrator. That can be uncomfortable. Especially for those of us who pride ourselves on being intelligent, analytical, observant, or thoughtful. But recovery asks us to consider a possibility.

• What if every thought doesn’t deserve obedience?
• What if every feeling doesn’t require action?
• What if every fear isn’t a warning?
• What if every conclusion isn’t correct?
• What if God can guide us in ways that thinking alone never can?

The Big Book suggests that the alcoholic suffers from an illness that centers in the mind. If that’s true, then perhaps one of the greatest acts of recovery is learning when not to listen to ourselves.

What Three More Years Have Taught Me

Three years after writing the original article, I still overthink. 

• I still get stuck in my head.
• I still occasionally conduct imaginary conversations that never happen.
• I still solve problems that don’t exist.
• I still predict disasters that never arrive.

But today I catch it sooner.

• Today I have tools.
• Today I have a sponsor.
• Today I have prayer (to a God of my understanding).
• Today I have inventory.
• Today I have trusted friends.
• Today I have experience proving that most of the things I worry about never happen the way I imagined.

Most importantly, today I know that my thoughts are not my higher power. That may be one of the greatest gifts A.A. has given me. The goal was never to stop thinking. The goal was to stop worshipping my thinking.

And for an over-thinker like me, that’s a distinction worth revisiting.

In love & service,