2 Things I Learnt About Overthinking as an INTJ

We tend to overthink many different things these days. It’s exhausting. Work. Life. Finances. Relationships. Communication.

Not only are we wasting our energy thinking about endless “what if” scenarios, we’re also wasting time by not executing a course of action. It then becomes a situation of paralysis by analysis.

The INTJ brain is unfortunately a case study of how poorly managed overthinking can stall progress. I’ve been a victim of it countless times myself.

Why? Our dominant introvert intuition (Ni) function is a master at internalising and conceptualising various different possibilities in situations. These variations are endless.

As a teenage boy, I could always envision having the “perfect” conversation with my crushes (based on an assumption of predictability), but my Ni would be thinking about real life situations. What if she responded differently? What if she were to be looking at a completely different perspective? What if she didn’t like talking to me? What if this? What if that?

Suffice to say, I never ended up asking any lady out when I was a teenager. There were too many what ifs I had playing in my head.

I thought I was weird.

In other situations, though, I found my Ni activity to be either highly effective or highly annoying. It was highly effective when I was doing scientific research, checking out the various what ifs and appropriate conditions for different equations when modelling a process, for instance. However, too many what ifs and nuanced conditions, again, were hurtful to my head. It became more of a “too many cooks spoil the broth” situation, and I’d be running up against a mental block.

Of course, I had various Master Shifus along the way. They would be the ones evaluating the various assumptions that I had in my head — provided I talked it through with them.

These conversations led me to think: Accountability and verbalising my inner thoughts are key.

That was the first trick I learnt: Verbalise the unknown with someone/a small group of people whom you trust. That first entails surrounding yourself with…