Overthinking and anxiety: how are they connected?

The studies below do not use the word “overthinking”. They look at worry and rumination, described below.

Worry and rumination are often studied together as "repetitive negative thinking". In 513 people seeking help for anxiety or depression at a community mental health clinic, it went with a range of anxiety problems and with depression, and among people whose main problem was depression, those with more than one condition had more of it. The study measured everyone once, so it cannot show which came first.

Researchers define rumination as a repetitive, passive focus on the causes and consequences of your distress, without actively coping or solving the problem. It is a well-established risk factor for symptoms of anxiety, as well as depression, in both teenagers and adults.

Two studies followed 1,065 young adolescents for 7 months and 1,132 adults for 12 months. In both, people who reported more stressful life events went on to ruminate more, and rumination helped explain the link between those events and later symptoms of anxiety.

Put together, the studies show the two keep turning up together across large groups. They are not a verdict on what drives your own thoughts.

The left column is what the worksheets on this site are for. The right one is wider, and the NHS page on anxiety is the place to read about it in full.

The NHS says anxiety can become a problem if you start worrying a lot about small things or relatively harmless situations, and that it usually starts to interfere with daily life or relationships when it feels really intense or overwhelming.

Watch for that shift: from a loop about one thing to a steady dread about many things, or a body that rarely feels at rest. That is the point to use the lines under “When to get help”, not another worksheet.

1. Write the thought down in one sentence, so you can look at it instead of only hearing it.
2. Ask whether there is anything you can do about it today. If yes, plan the first step and when.
3. If not, park it for a fixed worry slot later in the day instead of answering it now.
4. If it is bedtime, empty everything onto a page and leave it there until morning.

A 2024 review of 7 randomised trials with 999 participants found that postponing worries to a set worry period, practised for a week to a month, reduced how often and how long people worried in daily life, compared with only writing worries down. The effects were small, and long-term follow-up studies are still lacking.

Some looping thoughts are not overthinking in the usual sense. If a thought feels unwanted and you keep checking or asking for reassurance to make it stop, read this first.