Overthinking

Turns out we have about 6,200 thoughts a day, at least that’s what the smart folks at Stanford say. That’s almost as many thoughts as steps we take in a day, which is a heck of a lot of thoughts, but when you think about it, you’re awake for maybe 16 hours a day and that’s about 6.5 thoughts a minute, or 1 thought every 10 seconds.  My wife says I go for hours, sometimes days without thinking, which puts a real cramp in this research, but I’m with Stanford. Coach Valvano once said if you laugh, think and cry every day, then that's a heck of a day. Of course if we have 6,200 thoughts, I’m not sure there’s even time to laugh and cry, but maybe. I mean I cry most every day, sometimes from joy, sometimes from pain, like in my Boston marathon adventure last Monday – so maybe I’m crying and thinking at the same time? I’m sort of perplexed that if we think this much, how it is that we actually do anything - we always have to decide, our brains having to work hard just to process our life on the fly. “What can I get you, how would you like that, can we change that, should I go left, right or stop?” I watch my mom when these questions fly her way – it’s like they freeze in mid-air in front of her brain, her eyes squint, her thought processing jams up like a Xerox, and then there’s just silence until I say, “it’s okay no worries.” Thinking is harder for certain people – I wish it wasn’t so for mom, because she used to decide every day to get on a floor and sing and dance freely with those nursery school kids, risking getting peed on but loving every giggle—thinking I suppose, but only about making those kids happy. Do people with dementia think less? Do they have the same number of thoughts, just slower processing? I would argue the average has to be lower, but maybe it’s just that we can’t see inside to know. I asked a few thousand of our readers what they think about. People say they think about what they have to do about as much as they think during the thing they end up doing. Young adults think about how they can make a difference more than they think about being on time and productive. Former athletes acknowledge they think a lot about the games they played, lost, and what could have been, almost as much as the games they play now. Parents say they think about what others think about how they parent, and think about how others see their kids, more than they think about how to actually be a good parent. Old folks admit they think way too much about how the world is “going to hell in a handbasket,” said Georgie, a 77-year-old from Maine. In healthcare, there’s a lot of thinking about how to fix things, reform stuff, diagnose faster, and treat every ailment, though some policy people say doctors don’t think enough and instead rely too much on ordering tests and scans. “Wish they’d use more clinical judgment, give more thought to what makes sense,” Vu, a medical director from Illinois said. People with a family history of things like cancer and heart disease say they think about 10% of the time about that, about how to prevent it, or when it will catch up to them. Those who’ve been through trauma say that the event, however long it was, some days consumes 90% of their thoughts. People in their 70s think about death about 15% of the time, they say, though by 80 that doubles – but it’s not always morbid thoughts as much as proactive planning, like Pete from Iowa who says “when I die, I will mow the grass at Wrigley for game day…” There have been a lot of great thinkers – Plato, Freud, Socrates, some in medicine like Bill Harvey who discovered the circulation of blood, and Virginia Apgar who figured out how to assess newborns. I lean to Rosa, Ali, Cher…. not philosophers, but pioneers and humanitarians. I suspect they too had 6,200 thoughts a day, but man to get inside their brain at the moment of their defining discoveries, like Rosa’s decision to sit down. How many thoughts preceded that? I often wonder why we do what we do and behave the way we do in certain situations – holding a door for a stranger, staying silent in an elevator, arguing over a mistake, staying in an unhealthy relationship, taking a flyer on a day-old gas station egg and cheese sandwich, which requires extra thought and a lot of guts, obviously. But I may have been thinking about thoughts all wrong; perhaps the very thing driving our behaviors depends on our brain’s ability to process the constant barrage of thoughts coming at it. Better processing equals better behavioral health. One of my childhood heroes, Lloyd Dobbler, once said he didn’t like processing. “I don’t want to buy anything sold, bought or processed or process anything sold, bought,” he said. Thinking and processing just didn’t seem like a good way to spend time, but spontaneity, creativity, silliness – those are the behaviors that turn overthinking into lower stress, better perspective and maybe just maybe a few more seconds every minute to give our brains a break, because they sure do deserve it.