A beginner's guide to understanding and managing overthinking, anxiety, panic and similar issues.
A simple roadmap for initiating recovery as fast as possible.
It’s George.
If your mind feels like it has 17 tabs open at once, you’re just stuck in an uncalibrated survival system.
Now, all of us must be able to calculate the point of diminishing returns automatically so our efforts don’t backfire and instead deliver the desired outcome.
It does not matter if we are talking about reading, writing, working, investing, exercising, dieting, supplements, peptides, psychoanalysis, testing, spirituality, or whatever.
Too much of anything is bad and the same thing is true when it comes to thinking, anxiety and even panic.
We need the capacity for each one since, without them, we would have gone extinct.
But an excess of them is also extremely problematic.
As Dostoyevski wrote for example: “to think too much is a disease”.
Thinking and struggling mentally are necessary in order to reach clarity when it comes to a certain problem that we might face.
There’s no way around this.
But a lot of people hate thinking itself simply because they have never experienced clarity of thought or they hate anxiety because they never learned how to channel it to perform better.
In the first case, their thinking is too distorted, chaotic and doesn’t even serve them at the end of the day.
It’s just an automatic projection of their internal software reacting to whatever external stimuli are in front of them instead of a tool used consciously to achieve a certain outcome.
In the second case, they never learned how to set aside the false assumptions, how to manage the physical sensation and how to actually pay attention to the right signals.
Thinking, anxiety and even panic are some of our greatest tools for survival.
Yet when they are uncalibrated (aka turned into disorders), they become the ultimate instruments of self-destruction.
Overall, your internal world is equally, if not more, fascinating than the outside world with all of its complicated ecosystems.
If you feel otherwise, it might just mean you’ve detached from yourself as a protective mechanism.
Or as Carl Jung said: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls."
Now when it comes to overthinking, anxiety, panic etc we have:
Physical components
Lifestyle components
Psychological components
So no one thing causes anxiety for example in reality.
The panic attack you had a week ago for example might be the outcome of a slow COMT, paired with a stressful life situation right now, hormonal issues and a triggering event that goes way back.
Heck, there is even a large body of literature confirming that people can experience anxiety and depression even after taking antibiotics.
Point being that some people who struggle with anxiety, overthinking, panic and so on will have to work more on their bodies, some on their life, some on their personalities and some on all of these.
So what we are going to do here, as always, is understand the problem, mention the most common and proven root causes and outline certain relatively safe tools that can be used to manage the symptoms while focusing on fixing the root causes.
Aka, we will try to approach things from a holistic lens.
And of course, remember that if you have identified certain physical triggers that you can avoid without future downsides, you should still avoid them no matter if that’s called consuming 500mg of caffeine per day, excessive fasting or nicotine.
Now let’s start our analysis with the following:
A lot of the mental health issues share the symptom overthinking, anxiety and even panic.
What changes are the ways these manifested since they differ significantly across each condition.
Let’s start with understanding overthinking.
If you look at most psychology textbooks, you will see that chronic overthinking is usually categorized as worry, rumination or obsessions.
So the person usually experiences:
Future-oriented loops
Past-oriented dwelling
or
Intrusive, fixated thoughts
Now here is how overthinking uniquely presents itself in different conditions:
1. Anxiety disorders
Anxiety is the most common and direct driver of overthinking, serving as a core feature in conditions like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
In GAD, overthinking manifests as chronic, uncontrollable “what-if” worry.
They are repetitive, future-oriented thought loops that feel impossible to switch off because the brain constantly scans for potential threats even in safe or neutral situations.
This leads to excessive planning, analysis paralysis, reassurance-seeking, and constant second-guessing of choices or past actions.
That’s also partly why there’s so often intolerance of uncertainty / why people with GAD have a strong negative reaction to ambiguity.
The brain treats uncertainty as a threat, fueling endless mental scenarios in an attempt to achieve (impossible) certainty.
But while worry temporarily reduces the discomfort of uncertainty, it rarely solves real problems and often increases overall anxiety.
Here’s what actually happens in the body:
Amygdala hyperactivity.
Read this:
Impaired prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulation.
The ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex normally provide “top-down” control to calm the amygdala.
In GAD, this connectivity is often disrupted, leading to poor emotional regulation and persistent worry.
Read this:
Default Mode Network (DMN) dysfunction.
The DMN, active during mind-wandering and self-referential thinking, becomes hyperactive or inflexible in GAD.
This keeps the brain stuck in internal simulations of potential disasters instead of shifting to external focus or problem-solving.
The good news is that these circuits are plastic and techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness (which quiets DMN activity), and even certain lifestyle changes can improve PFC-amygdala balance over time.
Read the two articles above for more on these specific circuits.
2. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Now here things are different.
ADHD-related overthinking often stems from executive function challenges and an UNDER-stimulated nervous system that craves novelty and stimulation.
It feels like a “ping-pong ball” brain with constant mental restlessness where thoughts bounce rapidly between ideas, worries, and random associations.
Because the ADHD brain struggles to filter out irrelevant stimuli and regulate attention, people often experience analysis paralysis (getting stuck weighing endless options), hyperfocusing on a single problem for hours, or mentally replaying social interactions for no reason.
If you have no idea about the core mechanisms of ADHD, read this:
Here’s what actually happens in the body:
Dopamine and norepinephrine dysregulation.
ADHD is linked to differences in how the brain produces, transports, and uses these 2 key neurotransmitters.
Lower signaling in reward and motivation pathways makes the brain seek stimulation internally through racing thoughts, rumination, or hyperfocus when external tasks feel under-stimulating.
This might sound profoundly weird to a lot of people, but that’s what actually happens.
The brain treats thinking as a way to generate dopamine or resolve uncertainty, even when it becomes exhausting and unproductive.
This explains why many with ADHD describe their minds as “never quiet” or feel exhausted from thinking without much external output.
Or even why things like Adderall, ritalin and so on, actually quite the minds of people with ADHD instead of putting them on overdrive.
Default Mode Network (DMN) interference.
The DMN (involved in mind-wandering, self-reflection, and daydreaming) fails to deactivate properly during tasks or rest.
In ADHD, this network stays overly active or poorly coordinated with task-positive networks, leading to intrusive internal chatter, excessive mind-wandering, and difficulty shifting away from repetitive thoughts.
Executive function deficits.
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and prioritizing, shows structural and functional differences.
This impairs the brain’s ability to filter thoughts, suppress irrelevant ones, or break out of loops, resulting in analysis paralysis and mental overload.
Contrary to GAD, externalizing thoughts through brain dumps, voice notes can help quite a lot in these cases.
3. Bipolar disorder
Now in this case, overthinking shifts drastically depending on the current mood phase.
During a depressive episode, overthinking often takes the form of deep, dark rumination (think tepetitive dwelling on past failures, regrets, perceived mistakes, or personal worthlessness).
The mind replays scenarios obsessively, searching for answers that never fully arrive.
In this phase there’s:
Default Mode Network (DMN) hyperactivity: The DMN shows increased connectivity, especially with limbic areas. This fuels prolonged negative rumination and difficulty shifting attention outward.
Fronto-limbic imbalance: Reduced prefrontal cortex regulation over the amygdala allows negative emotions to dominate without effective “brakes.”
Lower dopamine and norepinephrine signaling in reward/motivation pathways.
Impaired executive function (planning, flexibility) and memory biases toward negative information.
In contrast, during a manic or hypomanic episode, overthinking appears as racing thoughts or a “flight of ideas,” where the mind moves at high speed, jumping rapidly between grand projects, creative connections, and loosely associated ideas.
Thoughts feel electric and abundant, but they can become fragmented, hard to follow, or difficult to translate into productive action.
They connect loosely via puns, rhymes, or associations rather than logic.
In this phase, there’s:
Elevated dopamine in reward pathways such as the nucleus accumbensthat drives the speed, novelty-seeking, and grandiosity.
This creates a constant “go” signal that’s hard to turn off.
Network shifts: DMN may show altered (sometimes decreased) connectivity compared to depression, while other networks involving attention and salience become hyperactive.
Increased fronto-limbic dysconnectivity reduces inhibitory control, allowing thoughts to accelerate unchecked.
Semantic overactivation: The brain broadly activates related concepts, leading to rapid associations and flight of ideas.
Executive function deficits impair filtering and organization of this mental flood.
So where depression rigidifies negative self-focus, mania creates instability and disinhibition.
Read these two for more on this topic:
4. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Overthinking in OCD is fundamentally different from other conditions because it centers on intrusive, unwanted, and often distressing thoughts, images, or urges that the person recognizes as their own but cannot easily dismiss.
The mind gets stuck in repetitive mental loops around specific themes so unlike ordinary worry, these thoughts feel ego-dystonic (alien or against one’s values), highly urgent, and anxiety-provoking.
This leads to hours of mental effort trying to achieve certainty or prevent imagined catastrophes, even when the person intellectually knows the fears are exaggerated or irrational.
The overthinking feels like a necessary defense mechanism, even though it usually strengthens the obsession-compulsion cycle.
Here’s what actually happens in the body:
Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) loop hyperactivity.
This is the core circuit implicated in OCD.
It involves the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), basal ganglia (striatum), and thalamus.
In OCD, this loop becomes overactive, creating a “stuck” sensation where the brain fails to properly gate or suppress irrelevant thoughts and signals.
The ACC shows exaggerated responses to perceived mistakes or uncertainty, generating a persistent feeling of “something is wrong” even in safe situations.
This drives the compulsive need to think or act until the discomfort decreases.
Glutamate-GABA imbalance: Many people with OCD show elevated glutamate (excitatory) and reduced GABA (inhibitory) levels in frontal regions like the ACC and supplementary motor area (SMA).
This creates neural hyperactivity and reduces the brain’s natural “brakes” on unwanted thoughts.
Serotonin and dopamine involvement: Serotonin dysregulation is well-established, while dopamine alterations in the striatum may contribute to the repetitive, reward-like quality of compulsions.
Read this:
5. Psychosis
In psychosis, overthinking crosses the line from exaggerated worry into distorted reality, where normal thought patterns can escalate into fixed, false beliefs (delusions) or perceptual disturbances.
Here, overthinking often acts as a precursor to, or a core component of, delusions.
A person might begin with an ordinary worry and mentally loop on it so intensely that it evolves into a fixed, unshakable false belief detached from reality.
The cognitive loops lack the usual reality-testing checks that most people apply so contradictory evidence is dismissed or reinterpreted to fit the belief.
This can involve paranoia, assigning hidden meanings to neutral events (ideas of reference), or building elaborate explanatory systems.
In some cases, it blends with hallucinations or disorganized thinking, making the internal narrative feel overwhelmingly convincing and urgent.
Here’s what actually happens in the body:
Aberrant salience (dopamine-driven).
According to the aberrant salience hypothesis, excessive dopamine signaling in the mesolimbic pathway causes the brain to assign undue importance to neutral or coincidental stimuli, thoughts, or events.
What should be ignored suddenly feels profoundly meaningful, driving the overthinking into delusional territory.
Salience network dysfunction.
The salience network normally helps filter what deserves attention.
In psychosis, this network becomes dysregulated, impairing the ability to distinguish important from irrelevant information.
This leads to hyper-attention to internal thoughts or minor external cues, which then fuel paranoid or referential delusions.
Impaired prediction error processing.
The brain uses prediction errors (mismatches between expectation and reality) to update beliefs.
In psychosis, these signals become noisy or inappropriate, often due to dopamine dysregulation.
This causes the brain to form and rigidly maintain incorrect explanations (delusions) instead of correcting them with new evidence.
Reduced function and connectivity in the prefrontal cortex impair executive control, logical reasoning, and the ability to reality-test thoughts.
This allows overthinking loops to escape normal inhibitory “brakes,” while altered communication with limbic and striatal regions further entrenches distorted beliefs.
So the overthinking serves as an (ultimately maladaptive) attempt to make sense of a world that suddenly feels unpredictable, threatening, or overly significant.
This escalation explains why psychosis can feel so terrifying.
The mind is desperately trying to impose order on what it perceives as chaos, but without the usual safeguards.
6. Specific phobias
Phobias represent one of the most focused and intense forms of overthinking, where the mind becomes narrowly locked onto a specific object, situation, or stimulus that triggers overwhelming fear.
Here, overthinking is highly anticipatory and catastrophic.
A person might spend days or weeks mentally rehearsing an upcoming encounter with the feared stimulus.
The brain generates vivid “what-if” disaster scenarios even when the actual probability is extremely low.
This leads to elaborate avoidance planning, mental checking, body scanning for signs of panic, and post-event rumination if exposure occurs.
Unlike generalized anxiety, the overthinking is sharply targeted rather than diffuse.
Here’s what actually happens in the body:
Amygdala hyper-reactivity and fear conditioning: The amygdala shows exaggerated and prolonged activation to phobia-specific cues.
Through classical conditioning, the brain has over-associated the stimulus with danger, creating a rapid, automatic fear response that bypasses rational evaluation.
Impaired fear extinction: The prefrontal cortex (especially the ventromedial PFC) normally helps “unlearn” fear by updating safety information.
In phobias, this extinction learning is weaker, so the overthinking persists even after repeated safe exposures.
Threat overestimation and attentional bias: People with phobias exhibit strong attentional bias meaning their brain automatically locks onto phobia-related cues while filtering out safety signals.
This fuels catastrophic thinking and intolerance of uncertainty around the feared situation.
HPA axis and physiological feedback loop: Anticipatory overthinking activates the stress response (cortisol, adrenaline), which then intensifies physical sensations (racing heart, shortness of breath).
The mind interprets these sensations as further evidence of danger, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
So the overthinking serves as a (maladaptive) mental safety behavior designed to prevent the feared outcome.
The excellent news is that phobias are among the most treatable mental health conditions.
Exposure therapy (especially gradual, systematic exposure) is highly effective because it directly rewires the fear circuit through repeated safety learning.
Virtual reality exposure, cognitive restructuring, and mindfulness techniques that reduce anticipatory rumination can further accelerate progress.
Now while no longer an official diagnosis, the idea of “neurosis” remains useful for understanding chronic overthinking, anxiety and panic disorders.
It historically described the exact psychological mechanisms that trap the mind in endless mental loops (without of course losing touch with reality).
It referred to conditions involving high anxiety, obsessions, rumination, and emotional distress where the person stayed fully grounded in shared reality.
Unlike psychosis, insight remained intact meaning that the sufferer knew their worries were excessive but couldn’t stop them.
Neurotics overthink reality. People in psychosis can’t identify reality.
Classic examples included what we now call GAD, panic disorder, OCD, phobias, and somatic symptom issues.
It was coined in the 18th century by William Cullen and later shaped by Freud and others.
Neurosis (or psychoneurosis) was a broad umbrella term for anxiety-based disorders.
In the 1980 DSM-III, the American Psychiatric Association removed it because it was too vague and theoretically loaded (tied to psychoanalysis).
It was replaced by more specific, symptom-based categories we use today: Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders, and others.
But we still use neuroticism as one of the Big Five personality traits that measures a person’s tendency to experience frequent and intense negative emotions (anxiety, sadness, irritability, self-doubt) and reactivity to stress.
Here’s how the feedback of “neurotic” overthinking/anxiety/panic works:
Amygdala and prefrontal imbalance: Heightened emotional reactivity combined with relatively weaker top-down regulation from the prefrontal cortex.
Default Mode Network (DMN) over-activity: Promotes excessive self-referential thinking and mind-wandering, especially under stress.
So we have:
Hyperactive threat detection.
The brain’s alarm system (amygdala and salience network) reacts strongly even to mild or ambiguous stimuli.
Self-generated thought.
The mind actively generates worries and simulations even in safe, calm environments.
This inward-focused thinking (linked to Default Mode Network activity) creates anxiety that feels internally produced rather than externally triggered.
The brain defaults to catastrophic thinking and struggles with ambiguity, fueling endless “what if” loops.
Perfectionism as control.
Rigid internal rules and standards serve as an (often unsuccessful) attempt to manage anxiety, triggering intense overthinking when things deviate even slightly.
But how does “neurosis” or to be more specific, high neuroticism, develop though?
It seems that it develops through a complex mix of genetic vulnerability, childhood environment, and adult stress.
So it is rarely caused by a single event.
Instead, it develops over time when a person’s biological sensitivity meets a world that feels unsafe, stressful and so on.
The developmental timeline generally follows three main stages:
1. The biological foundation (genetics)
Of course, you do not inherit “neurosis” directly, but you can inherit a highly sensitive nervous system with traits such as:
Hyper-reactive amygdala: Some people are born with an amygdala that fires faster, louder, and longer than average.
Neurotransmitter regulation: Genetic variations can cause your brain to naturally produce less GABA or process dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol and serotonin less efficiently.
This mix lowers your baseline threshold for stress.
2. Epigenetic triggers
Genes set the stage, but epigenetic triggers such as early childhood experiences determine how those genes express themselves.
Neuroticism for example often develops when a sensitive child grows up in an environment that feels unpredictable, invalidating, or unsafe.
Classic examples include:
Insecure attachment: If the primary caregivers are inconsistent, the child’s brain learns to stay in a state of hyper-vigilance so they over-analyze details to predict if they are safe or about to be rejected.
Overprotective or highly critical parenting: Parents who shield children from every minor discomfort prevent them from learning that they can survive distress. Conversely, highly critical parenting teaches the child’s brain that mistakes are catastrophic, planting the seeds for perfectionist overthinking.
Chronic stress, drugs or physical trauma during developmental years: This physically alters brain development, keeping the brain’s salience network stuck on “high alert” for the rest of its life.
3. The Cognitive Feedback Loop (Adulthood)
Once the brain is primed by genetics and environment, adult life experiences can lock the neurotic patterns into place through a reinforcing cycle:
[Sensitive Brain] ➔ [Views Stress as a Catastrophe] ➔ [Avoids the Stressor]
▲ │
└─ [Brain Learns the Stressor is Dangerous] ◄────── [Feels Brief Relief]Because a neurotic brain feels stress so intensely, its natural reaction is avoidance or hyper-control (overthinking).
When you avoid a stressful situation, your brain experiences a brief drop in anxiety.
This brief relief tricks the brain into thinking, “Wow, it’s a good thing we panicked and avoided that, otherwise we would have died”
This strengthens the neural pathways of overthinking, making the loop stronger the next time a stressor appears.
So when a person experiences chronic stress, instability, or trauma, primitive survival mechanisms such as emotional reasoning, black-and-white thinking, catastrophizing and other cognitive distortions become deeply ingrained habits because they originate as evolutionary survival mechanisms.
Black-and-white thinking for example simplifies a complex world into binary choices: good vs. bad, safe vs. dangerous, success vs. failure.
Beloeve it or not, for primitive humans, nuance was deadly.
Deciding slowly whether a rustling bush was a predator or the wind could result in death.
So the brain evolved to make instant, binary judgments.
Now in psychology, this is often called “splitting” and it originates, you guessed it, in dangerous unpredictable environments.
If a parent for example is loving one moment and abusive the next, the child cannot comprehend that a person can be both good and bad.
To cope, the child’s brain splits them into two separate entities: the “all-good parent” (to stay attached) and the “all-bad parent” (to stay safe).
Now in every day life, people who are high in neuroticism use black-and-white thinking to avoid the painful discomfort of ambiguity.
Saying “I am a total failure” is painful, but to the brain, it feels more certain and manageable than saying “I am a good person who made a mistake, and I have to fix it” belive it or not.
Yes, all these sound extremely counterproductive but remember, they were adopted for one reason only: survival, not optimal living.
Let’s take catastrophizing as another example.
In a nutshell, catastrophizing is the habit of automatically assuming the absolute worst-case scenario will happen.
Yes it might initially sound ridiculous and extremely harmful to be fair but remember, tour brain’s primary job is keeping you alive, not keeping you happy.
Evolutionarily, humans who assumed the worst survived.
The caveman who thought, “That noise is a harmless bird,” eventually got eaten.
The caveman who thought, “That noise is a tiger,” survived.
We are the descendants of these paranoid cavemen and these traits are still within us even if they don’t get triggered in early childhood and turn into traits where catastrophizing is basically a flawed attempt at emotional insurance.
The internal logic is: “If I imagine the worst thing happening right now, I won’t be shocked or hurt when it actually happens.”
What’s interesting is that in adulthood, these traits are maintained because they activate the amygdala, keeping the body in a constant state of fight-or-flight.
So the brain becomes addicted to the adrenaline of crisis, making peace feel unnatural and terrifying.
A “lighter” example of this thinking patern is “fortune telling” aka jumping to conclusions where you are assuming you know exactly what others are thinking or predicting a terrible outcome without actual objective evidence.
Or let’s take emotional reasoning as another example.
This is the belief that your internal emotions reflect an absolute external reality which is once again, obviously ridicoulous and false.
A person for example thinks, “I feel intense terror right now, therefore I must be in immediate physical danger,” or “I feel like an idiot, so everyone else must think I am one.”
In panic disorder for example, emotional reasoning traps a person into interpreting a benign physical symptom (like a skipped heartbeat or sudden sweating) as proof of a looming medical emergency.
Another extremely problematic defense mechanism that’s crucial for survival is depersonalization (or/and derealization).
This is a defense mechanism where the brain temporarily alters how you perceive yourself or your surroundings to shield you from overwhelming stress.
In depersonalization, you feel detached from your own body, like you are watching yourself from the outside.
In derealization you feel like the world around you isn’t real, looking foggy, artificial, or far away.
So a personality prone to anxiety deeply roots itself in childhood, but it is more accurate to view childhood as the forge rather than the sole blueprint.
Psychologists look at this through the Diathesis-Stress Model.
This framework states that you are born with a specific biological vulnerability, and your childhood experiences determine whether that vulnerability shapes a highly anxious personality.
An anxiety-prone personality develops during childhood through three distinct pathways:
1. Behavioral inhibition
Some babies are simply born with a personality trait called behavioral inhibition.
From infancy, these children react to new people, strange objects, or unfamiliar environments with intense distress, crying, and physical withdrawal.
Studies show that toddlers who display high levels of behavioral inhibition are significantly more likely to develop an anxiety-prone personality and anxiety disorders as they grow into adolescence and adulthood.
2. Attachment styles and environmental blueprinting
Children look to their primary caregivers to figure out if the world is safe.
If a child’s early environment is unstable, their brain adapts by becoming permanently hyper-vigilant and we have issues such as:
Insecure attachment: If a parent is emotionally unpredictable the child develops an anxious-preoccupied attachment style.
They learn that to keep people close and stay safe, they must constantly scan for shifts in body language, tone, and mood.
This constant scanning matures into adult overthinking and relationship anxiety.
Accommodating anxiety: If a parent is overly protective and constantly steps in to “save” a naturally shy child from uncomfortable situations, the child’s brain misses out on building distress tolerance.
The child grows up believing, “I am fragile, the world is dangerous, and I cannot cope on my own.”
This is a big problem as well and a quite neglected one with the classic sign of adulthood being unable to tolerate negative emotions because you never learned how to deal with them when you were young.
3. The genetic vs. environmental split
To figure out exactly how much of an anxiety-prone personality comes from childhood vs. genetics, scientists look at twins.
Large-scale twin and genetic studies reveal a consistent breakdown:
Heritability: It seems that roughly 30% to 40% of an anxious personality (neuroticism) is directly inherited through your DNA.
Environment: The remaining 60% to 70% is shaped by environmental factors, with early childhood experiences, family dynamics, and trauma carrying the heaviest weight.
Now of course, while childhood sets the baseline, a person can absolutely develop a highly anxious personality in adulthood.
If someone for example enjoys a calm, secure childhood but encounters severe, prolonged adult trauma, such as combat, a toxic or abusive long-term relationship, financial devastation, or a severe medical crisis, the brain can undergo late-stage rewiring.
So chronic adult stress can override a secure childhood foundation, forcing the amygdala into a permanent state of survival-driven hyper-vigilance.
Now let’s see what Freud, Adler and Jung have to say about these.
Number 1: Adler
Alfred Adler strongly rejected the idea that childhood trauma or past events directly cause a person’s current personality or mental illness.
Neuroscience of the 21st century proves this oversimplification wrong of course but it can provide the following valuable perspective for some people which is that we are not solely determined by traumas.
Instead, we choose the meaning we give to those past experiences to serve a current goal.
In Adlerian psychology, all emotions and behaviors are goal-directed tools.
Anxiety for example is not something you have, it is a tool you manufacture to achieve a specific end.
In an etiological view, a person might say, “I cannot go to social events because my parents neglected me as a child.”
Adler on the flipside would argue, “You are using the memory of your parents’ neglect to achieve your current goal of staying home and avoiding the risk of rejection.”
So the primary purpose of anxiety is to avoid defeat, protect the ego, and escape personal responsibility.
By creating intense anxiety, panic, or overthinking, an individual creates a valid excuse for why they cannot face life’s tasks (such as career steps, dating, or socializing). If they try and fail, it hurts their self-esteem.
But if they don’t try “because of their anxiety,” their ego remains safe.
Adler noted that all children experience a natural feeling of inferiority because they are small and dependent on adults.
Now if a child is pampered or discouraged, they fail to develop “social interest” (cooperation with others).
Instead of striving to improve themselves, they develop an inferiority complex.
They use anxiety to shout to the world: “Look how fragile I am! You must take care of me and expect nothing from me.”
Number 2: Freud.
There are many misconceptions when it comes to Freud one of which is that he advocated that simply understanding trauma automatically leads to healing.
But Freud said and wrote that true healing requires moving past intellectual understanding into a deeper, messy process of integration.
He broke this down into three major realizations:
1. Intellectual insight vs. emotional catharsis.
Freud noticed that many patients became experts at analyzing their own trauma.
They could map out their childhoods perfectly, but they did so with absolute emotional indifference.
He identified this as a defense mechanism called intellectualization.
The patient converts a painful, terrifying emotion into a sterile, cold, logical problem to avoid actually feeling it.
Freud argued that intellectual insight is useless on its own.
For healing to occur, the patient has to experience catharsis, meaning they must consciously re-feel the trapped panic, grief, or anger in the safety of the therapist’s office to finally discharge the emotional energy.
2. Durcharbeitung
When Freud gave patients a brilliant breakthrough interpretation of their trauma, they rarely got better overnight.
Instead, they usually fought back, missed appointments, or relapsed.
Freud introduced the concept of “working through”. He realized the brain is incredibly stubborn and addicted to its neurotic habits.
Understanding a trauma is just step one.
True healing is a repetitive, grueling process where the patient must trace how that single childhood trauma distorts their everyday choices, over and over again, until the neural habit finally breaks.
3. Transference
Freud concluded that you cannot heal a past trauma purely by talking about history. The trauma must be brought into the room, alive, in the present moment.
This happens through transference, where a patient unconsciously projects their feelings about their traumatic childhood caregivers onto the therapist.
If a patient was neglected by their father, they will eventually become convinced that the therapist secretly despises them.
Freud believed healing happens when the patient relives that exact traumatic dynamic in real-time, but experiences a new, safe, and healthy outcome with the analyst.
Number 3: Jung
Carl Jung famously wrote that: “The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis but how to bear it”.
He kind of acted as the ultimate bridge between Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.
He looked at Freud’s fixation on the past and Adler’s fixation on the future, and famously stated that both men were right, but they were each looking at only half of the human psyche.
Jung viewed chronic overthinking and neurosis not as a mechanical brain malfunction, nor as a simple excuse to avoid tasks.
To Jung, neurosis is the soul’s cry for help, misunderstood as madness.
He introduced a profoundly different framework for understanding mental suffering based on four core concepts:
1. “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering”
This is Jung’s most famous statement on the matter.
He argued that life inherently requires us to face difficult, painful truths, such as grief, the fear of death, or finding a life purpose.
When a person is too afraid to face that heavy, real-world pain, their mind creates a neurosis instead.
It is much easier for your brain to sit on the couch for six hours overthinking whether a friend’s text message was slightly rude (neurotic suffering) than it is to stand up and face the terrifying reality that you are lonely and need to change your career (legitimate suffering).
The chronic overthinking is an unconscious smokescreen to keep you from facing the real developmental task at hand.
2. Neurosis is an “attempt at self-cure”
While Freud viewed neurotic symptoms as a disease to be cured, Jung looked at symptoms as a survival adaptation.
Jung viewed the psyche as a self-regulating ecosystem, much like the physical body.
If you cut your finger, your body creates an ugly, painful scab to protect the wound while it heals.
Jung believed panic attacks, obsessive overthinking, and depression are psychological scabs.
Your unconscious mind forces a breakdown (neurosis) because your conscious ego is living a lie or ignoring something deeply important.
The overthinking loop is your brain violently trying to shake you awake to restore balance.
Focus on the present
Jung firmly agreed with Adler on one major point: the cause of neurosis is always in the present moment, not the past.
He explicitly warned that patients love to hunt for childhood trauma because it acts as a perfect distraction.
Digging into a 20-year-old memory allows the patient to ignore the fact that they are currently failing to adapt to their adult life today.
Jung argued that even if a childhood trauma happened, it only causes a neurosis today because you are currently refusing to face a necessary life transition, such as gaining independence or stepping into the unknown.
4. The loss of meaning
Jung was one of the first psychiatrists to note that a massive percentage of his patients didn’t have a clinical illness, they had an existential crisis.
When a person lacks a core sense of meaning, higher purpose, or spiritual connection, the brain experiences a profound internal vacuum.
The human brain cannot tolerate a void.
If it does not have a grand, meaningful problem to solve (like art, creation, or community), it will turn inward and begin consuming itself.
It will take tiny, meaningless everyday details and overthink them into monstrous crises just to give the brain something to do.
So here is exactly how Freud, Adler, and Jung would attempt to solve your anxiety or neurosis if you sat on their therapy couches today.
1. Freud
Freud’s solution requires entering the deep dark spaces of your mind to reclaim trapped emotional energy.
The goal is to create structural changes to the personality.
You must take territory away from the “Id” (primitive impulses) and the “Superego” (harsh self-criticism) and give it to the “Ego” (your conscious, logical self).
As he famously said: “Where Id was, there Ego shall be.”
The Practical Method:
Free association: You lie on a couch, look away from the therapist, and say whatever comes to mind without filtering it, even if it is nonsensical, rude, or frightening. This bypasses your brain’s defenses.
Dream analysis: Unpacking dreams to decipher hidden unconscious conflicts.
Resolving the transference: Noticing how you project childhood patterns onto the therapist, allowing you to emotionally relive and safely correct the old trauma in the present moment.
The Core Shift: Moving from intellectual knowing to visceral, emotional catharsis (crying, grieving, or getting angry) to physically discharge the trauma from your system.
2. Adler
Adler would probably advise building your “social interest”.
A sense of belonging and desire to contribute to society while stripping away the excuses your anxiety provides.
Parts of this method might include:
Pointing out the rigid “unconscious rules” you invented during childhood (“If I don’t do things perfectly, I am unlovable”).
Gently challenging your logic. If you say, “My anxiety prevents me from getting a job,” Adler would ask: “If you woke up tomorrow and your anxiety was 100% gone, what would your life look like? What are you afraid would happen if you got that job?”
Actively practicing behavioral roleplay. He would instruct you to act “as if” you were confident and courageous for just one day to prove to your brain that you can survive it.
Shifting from self-protection to contribution. Adler believed anxiety vanishes the moment you stop focusing entirely on yourself and start focusing on how to help others.
3. Jung
Jung believed that all these are signs that your conscious mind has drifted too far away from your true nature.
So his solution is an active, deeply creative dialogue with your unconscious mind.
The goal is individuation aka becoming the complete, authentic person you were always meant to be by integrating the hidden, rejected parts of yourself.
This would be accomplished through:
Active imagination: A form of meditation where you intentionally invite your anxious thoughts or “monsters” into your mind and have a literal, written conversation with them. You ask the anxiety: “What do you want from me? What am I missing?”
Integrating the shadow: Facing the parts of yourself you have repressed because society or your parents deemed them “bad” (such as your raw aggression, hidden desires, or ambition). Jung believed locked-up energy turns into toxic overthinking and releasing it gives you back your strength.
Chasing meaning over comfort: Actively engaging in art, mythology, journaling, and pursuing a grander existential purpose.
But now let’s discuss how we can “biohack” our way out of overthinking, anxiety, panic and so on.
First and foremost realize that even when you’re overthinking, your brain chemistry experiences a profound shift.
Overthinking represents an active state of hyper-excitation and a failure of the brain’s internal braking systems such as: