Overthinking

Sylvia Bishop | Five Books | Mar 25, 2026

There’s a fine line between what’s helpful and what’s unhelpful. Obviously, thinking is important – reflecting on your life, considering what’s happening, and processing how it went or how you felt about it. I wouldn’t work as a clinical psychologist if I thought otherwise. But overthinking is when you get stuck, and generally it’s triggered by, or a cause of, low mood. Whilst it can feel like it might give you a better understanding of what’s going on or help you feel more prepared, it does the opposite. All the research shows that it lowers your mood, amplifies the problem, and makes you less good at problem-solving.

This book inspired me to come up with the idea of the spotlight of attention: that what we’re focusing on becomes our reality of life. That led me to see what is going on when we’re overthinking… If our mind is a stage with a spotlight, then when you’re overthinking, the spotlight’s got stuck on one small detail of your life, and it casts the rest of your life into darkness. With the people I work with, they can’t see things differently at the time. If it were as simple as saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s okay,’ nobody would overthink. It’s so real, and it’s so difficult to access another view at that point – again, because when we’re in a negative mood, we narrow our focus of attention (this part isn’t in this book, it’s in my book). You’re on a different track in your brain, so you don’t have access to the same thoughts, memories and feelings. In fact, your brain matches you up with all the other times you felt that bad, and all the other times things weren’t going well. When you can broaden that spotlight of attention and boost your mood, then you’re back on the good tracks again, with the good memories that match – so it’s a positive knock-on effect.

The Digital Exiles

Isobel Cockerell | Coda Story | 21 Nov 2025

She talked about how the physical realm opened up to her when she got rid of her smartphone, with its Instagram account and its tens of thousands of followers. She regained a sense of her surroundings. “If you live for fifty years and you’re aware every day of what’s going on around you, and you’re listening to people, and you’re present, that is more valuable than living into your nineties and when you flash back through your life it’s just screens.”

And if tech leaders have their way, there’ll be a time when the smartphone is no longer an external device — but part of our bodies. Kyle Morris, a young AI builder I met in San Francisco last year, called the smartphone a “better prefrontal cortex. It tells you how to get places, tells you how to plan. It gives you answers. It gives you a better memory. I see in the next 50 years, that it’s going to enter us. That it’s going to become part of us.” He held up his phone in front of me: “It’s weird that we have these like external things that we’re using. People are going to start retrofitting themselves with improved memory, improved vision.”