Your brain is running eleven things right now. You know this because when you try to focus on the thing directly in front of you, something from three days ago surfaces. Then something you said wrong in 2019. Then a task you forgot to do, then a fear about whether you're doing enough of the right things, then — if you're lucky — five seconds of actually reading the email before your brain remembers the unread message from your family group chat.

This is what overthinking actually feels like from the inside: not dramatic, not cinematic, just a constant low-grade CPU drain where nothing gets your full attention and nothing fully closes.

The frustrating part is that most of these tabs opened for a reason. Your brain flagged them as unresolved. The 2019 thing felt unprocessed. The family message carries weight. Your brain is not malfunctioning — it's doing exactly what a brain does when it cares about too many things and hasn't had enough time or space to process any of them properly.

The problem isn't that you think too much. The problem is that thinking keeps happening in the background with no outlet and no resolution, so it loops. Same tab, same content, same unresolved flag, same circuit.

What actually helps: giving a thought somewhere to land. Writing it down. Saying it out loud. Making a decision — even a provisional one — so the brain can mark that tab as "addressed, pending." Not cured, not finished, but addressed. That's often enough to quiet it slightly.