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Do women think too much?

A book by a psychologist provides strategies to come out of the ‘epidemic of over-thinking’.

 

Politically incorrect though it may be. It is not uncommon for women to sometimes feel or be told that they are thinking too much. I know several women to sometimes feel or be told that they are thinking too much. I know several women who not only think too much but agonize that they do. Unremarkably, this is not such a common phenomenon in the male of the species. In fact, women accuse men of either being unthinking or thinking only about sex, money and power. It is of course, conceivable that gender stereotyping could be responsible for this contention that women think more than is necessary.

More than hyperbole?

However, evidence that it is not mere hyperbole come from Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, who has actively researched the subject for several years. In fact, she refers to it as an “epidemic of over-thinking”. Her research on the nature and causes of depression in women, from which her treatise about women thinking too much has been derived, has been well documented in scientific journals. Fortunately, her writing has not been confined to these erudite spaces, and she has taken the trouble to allay the concerns of millions of victims of over-thinking by writing a series of books for them.

 

The first of these, Women Who Think Too Much, which was published in 2003 and expectedly went on to become a bestseller in the United states. Was brought to my attention a year or so ago by a woman friend who thinks too much. I enjoyed reading it, for apart from being very well written, it is full of practical strategies that over-thinkers can use, as the subtitle of the book says, “to break free of over-thinking and reclaim your life”.

 

Nolen-Hoeksema begins by distinguishing over-thinking from garden-variety worrying. Worriers worry about the future. Over-thinkers fret over the past. What has happened in the past. What they’ve done in the past. What they should and could have done in the past. And so on. Nor is over-thinking a variation Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) where the individual’s conscious mind is actively intruded upon by unwanted and often, blasphemous thoughts that pretty much have a mind of their own and can sometimes take over the sufferer’s entire thought process. She defines three categories of over-thinking.

 

The first of these, Rant-and-rave over-thinking is usually related to an event of perceived injustice which sets in motion a “thought rage”, as it were, from which the individual finds it very hard to escape. The second, Life-of-their-own over thinking starts of as a sort of rumination of something that the person is a little unhappy about, say, being over-weight. Her mind then launches on a tirade directed against herself and her flaws and shortcomings which are immediately exaggerated to epic proportions. Her mind then goes around in circles, much like a roundabout that just cannot be stopped. The third variety, Chaotic over-thinking, involves jumping from one chaotic thought to another, not necessarily in linear progression. It’s almost like multiple thought processes explode against each other, each feeding off the other and setting a reverberating circuit of unhappy and unrelated thoughts.