Episode 100 - Overthinking

Transcript

Ellie: 0:11

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:13

The podcast where you get to hear your two favorite thinkers overthinking a lot of stuff all the time.

Ellie: 0:21

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:23

And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:25

And David, we made it. It is our 100th episode. I feel like I would always think about podcasts having 100 episodes and feel like I would think that that meant that they've been going on for so long. And it doesn't feel like it's actually been that long. I'm kind of in shock that it's been 100 episodes, to be honest.

David: 0:42

I know I'm so excited about reaching this milestone. I'm over here like, imagining little trumpets and confetti flying around, but does feel like we haven't been doing this all that much, but I have to say by the standards of the world of podcasting, we are in the minority because most podcasts bail out when they hit like the double digits of episodes. So by now we are a longstanding podcast in the community of podcasting and it feels really good.

Ellie: 1:15

Which I think has translated, you know, in terms of our listenership and how people are engaging with us as hosts, you know, like the ways that people know what Overthink is. It's so exciting and it's been really fun, I think, from my perspective to have a creative outlet in this way and also to be able to learn about so many different areas of philosophy, because a lot of times, you know, we're reading new articles or books for episodes, and I feel like it's just also broadened my horizons of what kinds of things I'm thinking about, what kinds of interlocutors I have in mind, and so on.

David: 1:49

I would add another point to that, which is that not only are we learning a lot about all these areas that we decide to take on as episodes, but we've also gained a lot of insight into each other, as thinkers and as friends also, because one of the things that I really look forward to whenever we settle on a topic

often is: 2:08

what ideas am I going to have? But also, how is Ellie going to surprise me with the ideas that she's also going to bring to the table? I love that this has been for us both an outlet for intellectual creativity, but also a kind of laboratory for working and reworking our friendship along intellectual lines. And so I'm very thankful for that, Ellie.

Ellie: 2:31

Yeah!

David: 2:31

Speaking as your buddy David and not just your wonderfully smart colleague. Yeah, work husband. I prefer that work husband. Maybe I prefer work wife.

Ellie: 2:42

You're right. Okay just constantly appropriating women's culture, David. But thanks for saying that. I, I recently was talking to my long time friend and roommate from Atlanta from back when we were in grad school there, Isa, who loves our podcast. So just a little shout out. Hi! And I was telling her that, you know, you and I sometimes have a hard time disagreeing about topics when we're discussing them because we share so many of the same intuitions. And she very kindly was like, you know what? But even when you agree, you agree for different reasons, like you have the same view, but you have different ways of backing that up and understanding it. And I feel like that's a really, that was a helpful thing for me to think about.

David: 3:22

Yeah, no, we have not fused into a single Borg like mind on This podcast, we still have our own ideas and our own approaches, and I do think that they complement each other well. And I say that just in terms of our styles, but also in terms of our intellectual interests. We bring different things to the conversation that end up creating nice synergies.

Ellie: 3:44

Mm hmm. Yeah. So now as we are overthinking our podcast, Overthink, in these first few minutes of our 100th episode, we want talk about how we came to this name a little bit because we decided to go meta for this episode and do an episode of Overthink on overthinking. So to start, we just wanted to share how we ended up naming the podcast this way and tell you some of the other possible names that we were considering. So David, what's your, what's your narrative of how we came up with the name Overthink?

David: 4:16

So for our listeners, I just want you to visualize the following, Ellie and I have this old Google doc where we have notes from the time when we were beginning to think about doing a podcast together. So it's very old and we put all the names that we were considering in this Google document.

Ellie: 4:31

It's 53 pages.

David: 4:33

It's, yes, it's 53 pages, and I think we ended up with overthink because it felt tongue in cheek, because overthink is something that we're told we shouldn't do, but it's also something that philosophers encourage us to do. And so we like that kind of sense of playfulness to the topic. But we did consider some other names, some of which were decent, some of which were honestly horrendous.

Ellie: 5:01

Yeah. So on the horrendous note, here's a few that we were considering. Mountains out of molehills. Two smart cookies. Philosophy hotspot. Burn after reading. David, that was yours. What is that?

David: 5:18

Isn't it a movie also, burn after reading?

Ellie: 5:22

Yes, that's it. That's especially bad. Here's, here's a couple that I came up with. Gadflies. Belabor the point. Midwives of ideas.

David: 5:33

Midwife, you see I am your midwife. I'm your wife and your midwife.

Ellie: 5:39

Okay, okay, true, true, true. You're my work midwife. I cringe to think about how close we came to naming this podcast Featherless Bipeds.

David: 5:50

Honestly, I love that name. I still stand by it. I think it is so good and unique and original and also accurate. We are featherless bipeds.

Ellie: 6:02

Yeah, I talked a little bit about that as a possible name in another episode, but yeah, it's not, not a bad one. It's just, it doesn't have the same ring as Overthink and we got so close to naming our podcast that and yeah, I really like Overthink.

David: 6:17

Yeah. there is a lot. Ellie, we cannot go through all of them.

Ellie: 6:21

Oh my god. Okay, last we'll move on. The Theory Spinsters. What is going on with that one?

David: 6:29

The feminine thread running through all these names evident. It's evident.

Ellie: 6:35

I do feel like Overthink, when we were trying on these names, it was like trying on a bunch of pairs of jeans, and Overthink just fit like a good pair of Levi's 501s, and a few years later, it's just worn itself in, in a very comforting way.

David: 6:50

and I like that it's like an injunction, it's a call to action. It's like an order. Overthink. And it's counterintuitive, right? Because it's something that, like I said, we typically tend to think of in a negative light. So it fits in a really fun way.

Ellie: 7:09

Today we're talking about overthinking.

David: 7:12

For our 100th episode, we want to go meta and ask: is overthinking a bad thing?

Ellie: 7:19

Under what conditions?

David: 7:21

And how can we praise examined in a world that resists it? In an 1818 article entitled Lecture on Hamlet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge argues that this famous Shakespearean character is the epitome of overthinking. He argues that Shakespeare went about creating characters by essentially imagining a person who had either an excess or an absence of a particular trait, and then imagining what their life would be like in light of that presence or absence. And in the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare invented a man who had an excess of thinking and rational capacity, so much so that his thinking capacities overwhelm his capacity for sensibility. So here we have the overthinker par excellence.

Ellie: 8:21

And you can see that a lot in Hamlet's soliloquy and in other aspects of the play too, some of his dialogue. He's just obsessed with figuring out what the right course of action is and is constantly hesitating, right? I think Hamlet is also associated with hesitation of not being able to act because he's too caught up in thinking. And it's also interesting to me because Hamlet is Is. often additionally associated with depression. He's known as a character who exemplifies like a depressive attitude towards the world, to the extent that some people have kind of diagnosed this fictional character of with depression or, you know, prior to that melancholia. And this connection interests me because there's a lot in psychology research associating overthinking with negative mental health outcomes. What we call overthinking is more or less what psychologists call repetitive thought, or the process of thinking attentively, repetitively, or frequently about oneself and one's world. That's a definition from this 2003 article by Segerstrom. There are a lot of different kinds of repetitive thought that psychological literature focuses on. I went down quite a rabbit hole of looking into them for this episode, but one common form is depressive rumination. So I want to say a little bit about that in light of, I think, this common cultural narrative that we have that overthinking is a bad thing because there is some research to suggest that that is true. The notion of depressive rumination is associated with the psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, who developed a theory of the link between depression and rumination in the 1990s that she calls the response styles theory. And according to the response styles theory, rumination is a way of responding to distress that involves repetitively and passively focusing on symptoms of distress and on the possible causes and consequences of them. And so if you are experiencing distress, you might focus on like, well, why am I feeling this way? And what is going to happen as a result of me feeling this way? And you're just kind of obsessively going into these thought loops. And this is associated with the onset of depression and also with the maintenance of it. So if you get caught in these thought loops, you know, thinking things like, I'm worthless. There's no meaning to my life. Nothing's ever going to get better. Then you're actually maintaining your depression, even though it's arguably a way for your nervous system to try and overcome it, right? It's a response to distress, but it's a really unproductive response to distress because it ends up actually making you feel worse.

David: 11:04

it ends up amplifying your stress because as you point out, it redirects your focus over to your own mental state, which is why often people think about these thought loops as targeting the self. And one of the consequences, of course, of getting trapped in one of these thought loops is that it entirely disconnects you from the world of action, right? Like you're unable to do the sorts of things that you would want to do or that would bring about a shift in your mood, a shift in your perspective. And just to go back for a hot second to Hamlet, I think you really see this in the character of Hamlet, who is consumed by trying to figure out who killed his father in order to get revenge. And there is a very famous scene in the play where Hamlet. He finds the person who killed his father, who is just sitting inside a church, and he's about to get the revenge that he's been wanting this whole time, and he gets caught in one of those thought loops. Hamlet starts thinking, Oh, this guy is here, but if I kill him right now, then maybe this is not the right decision because he's praying in church right now, which means that God has just forgiven him. And so if I kill him, he's going to go to heaven. And that means that he's not going to suffer eternal damnation. And so at the moment of action, the thought loop intervenes, and he's unable to do the thing that was his goal from the very beginning.

Ellie: 12:30

Absolutely. And I think it would be important to put a couple things in context here in connection to Hamlet. One is that this guy is his stepfather, so it's not just a rando, right? And another is that, the form of action that he is wanting to take is murder. so I would maybe caution against, a correlation, when, Nolen-Hoeksema is talking about depressive rumination, she's talking mostly about thoughts of, one's own, esteem in the world, a sense of worthlessness, a sense that nothing's ever going to get better. So there's this really strong evaluative component to it. I think what, Hamlet has going on in this scene that you're talking about would be one of the other kinds of, repetitive thought that psychologists focus on, possibly simply worry, is another form of repetitive thought.

David: 13:17

I would say that it's more than just worry because all I wanted to address by that is that there is a dissociation from the world of action and behavior in the case of rumination, where the thought process gets started and it prevents you from ever reaching that point at which you have to leap from realm of thought to the realm of practical action. But yes, of course, I don't say that the way out of a thought loop is through murdering your stepfather. That is not the takeaway here.

Ellie: 13:47

also with respect to rumination, though, one of the aspects of the definition of rumination is that rumination involves thoughts that don't have immediate environmental cues associated with them. So when you're ruminating, it's actually not on a situation in which you currently find yourself like in a material sense. It's either more abstract or actually more imaginative. It's thinking about, like, "Oh, is the person I have a crush on thinking about me when they're not there in the moment?"

David: 14:14

And the fact that those cues are outside of the immediate environment would suggest that it's a case of the mind fleeing from the surrounding world in a way that, is tricky to get it to come back, which is what makes things like depression and other forms of rumination as well so difficult to treat and to control because they represent this kind of flight of our psychology from reality in many ways, a kind of dissociation.

Ellie: 14:46

You know, even though Hamlet's a young man, rumination is much more common among women than among men on the whole. And it's also much more common for women to be depressed than it is for men to be. psychologists acknowledge that it's not a mere coincidence that women tend to be prone to rumination and to depression, right? Because there's actually a pretty tight link between depression and rumination.

David: 15:10

Yeah, and here we're talking about a kind of rumination that has to do with a vicious cycle, where you get dragged into a mental whirlwind that is difficult to break. But I would also add that there are other forms of rumination that maybe have more to do with just amplifying things that are insignificant in various contexts, and that still would be a kind of overthinking. And here I want to make a pivot for a moment from the psychological more to the physical, because I read an article about chronic pain where the authors suggested that one of the ways in which we can really overthink our relationship to our body is when we ever we have chronic pain, because of course pain is aversive, we want to do everything in our power to make it subside when it's there and to prevent it from arriving when it's not there. And the author of this piece talked about her chronic leg pain, and she suggested that often people who suffer from chronic pain, what they face is precisely a problem of overthinking, where they start attending to every little sensation that might come from their bodies and interpreting that information as pain before the body and the mind really tell us that it is pain. So it's a case where our expectation and our heightened attention to certain things becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so here we're talking not so much about the mind getting itself in a loop, but the mind bringing something about through expectation and prediction.

Ellie: 16:45

Definitely, and I found a little bit of that in some of the work that I was looking at too. Not only is rumination associated with depression, but it's also associated with anxiety and with physical outcomes. But lest you as a listener think like, okay, so this podcast called overthink is just going to be all about why overthinking is terrible. This is only part of the story and it is a part of the story that that is worth mentioning, right? I know like in my own life, I've experienced some really destructive thought loops that I would consider to be overthinking that My life is better without them. There are also forms of constructive overthinking or repetitive thought, as it's called in the psychological literature. So I want to think a little bit about those two. Because also included in repetitive thought, are things like planning, problem solving, mental simulation, and cognitive and emotional processing. for listening. And some of these forms of overthinking have been associated with some really positive mental health outcomes, especially when they are undertaken in certain ways. So, take cognitive processing, for instance. Cognitive processing is a process of actively thinking about a stressor and its implications for your life and for your future. This kind of processing is hypothesized to be central to overcoming post traumatic stress. So PTSD has been associated with repetitive thought patterns, but also overcoming PTSD is associated with repetitive thought patterns. It just depends on the kind of repetitive thought patterns that you are engaging in. And so some psychologists have suggested that major traumatic events challenge or destroy key aspects of yourself, right? And this produces emotional distress and repetitive thought can be a way of resolving that distress that leads to personal growth.

David: 18:48

I really like what you're saying now, Ellie, because we need to keep in mind the difference between positive and negative forms of rumination. But when we talk about the negative form of rumination, we also have to recognize that it can take various forms. Because an article that I read for this episode, which is called Rumination as a Transdiagnostic Phenomenon in the 21st Century, which appeared in the journal Brain Science. makes the argument that for a very long time, people, especially in psychology and cognitive science, have thought of rumination and overthinking largely in connection to depression and melancholia, because their focus is on forms of rumination, where the self is the object of that kind of thought pattern and thought loop. But there are other forms of rumination that have nothing to do with the self and your reference in particular to PTSD reminded me of this connection because they say when somebody suffers from PTSD and they play and replay let's say a traumatic event like a car crash or an earthquake or a war scene in their minds We have every reason to believe that is a kind of rumination. It's just not a self directed kind of rumination. It is what they call event based rumination, where you ruminate about the world and about things that have happened in the past. But of course, if we then go back to the positive form of rumination, the article that I mentioned about chronic pain also makes this point that in the same way that overthinking can be at the root of the problem for people suffering from chronic pain conditions, it too can be part of the solution if you, for example, start focusing on other aspects of the experience, like the fact that it's transient, or if you start focusing on new ways of describing what is happening to you that shift the experience from the kind of negative end of the hedonic spectrum to the positive one.

Ellie: 20:48

That's an interesting take on it. I hadn't come across that in my research, because one thing I did find is that constructive forms of repetitive thought have been the subject of much less research than unconstructive repetitive thought, and I think you kind of alluded to that as well. One thing I found really interesting when talking about constructive repetitive thought is that even when the contents of our repetitive thoughts are negative, there are different ways of engaging with those negative thoughts that are more and less constructive. And so let's say you're caught in a depressive thought loop of thinking to yourself, I'm worthless and things are never going to get better. If you have a problem solving approach or an evaluative approach to that thought, it's just going to make you feel worse because you're going to know like this isn't solving any problems. Like me thinking I'm worthless isn't getting me anywhere. And then you're going to exacerbate it actually like making it even worse. But If you take a more searching or exploratory perspective on things, what in the literature is called experiential rumination, then it can actually be kind of constructive. And I think this sounds quite a bit like mindfulness practice, right? This idea of non judgmental awareness of what's going on with you. This experiential rumination actually improved outcomes for depressive patients.

David: 22:10

And why do you say that it's similar to mindfulness? Is it that the authors made an explicit connection to that? Because I'm trying to get an image of what experiential rumination looks like in practice.

Ellie: 22:22

It looks like recognizing I'm having this thought, getting curious about your experience. And in fact, the author of the study that I'm talking about here has a footnote saying this actually is different from mindfulness, but the way that he characterizes mindfulness as super narrow. And as somebody who's been practicing meditation for a long time, I think it's very fair to say that experiential rumination is a form of mindfulness based on the way that it was being described in, in the pieces.

David: 22:48

Ah, I don't know, Ellie. I think that's still a little bit unclear in my mind. I would want to know a little bit more about why they're calling attending to experience, and what you're feeling and thinking in the moment, rumination per se, and then what that really looks like practically in the context of, somebody being told that they should do this by a therapist or a doctor or something like that. Is it something that they do in the clinic? Is it something that they do at home? Is it a one time exercise or more of a global shift in one's perspective? What's this positive form of rumination?

Ellie: 23:22

Well, it's still a form of rumination because it's repetitively focusing your thoughts on the self as well as symptoms and mood. It's just that you're engaging with that in a different way and that's one of the ways that the author distinguishes it from mindfulness. Although, as I said, I feel like it is fair to consider it a form of it because in mindfulness the author notes there is a focus on bodily states whereas this is really more about just thinking. And so idea is that you're just engaging in this nonjudgmental awareness, and they were doing some, clinical studies to try and induce this state of rumination among patients, but really to induce, again, this experiential form where it's not, it's not feeding the cycle of I am worthless. It's noticing those thoughts when they arise. And that is a form of metacognition. know, therefore, and it's about the self. So it would meet the definition of rumination as it's being used in the psychological literature.

David: 24:19

Yeah, no, if the point is to attend to when those negative thoughts emerge so that then you can re pivot in connection to them, it strikes me as somewhat similar to what I mentioned in connection to chronic pain, which is that instead of just thinking, Oh, I feel something in my leg. It must be pain. You really attend to when it emerges, when it doesn't, and maybe the fact that you still can do a number of things when it appears, so that it breaks this idea that it's incapacitating or debilitating right away.

Ellie: 24:55

Enjoying Overthink? Please consider the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent and self-supporitng show. You can help us cover our key production costs, gain access extended episodes and other bonus content, as well as joining our community of listeners Discord For more, check out Overthink on Patreon.com.

David: 25:16

Whenever we accuse somebody of overthinking things, we do so with the assumption that we understand what thinking is, such that we can identify those cases where somebody is overdoing it. And the discussion that we just had about psychological rumination, I think defines overthinking as a kind of getting stuck, right? Like you can move forward in your thought process and you're just like spinning the wheels without making any progress. I almost think of a car that's stuck in mud and you're stepping on the gas and the wheels are turning but you're not actually moving. That's what we tend to think is happening in these cases, right? That's what it means to overthink. And I think if that's the notion of overthinking that is at work here, it means that the implicit notion of thinking that we're dealing with is the idea that thinking is or should be a continuous stream of mental activity, which is how a number of philosophers have thought about it. That's how a lot of early modern thinkers like Hume and Locke thought about what thinking is. It's a kind of flow and association and connection of ideas. And it's also how William James, the father of American psychology, defines conscious experience. He uses the metaphor of the stream. And what I want us to think about a little bit, Ellie, is that this is only one way of thinking about what it means to overthink. And I'm going to pitch now an alternative account, and I want to get your thoughts about that.

Ellie: 26:54

Right, hit me.

David: 26:55

So what I'm going to mention here, I'm getting from a 1941 essay called Co conscious Mentation that was written by Charles Oberndorf, and it's a contribution to psychoanalysis. According to Oberndorf, our experience of thinking is not, as these modern thinkers or William James would have said, a stream of mental activity. Rather, there are often many cases where our experience of thinking is actually a split or a dissociation between two coexisting processes of mental experience that are happening at the same time. So think about, for example, Ellie, when you're watching a movie and you're paying attention to the movie, of course, but you're also already thinking about why you hate the movie so much, like everything that makes it so terrible.

Ellie: 27:44

This sounds like what I articulated when we had the bad movies episode. Like, I actually often movies with that sort of dual thought process going on.

David: 27:51

Yeah, and so that dual thought process is what he calls co-conscious mentation, and he says, look, this is a normal feature of our mental life. In fact, that's what thinking often is. It's this duality where we're entertaining two ideas and trains of thought at the same time. Unfortunately, sometimes that duality can be accentuated to the point that it becomes pathological. And what should be a minor split becomes a full blown dissociation that culminates in a kind of obsessive form of thinking or negative rumination that can potentially lead us to derealization and depersonalization in the most extreme cases, right? Where your thought kind of splits, producing a kind of psychosis. And so here overthinking is no longer getting stuck and spinning your wheels internally, but rather a kind of normal splitting that becomes abnormal and the creation of a rupture in your mind that can no longer be brought back together.

Ellie: 28:55

Okay, this one is definitely my form of overthinking.

David: 28:59

The co-conscious one.

Ellie: 29:01

The co conscious mentation. Yeah, I mean, not in terms of full blown derealization or depersonalization, but definitely some low level dissociation that happens for me quite frequently. No, very frequently. And I feel like I am just constantly co consciously mentating. Even as a long time meditator, when they tell you when you're studying meditation, it's not about stopping thoughts. It's about just kind of like not investing so much in them. That is the only way I've kept meditating so long because if was about stopping thoughts, like, it would never work for me. And in fact, okay, one time when I was in grad school, I was applying for some fellowship or job that required mailing in letters of recommendation, which is like pretty unheard of now and was even unheard of then it was all via email. And so, my recommenders had to print out their letters of recommendation, put them in envelopes, and then I sent them in. And I have to admit that I put one of them up to the light just to like, see just like a little, a little glimpse of what it was saying. I didn't want try and read entirely, but I was just kinda curious. So I it up to light and was I'll let myself read a phrase. And the phrase I read was something like, her mind is always active. It never rests. And I was like, then that caused me to spit out being like. Is this a good recommendation or a bad recommendation? Because that could really go different ways.

David: 30:29

Oh my gosh, I wish I had some insight into what people wrote about me and my letters of recommendation,

Ellie: 30:35

David underthinks. He actually doesn't really think at all.

David: 30:39

yes, no, I was about to say, if I am one of these two models of overthinking, I am definitely not the co conscious one. I am the continuous stream and getting stuck in the mud one. So I honestly, really, I'm an underthinker. and I'm, it's something that has, I don't say that with pride, but I also don't say that with any shame, because it has served me really well in many areas of my life. But when I do overthink, it takes the form of me zooming in on a detail and spinning my wheels and rehearsing it and going over again and again, without getting the kind of resolution that, okay, either I've said what I had to say or I've done what I needed to do. So I'm the kind of person that's in the shower, holding the shampoo bottle, yelling at somebody, telling them something that I should have told them a long time ago, but it is rare. It is rare.

Ellie: 31:34

Okay, just repetitively thinking about that. But so, so would you really say you're not an overthinker? I mean, as somebody with a PhD in philosophy who has a podcast called Overthink and has written a book?

David: 31:48

no. obviously I'm a thinker and an overthinker in the positive academic sense of the term, but a number of people have told me sometimes positively, sometimes negatively that I underthink a lot of things and just let them go by. I just give myself over to that, let's say the Jamesian stream of conscious life, like somebody floating down.

Ellie: 32:11

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you, you are that way. And then somebody else has to, like, fish you out.

David: 32:16

Yes, actually, this, like, all of my interpersonal relationships are with experiential fishers who take me out of that flow.

Ellie: 32:25

don't You don't have to tell me that. Believe me.

David: 32:30

Touche.

Ellie: 32:31

I just feel like I, so one thing I really like about myself is this penchant for overthinking. And like you said, you like and don't like your, quote, underthinking. I like and don't like my overthinking because I definitely am just, like, having ideas all the time. Especially, I mean, I will say I think this has to do with having material conditions that foster my flourishing. Like, I definitely am not having ideas all the time if I'm in, like, a very uncomfortable situation or if I am experiencing, like, negative mental health. So I don't so much resonate with, like, the depressive rumination that we talked about before. But I do think experiential rumination is very often a part of my life and I actually ruminate more when I'm like in a good place in my life. I'm just constantly repetitively thinking things through whether it's like random ideas that I'll have for the podcast. I feel like I have so many of those at just like different parts of the day. That's like what is happening to me in the shower or thinking about my research or I really like everyday problem solving as well. We mentioned that is a form of repetitive thought as well. Thinking about like, what's the optimal way that I can structure my morning so that like, my skincare is on point.

David: 33:46

An optimizer!

Ellie: 33:47

I know, I know.

David: 33:48

You are like optimizer bordering on perfectionist in terms of like my limited experience of the ways in which you might overthink.

Ellie: 33:57

Yeah, I don't know if I'm a perfectionist. And I also hope that I'm an optimizer, not in like the gross capitalism, Taylorism factory assembly line kind of fashion.

David: 34:06

There's another way?

Ellie: 34:08

I really think there is, thinking about when is best for me to have my coffee in order to facilitate like a pleasant and thoughtful morning? How can I kind of figure out when I should be doing my meditation during the day in order for it to fit in? Like all of these questions, I just love thinking about them.

David: 34:28

Remember when we did the regret episode, we noticed that one of the big differences between us is that you tend to regret small things, Misplacing your keys that I think now we can think about as obstacles to that kind of day to day optimization that you're talking about. Whereas I don't think about the details. If anything, I regret big life decisions that then prompt a kind of moral reflection and sometimes some moral crisis in me. But yeah, I think maybe it's a difference of detail versus large scale. So it's about

Ellie: 34:59

Mm hmm.

David: 35:00

where you place the focus.

Ellie: 35:03

Yeah. And it's certainly not always a good thing either. I mean, I think sometimes I overthink in a bad way as well, like I need to get out of my head a bit. And this is why a lot of times when I meditate, I use as anchors sensory things like sound is a really helpful anchor for me I focus on the breath when I'm meditating, it's really helpful. It's almost impossible for me not to control it. And my meditation teacher has said that she thinks I also have trouble not controlling my thought patterns as well, which I think to some extent, obviously

David: 35:34

Like letting go of thoughts or

Ellie: 35:36

what? Yeah, like I just want to follow my thoughts because I think they're fun! And so then I, it's not like controlling them as in think about this and don't think about that. It's more just. Like, instead of letting them go, like you mentioned, it's kind of continuing to feed them. And I find that really enjoyable from a certain angle, but from another angle, it can really separate me from my environment and mean that a lot of times, like, I might be physically in one place, but my thoughts are just completely somewhere else.

David: 36:06

I see. But it seems like then in this case, you are actually like attaching yourself to particular lines of thinking and like wanting to pursue them without letting them roll off your back as in certain forms of meditation maybe is encouraged.

Ellie: 36:20

yeah. It's the thought that in the psychological literature is called perseverative cognition. I found all, like, I found all these fancy terms for repetitive thought. I didn't want to list them, but they're kind of popping up here and again.

David: 36:32

Yeah, no, I ran into that term and I had to Google it and I actually think it's really useful. And for me, when I think about the kind of rumination that I'm most prone to, I do think it is not the kind of self directed rumination that is at the root of conditions like depression. I am much more likely to suffer from external event based rumination, like the one that is associated with PTSD. So I don't have negative thoughts about myself. I have negative thoughts about the world when I have those negative thoughts, because obviously it can't be me. The world is broken The blame goes out.

Ellie: 37:11

The way that says so much about you, David.

David: 37:14

Again I say that without pride and without shame.

Ellie: 37:18

Okay, I want to talk about another perspective on thinking too. You mentioned this co conscious mentation notion and then like the wheels getting stuck in the mud notion of overthinking and the way that those are like based on different ways of conceptualizing thought. And another way of conceptualizing thinking that I want to bring in the mix is from the philosopher John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, who was writing about a century ago, because his view of thinking has been really influential in philosophy of education to the point that our educational model is, to a large extent, educational. actually based on Dewey's principles, and arguably would be better if it were more based on his principles, but that's a story for another time. Dewey essentially has a view that thinking is problem solving. He thinks that our thought processes begin when we find ourselves faced with a problem. And they end once we've resolved that problem through testing our various explanations or solutions. And he gives a metaphor of thinking being like finding yourself at a fork in the road and not being sure which direction to go in. You could once you find yourself in this fork, just start walking in one of the two directions and hope for the best, but more likely you're going to try and gather more information about which direction is best before embarking on one path or the other.

David: 38:36

Girl, I'm just going to look at Google Maps, obviously.

Ellie: 38:39

I know, right? Poor Dewey did not have access to Google Maps because his book, How We Think was published in 1910. So said, he said, you'd probably climb a tree to see in both directions. Like, that would be your form of thinking, you know, , and then you'd look. And what you're looking for when you do that is going to depend on what your objective is. If your objective is to reach the City of London, you're going to be looking out for tall buildings. But if your objective is to take the most beautiful path, then you're just going to be looking to see which path has more trees, or is there a brook or a beautiful field that seems to be in one direction or another. So thinking is a form of problem solving that's rooted in the objectives that we're seeking. We want to seek to confirm or deny different beliefs, whether they have to do with a state of affairs or about what we should do.

David: 39:34

Yeah, no, based on this, I can definitely understand how overthinking then it could be a potential danger for Dewey because you'd either just be continuing to think after you've already found out a perfectly practical, viable solution, or you would be spinning your wheels without ever arriving at any solution to begin with.

Ellie: 39:48

Totally, and this goes back to the wheels stuck in the mud metaphor that you mentioned earlier. Dewey does think about thinking. as a more reflective process than just a car driving along naturally. So it's maybe a little bit different from the metaphor that you brought up earlier, but it is as though once we have gotten to our destination, if we continue to think about that, then we would be in a bad place for Dewey. And this is part of why education is so important for him because we can't solve problems If we don't have a reservoir of knowledge, including knowledge of past experience, to draw on, nor can we really know how to recognize problems as problems. So the point of education for him is a disciplined and logically trained mind. And that mind is able to judge how far to take each step of the process, how to recognize where to go next, and when the process is over. And he says there aren't any recipes for this. Each case needs to be taken for itself. So it really is a kind of practical wisdom that we're after. It's not just like some set of knowledge that we have that we can perfectly apply in each and every case.

David: 41:03

although one worry that emerges for me when we equate thinking with problem solving in this Deweyan tradition is that it limits the realm of thought to precisely those problems. that we agree collectively have a solution. And leaves outside of the realm of thought and also outside of the realm of education here, thinking more institutionally, all those themes and problematics that don't have a solution that anybody could present as the right answer. So I'm here thinking about things like metaphysical problems, philosophical conundrums. Are those things for which we can come up with a solution? I don't know. And I think this might explain the anti-metaphysical orientation of a lot of pragmatism that grows out of this Deweyan way of thinking. Because of course, when you're dealing with metaphysical problems, there are problems. There are just, no solutions on the horizon.

Ellie: 42:04

Yeah. So Dewey's view is helpful if you're trying to figure out why your coffee tastes bad and how you can make it better or what optimal schedule you should have in the morning for when you drink your coffee. But yeah, maybe not for some of these broader questions. And I know we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment, but I just want to say one thing that I do like about this view is that Dewey emphasizes the affective aspect of problem solving and thinking, where he says that the feeling of a problem is where thinking begins. And have to accept that during that entire process of thinking, there is a felt discomfort, because we're suspending our judgment. And so critical thinking requires getting comfortable with that felt discomfort that happens when we don't immediately know the answer to something. And I think that emphasis on being comfortable with the discomfort is something worth preserving, especially in a society that increasingly is looking for quick and easy answers to problems. Yeah.

David: 43:08

I would say that among academics, we philosophers are the ones that are most frequently and most viciously sometimes attacked as overthinkers.

Ellie: 43:33

Which is why our podcast name is so great.

David: 43:35

Yeah, I think there's something about philosophy, about the kind of discourse that we have in philosophy, about the sorts of questions that we deal with and the sorts of solutions, to go back to Dewey for a second, that we propose that just. doesn't jive well with our society's conception of what proper thinking is, such that in the eyes of society, the philosopher is always the person who is overdoing it.

Ellie: 44:02

I agree with

David: 44:03

you that

Ellie: 44:04

philosophers have

David: 44:05

a

Ellie: 44:05

special relationship with overthinking. And one way that you might see that is in the fact that PhD means Doctor of Philosophy. So it's like if you're a PhD in neuroscience, you're a Doctor of Philosophy of Neuroscience, which means you are the overthinker of neuroscience par excellence. But I also feel like one of the places where overthinking really gets used as an accusation is in English classes. You know, when you're like talking about a text in an English class and either really going deep on the character psychology or the prose or potentially like author's intentions or structure, whatever it might be, all of those really juicy, fun conversations that you have in an English seminar room, y'know, some bro just might come in and be like, I think we're overthinking it. And it's really hard. It's, it's like such a devastating, it's no, but I was having so much Yeah. fun.

David: 45:00

That leads me to maybe change my original claim a little bit. And now I'm going to propose that the people who are accused of overthinking the most in higher education today are humanists to, make room for our colleagues in the English department. But what really strikes me about this is that nobody says this about other academics who engage in equally rigorous and abstract forms of cognitive labor, like mathematicians, or physicists, or biologists. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say to a biologist, Oh, dude, I think you're mapping this molecule in too much detail. You're overthinking it. And so it seems to me that the accusation is often made against people who pursue critical and interpretative methods that are not consistent with scientific epistemology, but are associated with art, literature, and philosophy.

Ellie: 46:01

I have a theory about this. I think it's because people are understanding thinking in Dewey's terms, which is as problem solving. Granted, Dewey was like very pro humanities. He has amazing philosophy of art, but I think that's the way that we've had this kind of pragmatist tradition show up in our culture in decades. It's in this real faith in science because it's problem solving and the sense that the humanities are useless because they're not solving these real world problems.

David: 46:27

Yeah, and I think that problem would also explain why we're so worried about credentialing or pushing people to the STEM disciplines or making sure that there is an applied dimension to their degrees, which is, a reality that you and I are living as people who work in higher education. But this actually I think is a great segue because one of the people that I want to bring into the mix here is the German critical theorist Max Horkheimer. Who worried that the kind of critical thinking that we need to resist modern day capitalism is disappearing from society precisely because this kind of thinking is associated with the humanities and not with the ruling spirit of scientific rationality, which is what dominates our culture nowadays.

Ellie: 47:15

And Horkheimer is a member of the Frankfurt School, this really important German school of thought that then kind of like became a thing in the U. S. because a lot of the thinkers were expelled from Germany because most of them were Jewish. And the Frankfurt School was actually really critical of Dewey and the pragmatist tradition. They associated that way of thinking with instrumental reason, which is associated with science, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote a paper in grad school about how they didn't really give Dewey a fair shake also story for another time. but yeah, they really are working with a pretty different conception of what thinking is, where thinking is not problem solving.

David: 47:52

Yeah, and for them, thinking is philosophy, where philosophy means specifically critical thinking in the vein of especially Marx and Hegel. And here I want to draw primarily from an article that Horkheimer wrote in 1939 called The Social Function of Philosophy. Where he argues that people in the 1930s really felt the need to justify philosophical thinking by showing that it is actually scientific, even though people don't realize that it is. And he argues this is the exactly wrong way to approach the question of the value and the social function. of philosophical thinking, because the value of philosophy is not that it can approximate the natural or the physical sciences and maybe ape them or mirror them. Rather, the value of philosophy lies in the fact that it is a non instrumental form of thinking that enhances our human capacities. And as he says, at one point, can point to no successes. in many ways, it's the fruitlessness or the futility of philosophy that is ultimately its saving grace.

Ellie: 49:08

In a very reductive way. Philosophy for philosophy's sake. I think he would hate that formulation, but maybe we can use it for now.

David: 49:15

Yeah, no, but it seems like he agrees with this notion that philosophy is the epitome of overthinking, but he wants to reevaluate what that means so that it's not a criticism as much as a form of praise. And there's a quote that stood out to me from his essay where he says, the real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent. Philosophy is inconvenient, obstinate, and, with all of that, of no immediate use. In fact, it is a source of annoyance.

Ellie: 49:49

One of the ways that Horkheimer had a huge impact on me is in this idea that common sense, it should always be an object of distrust, and I think this quote really gets at that. But the reason that I said I think he would hate the phrase philosophy for philosophy's sake is because when you mentioned that he says philosophy claims no victories, what he means is no instrumental or practical victories, philosophy does serve an important role as a catalyst of social critique and also of negation. So it's not philosophy for philosophy's sake in the sense of an ivory tower, idol, or leisure based pursuit. Rather, it's for, I would say, a recognition of the contradictions within the status quo, which arguably has extremely revolutionary potential.

David: 50:38

No, you're right to make that observation because, of course, as a member of the Frankfurt School and as a neomarxist, Horkheimer is also very critical of various forms of idealist philosophy that on his view are not materialist, right? They don't draw our attention to understanding the contradictions of the present order. And he captures this at one point in the article by saying that being a philosopher means precisely pointing out the fissures in the system. And he says, I don't mean like a doctor who finds a cure for an ailment or a solution to a problem, but rather like a dialectician, who, like Socrates in antiquity, shows you your own contradictions and basically forces you to confront the fact that things need to change even by your own standards. And I think that this is, a line of thinking that we find in many other, representatives of the Frankfurt tradition. For example, it's also an argument that was made by Herbert Marcuse, who wrote an article in 1965 called Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture, where he basically makes the same argument and he uses the term non operational thinking to capture that which philosophy offers us and the reason for which we ought to cherish it. And at one point he says, what we really need to be protecting in our society are those places where culture can take place. And by culture, he means all the things that get denigrated in the present, art, humanities, poetry, so on and so forth.

Ellie: 52:17

I'm just gonna say, working on culture seems pretty Deweyan to me.

David: 52:22

Yeah, fair enough.

Ellie: 52:23

Preserving, preserving a space for culture.

David: 52:26

Yeah, preserving a space for culture. And I think where they would both agree is that institutions of education can probably do that, depending on how they are organized and arranged. But in this piece from 1965, Marcuse actually has some unexpectedly concrete recommendations of how we can protect philosophy and critical thinking.

Ellie: 52:45

That is unexpected for a Frankfurt School thinker. Oftentimes they eschew concrete recommendations.

David: 52:51

Yeah, very much so. And for example, Marcuse says that you can be a scientist and still contribute to critical thinking, but only if you become a theoretical scientist rather than an applied scientist. So he says, I want to see theoretical sociologists, theoretical biologists, theoretical physicists, and that would be a way of reconfiguring higher education for him to make it more aligned with this promotion of culture. He also says that universities should forego vocational training and really focus on liberal arts whole citizen education. And that they should be financially independent so that they don't have to worry about, making deals with industry and selling their soul just to have enough money to do what they're supposed to do in order to fulfill their mission.

Ellie: 53:41

and I will say that that financial aspect is a problem increasingly for the humanities, especially in Europe and the UK, but also for sciences everywhere. Because this idea that in order to get funding for a given project, you have to have a clear research program and a sense of the results that you might find really stymies a lot of research in the sciences and increasingly in the humanities. I feel like my European colleagues are always having to define their new projects before they actually figure out what's going on. And I'm like, oh my god, I may or may not be a third of the way through my book project. And please don't ask me for an elevator pitch. I'll have something to say about it once it's done. But for now, I'm in this Deweyan space of suspending judgment and feeling the discomfort.

David: 54:29

Yeah, no, because it does seem like it gets things backwards because instead of beginning with the problem, working through inhabiting that do we in space of discomfort, and then hopefully find a solution. It means that if you need funding, you have to begin with the solution off right up front as a research proposal. And then hopefully work backwards from the solution, which is exactly the way in which thought shouldn't necessarily move. I also think that this pressure for funding has another consequence, which is that it pushes research in the direction of problems. where practical solutions are possible, which is why most funding today goes to the sciences. how many grants are there out there for metaphysics or for theology? if you really do a comparison and do the math, it's like night and day.

Ellie: 55:19

Honestly, even among physicists, I've heard from my brother in law, who's a physicist, that there's kind of a conception nowadays that physics hasn't made genuine progress in a while. And, you know, you could trace that, I think, also to these funding systems too, where there's not enough funding that's going towards what's known in science as basic research, or just kind of letting people think about things and then seeing what happens.

David: 55:44

No, I know some physicists who do theoretical physics, like the more heady speculative dimension of physics, like how many universes there are, wormholes, things like that. And sometimes they are ostracized in their own departments because they're seen as the theoreticians who failed to be philosophers. And that shouldn't be in a physics department. Because, if you're a physicist. You should be doing work that, at least in principle, is translatable into some applied domain, whether that's engineering or some other related field.

Ellie: 56:18

Yeah, and you know, we're really focusing here on the value of non instrumental reason and that can constitute a defense of a certain kind of overthinking in, capitalist society. However, I also want to introduce a more Marxist critique of this, which is one that actually the Frankfurt School has sometimes been targets of by other Marxist thinkers, which is this idea that praising the life of thinking can remove you from material transformation. So we mentioned earlier that the Frankfurt School's way of thinking about thinking has a lot of revolutionary potential. But some other Marxist thinkers have thought that they were actually way too obsessed with thinking because according to Marx himself, ideology is always going to be the ideology of the ruling class and transformation needs to be sought through material conditions and thinking will follow. versus the other way around. And I know that's a little bit of a reductive approach to Marx here about which people have different views, but this is something that Marx at, you know, at least in like one famous passage explicitly says. so, yeah, I think potential to critique the penchant for this kind of critical thinking from a different angle, which is actually a Marxist angle.

David: 57:34

Yeah, and I think the Marxist angle can also be articulated in terms of a critique of the possible elitism that can emerge this. Because, so this is something that I noticed in the Marcuse article, that when he's giving this defense of the university, he does say, what I want are elite universities, where like the, creme of the creme, is that how you say that? The creme of the creme? The creme de la creme. The creme of the cream. Get educated, even if that's not true. democratically accessible. And so you can end up with this elitism at the level of critique that doesn't sit well with, I think, the fundamental spirit of Marxism, which is precisely that at some point, unlike Hamlet, you have to jump from thought into the world of action. And in the case of Marx, of course, that means revolutionary action that will completely alter social relations on the ground.

Ellie: 58:33

And at the same time, I think the Frankfurt School was understandably wary of that jumping into action, being predominantly comprised of Jewish thinkers who had to flee Germany during the Holocaust. So I don't know that we're coming to any final conclusions here other say whether you see overthinking as a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing that could potentially become good or bad depends on your view of thinking. And we hope that you'll stay with us for however many future episodes we create on this overthinking project of which this is our 100th.

David: 59:08

We you enjoyed today's episode Please and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access bonus content Q As more and thanks of you who To reach out us and episode go overthinkpodcast. and connect with on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod pod we'd like to thank our audio editor Aaron Mo,rgan production assistant Emilio Esquivel Marquez Samuel P K Smith for the original music and to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.