?
How you overthink
An overthinking test for what plays again once the light is off
An unanswered text, a curt line, a long night, and what you do with whatever comes back.The thought that comes back in the evening asked for nothing, and still it settles in.Eight scenes to see what you answer it.
8
questions
1
minute
80+
avatars
Eight questions, no overthinking. Ready?
Going back over a thought, each in their own way
Staying with it, sorting it, writing it down, moving on. A thought gets picked up again in many ways, and each of these symbols carries one.
The same thought,eight times
A thought comes back, eight times, in eight forms. You tick what you do, or write your own way.
The card stays with you. It only travels if you send its private link.
Follow your thought
Eight scenes where something comes back. You choose what you do when it replays.
Find your angle
A thought that loops, an envy, a mood caught in passing. Each test takes one, choose yours.
Keep what follows
If you want to go on, a Persona is there for what comes next. And if you then tell someone else, you will already have found your words.
What you do with what comes back, in an overthinking test
To ruminate comes from the Latin for chewing the cud, and the picture still fits. A thought goes down, comes back up, gets chewed again, and somewhere around the fourth time you start to wonder what you are hoping to find in it. This overthinking test looks at that everyday habit of replaying a message, a sentence or a scene, and at what you do next.
The eight situations are ordinary ones: a silent phone at nine in the evening, bins left outside your door, the same thought at three in the morning. No answer is the right one, and nothing in any of them needs fixing. A minute is enough, and you leave with a way of doing it, not a verdict.
Three of the eight situations
These are small everyday things that come back in the evening. Answer the way you actually do, not the way you wish you did.
- A message sent and no reply.
- A curt remark that replays at night.
- Three in the morning and the same thought.
Which work do you reopen at night, hunting for the flaw? An overthinking test
In LittrĆ©ās French dictionary, to ressasser a piece of work is to examine it closely for its smallest faults, and to ressasser a person is to go through their conduct in case there is something to hold against them. The word described an inspection, carried out with method by someone who is looking. At night, when a message has gone unanswered or a curt remark plays again, inspector and inspected are the same person, which makes the audit unusually long. This overthinking test looks at what you do when the file reopens: you check the message, send the second one, tell someone, decide, or leave it to ripen. Those gestures say something about how you go round in circles that the circling alone does not.
Combing the message for one word too many
The message went out at six. By nine it is being reread in the head, word by word, hunting for the one that should have stayed in the draft. If a friend remarks on a faraway look, the whole evening can go on wondering what showed.
Message two fits on two lines
A second message, short, with no fuss made of it, and the waiting stops weighing. When a friend notices a faraway look, the sentence comes first, here is what I was thinking about. The question has no time to become a file.
The bins do get collected
A curt line at noon, a light switched off at ten, and between the two a calm decision that it is not worth the evening. The neighbourās bins get the same treatment, a sigh and a bet on the collection.
Ring the bell before it fades
The noon remark does not wait for night. It is written within the minute, or you ring the neighbourās bell before the irritation has found its place. There may be less left to replay once the light is off.
Dinner declined, head kept home
The dinner invitation is turned down in a sentence, and the thought from lunch stays home. It turns over alone, in a single direction, with nobody having seen what it looks like. Some evenings, silence is the choice.
A heap of it, for whoever answers
Something has been trotting round since lunch, and whoever answers first gets all of it, in a heap, before asking what it is about. The dinner is accepted too, because other people tend to put oneās thoughts back in place.
Let it ripen until dawn
Two columns, twice, a tie. It is left to ripen, like a fruit on a windowsill. And when the thought is back at three in the morning, it is allowed its lap, until it tires itself out.
Up at three, file open
The columns tie, so you decide tonight, even at the risk of being wrong. At three in the morning, when the thought comes back, you get up to deal with it, and the night becomes an office with no window and no colleagues.
A slip of paper by the bed
One last opinion, just the one, then a slip of paper by the bed where the three oāclock thought waits for tomorrow. The silent phone has gone to another room, and the table is laid for real.
In the early 2000s, Wendy Treynor, Richard Gonzalez and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, at the University of Michigan, took data from a 1999 study and cut a rumination questionnaire into two packets of five sentences. One they called reflection (reflective pondering), the other brooding. The two packets, they found, do not behave alike against a low mood. The abstract names its own limit: a secondary analysis, on a single set of data.
Eight years later Anson Whitmer and Ian Gotlib ran the numbers again on three groups. The line between the two packets held among people who had never been depressed and among those who had come out of it, and blurred among those going through it, and the authors warn against assuming that brooding means the same thing in all three.
What to keep fits in a line: under one verb sit two gestures that a questionnaire separates more easily than a sleepless night does. As for the eight scenes of this overthinking test, nobody has gone over them twice, no study validates them, and they are still on their first reading.
Three notes to turn over at your leisure
Nothing to ruminate on here
The test looks at four traits through scenes from ordinary life. It gives no score and no diagnosis. It is a game.
The first reflex, even if it flatters less
Take the first answer that sounds like you, even if another one flatters you more. You can tick one of the three or answer in your own words.
Your card, kept in your account
At the last situation the Persona asks for your e-mail to show you your card. It is then kept in your account.