Over-Thinking

Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Over-thinking and Reclaim Your Life

by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D

In today's society, women are often ruminating about their lives.  When they are not thinking about their careers, co-workers and relationships with their bosses they are caught up worrying about problems with their family, at home, and many other relationships in their lives.  However, can all of this over-thinking cause problems in women's lives? The answer is yes, over-thinking can deepen depression and make women feel hopeless.  Through her experience and research on rumination and depression, Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema offers an overview of why women tend to over-thinking, suggests strategies to overcome the over-thinking and identifies some of the most common themes (i.e., relationships) that women tend to over-think about.

When I first decided to choose this trade book, I chose it because I often felt like I was much of an over-thinker.  Day after day, I catch myself spending large chunks of my day just going over every problem in my life or replaying different scenarios (where I wish I had behaved differently) in my head.  Therefore, I thought this book would offer a great way to escape this endless cycle of rumination I had  fallen victim for.  In addition, the book had raving reviews on Amazon.com, so I thought, "Great! Sounds like I picked a perfect book"

Well, that's a yes and no.

When I first started reading the book, I was very put off by the author's writing style.  First, the author used these odd descriptions to introduce different over-thinking women (e.g., Sandy, a crusty fifty-year-old waitress from Brooklyn (p. 15)) that I thought were unnecessary ways to describe the women in the book.  Second, her writing style seemed repetitive.  I understood what over-thinking was by the first couple of pages but it takes 40 pages for the author to feel comfortable enough to move past just giving example after example of women who take over-thinking to the extreme and discuss what are some of the causes of over-thinking.  However, despite the repetitive introduction, I feel that this became the turning point of the book.  Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's writing becomes much more purposeful in why women over-think and offers strategies to overcome the over-thinking.  

I feel that overall, the book is a good choice.  It may have not have appealed to me immediately because I am use to reading either heavily scientific writing (psychological) or philosophical writing and this probably influenced why I felt that the first part of the book was so repetitive.  However, for the average person who has no background in psychology, I think by offering so many examples of over-thinking to the reader it allows for a wider ranger of readers to find an example of a woman that is most like them.  The examples offer many opportunities in which readers can read about a woman in the book who over-thinks and personally relate to them on some aspect (e.g., age-wise, career-wise or same style of over-thinking, same life circumstances/experiences).  Despite the repetitiveness, I think the book offers a great social commentary on how today's values and expectations of ourselves and others can lead to over-thinking.  

I probably would not recommend this book to friends my age (Personally, I feel that my friends are use to more intellectual writing but I know there are women my age who would benefit from reading it).  Although the book does use examples of young women in college who are over-thinkers, I feel that most of the examples are about women with jobs, family and children.  As much as each of these experiences are some I hope to have in the future, they are currently not very relevant to me.  Therefore, I feel that the target audience for this book is for women between the ages of 25 +., it targets women who are in long-term relationships (i.e., marriage) or in the middle of building their careers and families.  Thus, I would recommend the book to women who a bit older than me but this book is still very applicable to almost any woman (despite their age).  The topics of over-thinking, the causes and how you can move past over-thinking are very relatable and easy to understand.  Moreover, because it is a psychological book written for a general audience, I think anyone (any woman) can read this book and find valuable information; whether it is the reasons why we over-think and/or how to overcome over-thinking.  I also feel that this book would be an interesting read for men.  Men may often not understand all of the intricacies of how women think and feel about, well everything!  "Women Who Think Too Much" can offer insight to men about how women in their lives are being overwhelmed by hundreds of thoughts at once and they may be able to:

A) Understand their girlfriends/wives style of thinking/thought better

B) Aid in ways to help overcome their over-thinking (e.g., such as being responsive to their change in moods, help women find ways to relax)

C) Most of all, understand that their significant other is not 'crazy', women have just been brought up to be worried about many things at once and thus it causes them to be overwhelmed most of the time.  

When this book was published, Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema was a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.  However, a year after it was published she was a professor and researcher at Yale and head of the Yale Depression and Cognition Program* (She has since then recently passed away).  (*See references below for information).  Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksama has been researching how depression and rumination affects men and women lives and cites several of her own studies throughout the book (e.g., p. 17, depression and anxiety in students before and after the World Series Earthquake in San Francisco on October 1989).  In addition, all of the woman that she mentions in the book are all woman with whom she interviewed, studied or spoke to.  Thus, she offers insight from all of her years of research and her personal engagement with women who over-think.  Nonetheless, she does offer copious amounts of examples of research from herself and other scholars that give insight on over-thinking.  For example, she discusses in her book that our brain can be prone to over-thinking.  Although her explanations are quite clear (i.e., all of our thoughts are interconnected, therefore when we think about one specific thing, it is easy for it to provoke thoughts about other things that are related to it) (p. 34) she always offers evidence of research that backs up her arguments.  In the case of the interconnectivity of our thoughts, she mentioned psychologist Gordon Bower's research on how our network of thoughts are also connected to our moods and emotions.  Thus, it follows that our negative over-thinking leads to more negative thoughts and over-thinking (p. 34).

Once again, what I liked the most about the book was her commentary on some of the reasons why women over-think.  She says that there are four major cultural trends:

1) The Vacuum of Values: Now, more than ever, people are making choices for themselves about what they want to study, what careers they want, whether or not to get married, ect.. However, the media somehow always puts these values into question.  It is as if even when we attain what we want, we're never rich enough or skinny, sexy or popular enough.  Therefore, we just keep getting pushed down by all these standards that others set as "the best" way to live and we then ruminate on how the choices we made were not good enough because we are not living to those standards.

2) The Entitlement Obsession: We feel entitled to always get what we want and when these expectations are not met, we are quick to ruminate and over-think.  An example of this (directly from the book) is:

Why am I not progressing in my job?  Why am I not rich?  Why haven't I  benefited from the economic boom of the last ten years?  We answer these questions, based on our sense of entitlement, by continuing to over-think even more: Maybe it's because my parents wouldn't pay for me to attend an Ivy League college.  Maybe it's because my family responsibilities are holding me back.  Maybe it's because I'm not as smart as everyone else.  (p. 43)

3) The Compulsive Need for Quick Fixes: Essentially, if there is something wrong with us, we want it to be fixed quick, fast and with the most minimal effort.  

4) The Belly Button Culture: Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema says that one of the popular themes of psychology was self-awareness (e.g., Express your inner child) but that we have taken it too far and spend our time "staring at our own navels" and are too self-absorbed and hyperanalyze events in our lives to find meaning.  

(pg. 41 - 47)

I think the major trends she points out are very spot-on on how our social norms and standards create an environment that leads to over-thinking.

In conclusion, the main message to this book is that we are all prone to over thinking, we live very busy and loaded lifestyles.  However, if we let our over thinking become our only way of thinking, we will soon find ourselves to feel depressed and hopeless.  Therefore, it is essential to understand why we over think and how to overcome it so that it does not rule our lives and we can be much more positive, optimistic and happy about ourselves, our relationships with others and our futures.  

n = 1598

----

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2003). Women who think too much. New York City: Henry Holt and Company.

*Yale Depression and Cognition Program: http://www.yale.edu/snhlab/

*Article on Author's Recent Passing: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/01/04/psychology-department-chair-dies/