I often take long walks and think about things while walking. Being a mathematician, I have a tendency to figure things out in my head. While this works great most of the time, there are occasions when this causes me a great deal of anxiety and frustration. As life becomes more complex, the latter situation is only becoming more frequent.

I used to think that this has to do with overthinking but I no longer believe that it is possible for the brain to overthink. Our brains are constantly thinking even when we’re not consciously aware of it. So it is just not physically possible to overthink. We don’t really have access to an external GPU or the ability to overclock our brains. Instead, my issue is with the way I sometimes organize thoughts in my head. The culprit is unstructured thoughts.

I was listening to an interview with Leonard Susskind. He talks about how our minds have evolved to only think in the three dimensional because that’s the dimension of the world we live in. Even the two-dimensional and one-dimensional objects we visualize are seen as being a part of a three-dimensional mental world. I think that this natural predilection towards three-dimensional thinking also seeps into our argumentative thinking. By this, I mean that when we’re trying to argue things out, the brain does not immediately put the arguments in a natural tree/flowchart or even just vanilla linear order. Instead, it arranges the facts and the arguments in some random three-dimensional configuration. This leads to chaos and a depressing feeling of being lost and stranded. It probably triggers the evolutionary circuits in our brain that deal with getting lost in the woods and evokes fear and anxiety.

Feeling anxious and frustrated because of feeling stuck on some problem is an evolutionary warning sign that my mind is unable to structure and delineate the arguments in the right order and I need to stop thinking in my head and use some external resources to get out of the woods. Whenever this happens to me, I make an effort to write things out somewhere. Even when I’m brainstorming, it works better for me to put my thoughts out in the world than to keep them stuffed in my head (as I’m doing here), and when I’ve written enough down, I stop thinking about the problem consciously and trust that the subconscious brain will work on it and provide me with some clarity.