I'll bet you think this post is about you!

It probably is.

I over-think things and over-analyse things a lot, and I always believed that was a bad thing to do - or at least that's what everyone told me.  I was thinking about this however and after chatting with my good friend Ryan who would openly admit that he over-thinks things too, I had a thought; we both perceived this as something bad or wrong or something that you should try not to do, but is that really the case?

When I stopped to think about it, I don't actually know anyone that doesn't over-think things.  How often they do it or admit to doing it however is another matter - but I don't actually know anyone who has never over-thought something or had a moment when someone said something or did something that they then thought about in excess, often ending with them having an in depth conversation about what happened and what things actually meant.

The Psychologists among us, or more specifically the Behavioural Psychologists will side with me on one point - that what we do is rarely if ever random.  Everything we do is motivated by our thoughts, intuitions, desires, motivations, and aspirations etc.  Whether we are conscious of the reason we do something or not, there is almost always a rationale behind the behaviour.  We eat because we are hungry or because we are low on energy - we rarely eat for the sake of eating.  Even people who eat all the time will have a motivation for doing so, whether that be something physical or emotional - we don't always eat consciously, sometimes we eat for the sake of routine and pay little attention to what we are doing or if we were actually hungry in the first place.

In following with all of this, our actions and our words are often chosen for a reason, whether we give it conscious forethought or if our actions are motivated by our subconscious what we say is inexorably linked to what we want, or how we feel.  So every little thing you say in conversation, no matter how insignificant you think it is, it has a motivation behind it.  So if we accept that we are all guilty of over thinking things, consciously or not, then you have to ask yourself is it actually wrong to over analyse what someone else does?  If someone else has said something to you that may seem insignificant at first, even if they never meant it to be anything more than a passing remark, surely you should feel no guilt about contemplating why they said it, or even what might have lead them to think about it in the first place.

So going back to the title of this post, when someone makes a passing remark and you dismiss it thinking "oh they don't mean me" or "hmm do they mean me?" the answer is more than likely yes, they do.  Carly Simon once wrote a song called 'You're so Vain' with the infamous line "I'll bet you think this song is about you" - nowhere is this over-analysis psyche more apt than in the critique of the lyrics, despite the chorus in jest that someone might be so self-absorbed to believe they'd write about them, if you actually read the rest of the lyrics the song is indeed about them.