This was a project I did at HNG Internship 8, where we were asked to pick a problem from a pool and try to solve it. They were all futuristic ideas so we had close to zero constraints. I saw one on overthinking and I thought it should be fun—being an overthinker myself.
Risk free would be an app that would help users detect when they are overthinking, and provide solutions to help them stop.
I started my secondary research and I found something interesting. This article containing a study conducted by the University of Michigan suggests 73% of 25- to 35-year-olds chronically overthink, along with 52% of people ages 45 to 55[1]. This could be attributed to various factors:
I conducted an interview with a few folks and the results showed that it is very easy for overthinking to become a reflex action that can’t be controlled at all. Many times, I found the root cause of the problem to be things they couldn’t control.
As with almost everything when done too much, overthinking has some nasty side effects. Ranging from:
It starts small and gets worse.