How to Deal With Overthinking using the FACETS Approach
Overthinking can be utterly frustrating.
It happens when your brain keeps spinning on the same subject, but doesn’t seem to get anywhere.
Sometimes you just keep rehashing a situation that felt distressing to you.
Or you desperately need to make a decision on something but you are frozen in indecision. Not because you don’t have enough information but because you have too much information, and you don’t know what to do with it.
This ties right in with
• people pleasing
Having an opinion that is just your own may not sit well with somebody else. It’s even worse if you have to make a decision that forces you to take sides between two people that you really want to think highly of you.
• perfectionism
You do not want to move forward until the thing is perfect, so you have to think of all of the details before you make that decision.
• self-esteem
You value everyone else’s opinion above your own. You assume that if you come up with what you think on your own, it’s going to be wrong.
• anxiety
You are afraid of all of the possible consequences of making the wrong decision. And some impossible consequences that feel real in your imagination.
• trauma
Somebody in your past told you that you were wrong. Always. You don’t know how to trust your own instincts. It feels safer to just wait until everyone else figures out what to do and go with that. When you were growing up you may have had to be super tuned-in to someone else's emotions because their emotions had ramifications on your emotional or physical safety.
Overthinking sounds a harmless anxiety symptom, but it often has deep roots. I am here to work on the roots with you, but I will share a strategy you can use on your own to help sort things out.
I learned to start thinking this way before I was a therapist. The Life Coach School created a model (1) that describes how your thoughts can influence your feelings, which influence our actions, which generate results. This is a fantastic model, but I find it helpful to make some additions, and focus less on the cause and effect. Sometimes I find that our actions can influence our feelings, or our feelings can influence our thoughts (at least the thoughts that we are aware of). My variation of the Life Coach School’s model is something I call F.A.C.E.T.S. (Like a typical military spouse, I appreciate a good acronym!)
Just like a diamond is one thing with many facets, when we experience emotional distress and indecision there are many sides to it.
You may be thinking, “Yeah, that’s the problem! I am seeing too many sides to this thing!”
I know. FACETS is a way to separate and clarify the things that your brain is running away with.
F: Facts
A: Actions
C: Context
E: Emotions
T: Thoughts
S: Sensations
The idea is to write out the letters, and then fill in what comes up for you related to each category. You can start anywhere. Often it’s easiest to start with your emotions or actions, because those will be most immediately obvious.
Let me explain what kind of information you will want to jot down:
Facts: You may think you know what facts are, but it’s highly probable that when you try to write down a fact, you are adding a judgement or an interpretation to it. A fact should be something that someone else observing the situation would say about what they see and hear. No feelings allowed in this one! Sometimes just writing the facts solves your problem, because it helps you see it clearly without emotions clouding your judgement. Not that emotions are bad. They give us important information that we really need to listen to. But they can sway us into seeing something differently than it actually is sometimes.
Actions: What are you doing? This could be any kind of behavior you find yourself doing in response to whatever you’re working on. Are you preoccupied? Busying yourself? Pouring a glass of wine? Slamming kitchen cabinet doors? Crying? Bending over backwards to do a lot of favors for someone? Just notice what you are doing.
Context: What is going on in your life that could be related to this issue? Sometimes we don’t realize that we have predictable triggers for our thoughts, feelings and actions. Did you have a houseful of guests? Did you skip lunch? Did you get enough sleep last night? Are there bigger factors to consider, like the stage of life you are in?
Emotions: What are you feeling? This one is harder than you might think. Many people are a bit disconnected from their feelings and find it hard to name them. I wish I had a dollar for every time I asked someone how they are feeling and they answer with a thought! If you need help identifying your feelings, you could download a feelings wheel (2) to give you some ideas.
Thoughts: Write down whatever you are thinking about the situation. This one can include judgements and interpretations… “I can’t believe she did that!” “That was so rude!” “What is wrong with me?” “He must not love me if he could have done that.” You may logically know it’s not even a true thought but write it down anyway. In fact, it’s especially helpful to write down the ones that are not true, because you need to recognize that your mind is trying to take you there.
Sensations: Just like people tend to disconnect from emotions, they don’t realize that emotions are generating body sensations. It can help us to deal with our emotions if we can recognize they are just energy in our body. This information is very valuable to bring to your therapist, because it can clue her in to where trauma gets triggered or stored in your body and she can help you make connections to events in your past that might be relevant to this one.
Once you get all of that down, you’ll go back and read it. Often when we re-read something we wrote down, we gain some clarity.
We see it differently. Reading it this way, with all the facets separated out, we can solidify what is important, what to prioritize, and what to let go of.
How this might play out:
F – we just found out we are moving, husband will have to be out of town for 2-3 weeks at a time, multiple times in a year, I need to take 2 more years of classes to upgrade my teaching credentials to be able to work as a teacher here.
A – endlessly searching the internet for job listings, also searching for apartments (obsessively), praying, ruminating, mindless eating, wandering around Walmart, talking to husband and family
C – newlywed, recently left my job, my family, and the state I lived in most of my life to get married 4 months ago, I haven’t made such a drastic move since I was 6 years old, we both brought some debt into the marriage
E – inadequate, frustrated, sad - I miss teaching kids, scared that I wasted my degree, crazy in love with my husband, excited about our new life, fearful of the unknown
T – “I am going to let my husband down” “I have to do something to fill my time when he is gone” “How will we pay down this debt if I don’t get a good job?” “How will I meet people and make friends?” “If I go back to school I’ll get credentialed just in time for us to move again.” “Will anyone hire me if they know I am moving soon?” “This isn’t fair!” “I know God put me with this guy – if God did that, then He has a plan.”
S – jittery, flutters in my stomach, tension in my jaw and neck
Now that I can see it all, some aspects stand out:
• I need to find a job because of debt, but also to make friends, and avoid boredom when my husband is away.
• It doesn’t make sense to do the schooling to get credentialed here.
• I miss working with kids.
• No wonder I am struggling with this decision – I have a lot of conflicting emotions happening all at once.
• I am probably not really going to let my husband down. He is as crazy about me as I am about him.
• I can trust God, even though I don’t know how it’s going to work.
It doesn’t solve my problem immediately, but it helps me see it more clearly so I can work on what I can work on. I become aware of the meanings and triggers attached to the situation.
This was a true situation from my past, although I didn’t have the skills to tackle it this way at the time. If I had, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to get the idea to look into Christian schools (which had some margin in their credentialing requirements). I got a great job teaching kindergarten and met some fantastic people.
Using a model like this I could have skipped the weeks of stressing about the future and walked into it with intentionality and more of an “OK God, How are we going to do this?” attitude.
I hope you find this model helpful in stopping the hamster wheel spinning in your brain. To be intentional about how you approach a situation, you have to be able to see how your thoughts, feelings, actions, context, and body sensations connect to your circumstances. That clarity really helps you figure out a way forward.
Let me know if you want help working through the deeper stuff.
It can be very frustrating to know what you want to do but have feelings that keep you from taking action.
Sometimes we can do the FACETS process again and again and start noticing recurring themes.
Therapy can help you uncover what keeps you reacting in the same ways and equip you with the skills to do something different, more satisfying.
You don’t have to tackle that alone.
References
(1) https://thelifecoachschool.com/self-coaching-model-guide/
(2) https://blog.calm.com/blog/the-feelings-wheel
Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her downtown Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.
