Word list · 15 words
Words for when you're overthinking
Overthinking is an everyday word rather than a precise one. It covers several different habits that do have names: replaying a conversation, freezing over a decision, assuming everyone noticed your mistake, finding the perfect reply an hour too late. Telling them apart helps, because they are different problems.
Some of these are research terms and some are everyday words, and the research behind a few of them is contested; each entry says which. They describe common patterns, not disorders, and nothing here is a diagnosis.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Rumination
Rumination is the tendency to dwell passively and repetitively on your distress — its causes, meanings and consequences — going over the same thoughts again and again without moving toward any…
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics
Analysis Paralysis
Over-analysing a decision until no decision gets made, so that the delay often costs more than simply choosing would have.
Work & Business
Decision Fatigue
The deterioration in decision quality after a long run of decisions — a drift toward the default, the safe no, or no choice at all.
Work & Business
Spotlight Effect
The spotlight effect is overestimating how much other people notice — and later remember — your appearance and your behaviour.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
L'esprit de l'escalier
L'esprit de l'escalier is the perfect retort that arrives only after you've left the room — literally, 'the wit of the staircase'.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Zeigarnik Effect
The Zeigarnik effect is the claimed tendency to remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than finished ones — a classic finding a 2025 meta-analysis could not confirm, though the urge to go…
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Negativity Bias
Negativity bias is the tendency for bad events, emotions and information to carry more psychological weight than equally intense good ones — hitting harder, lasting longer and shaping judgment more.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Hindsight Bias
Hindsight bias is the feeling, once you know how something turned out, that the outcome was obvious all along and that you saw it coming.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is the persistent private sense that your achievements are undeserved and that you'll eventually be exposed as a fraud — held despite clear evidence that you're competent.
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics
Akrasia
Akrasia is weakness of will: doing what you yourself judge to be the worse option, at the moment you judge it.
Philosophy & Ways of Living
Velleity
A velleity is a wish so faint it never turns into any attempt to act on it.
Rare & Beautiful English
Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
Revenge bedtime procrastination is deliberately putting off sleep — with no real reason, and knowing it'll cost you tomorrow — in order to claw back some personal free time that a day of other…
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics
Doomscrolling
Doomscrolling is the compulsive habit of scrolling through a bottomless feed of bad news, unable to stop even though it keeps making you feel worse.
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics
Torschlusspanik
Torschlusspanik is the panic that a window of opportunity is closing and you'll be locked out — literally, 'gate-shut panic'.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort you feel when two of your beliefs conflict — or when what you did doesn't match who you think you are — and the pressure that discomfort creates to make the…
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics