Dr. Aziz explains that overthinking conversations arises from an underlying belief that being judged is dangerous. This belief turns conversations into "proving grounds" and causes people to replay and catastrophize benign remarks. He compares this to a "bad drug trip" and advises the remedy is not conversational perfection but recognizing that others' judgments are not actually dangerous and that one is safe regardless.
You don't overthink conversations because you actually said or did something wrong. You're doing it because of this underlying belief, which is that people judging me is dangerous. And so now every conversation becomes a proving ground where you have to make sure that you got through it okay and that you're safe. Because if you leave the conversation and someone's judging you, that's really bad and dangerous. And so then we scan through everything we could have said and even benign things or things that were no big deal at the time, we blow them into big proportion and say, oh, I bet everyone's judging me for that. But it's not real. It's like a bad drug trip that we're on. The truth is, I'm just anxious because I think that someone judging me is really dangerous. And so the way out of replaying conversations is not being perfect in all your conversations. It's realizing, seeing through the fear that people judging me is not dangerous, that I'm safe no matter what.
