Hi, this is Ray.

I want to introduce you to the villain of today's newsletter, and the villain is me. Specifically, it's a very particular version of me: the one who sits down to learn something, reads the first sentence, and then (instead of reading the second sentence) spins up an elaborate internal monologue about whether I'm learning this correctly, whether I should've picked a different textbook, whether my study method is optimal, whether I'm even smart enough for this, and whether that noise was the fridge or something more sinister. Twenty minutes later I have "studied" one paragraph and aged four years.

If you've ever done this, congratulations, you have the same bug I do. And it is a bug, in the very literal computing sense: it's a background process, running silently, hogging resources, that you never actually asked to launch. You think you're running one program ("Learn The Thing") but there's a second process pinned at 90% CPU called "Anxiously Narrate The Experience Of Learning The Thing," and it is absolutely thrashing your system.

Today I want to explain, with actual science, why overthinking doesn't just feel counterproductive but is mechanically, measurably bad for learning. Because once you understand what's happening under the hood, it gets a lot easier to forgive yourself and (crucially) to fix it.

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Here's the core concept, and everything else in this newsletter hangs off it. When you learn something new, the heavy lifting is done by your working memory… the small, fast, precious mental workspace where you hold and manipulate information in the moment. It's your brain's RAM. It's where a new idea gets turned over, connected to what you already know, and stitched into memory. And like RAM, it is finite. Painfully, hilariously finite. You get to hold only a handful of things in there at once.

Now here's the cruel part. Worrying is not free. Anxious, overthinking, self-monitoring thoughts don't float harmlessly in some separate compartment… they occupy the exact same working memory you need for the actual task. Researchers demonstrated this beautifully in studies of "choking under pressure," where performance anxiety was shown to consume the working memory resources that people otherwise rely on, so that worry literally depletes the mental capacity available for the task at hand. Every "am I doing this right?" is a process running in the background, and it's allocated out of the same limited pool that's supposed to be holding the thing you're trying to learn.

This is why overthinking feels like wading through mud. It's not your imagination and it's not a character flaw. You are genuinely trying to run a demanding program on a machine that has half its memory tied up by a panic loop. Of course it's slow. You've got a memory leak, and the leaking process is named Anxiety.

Now, you might assume overthinking is a problem for people who are struggling… that the anxious spiral is what happens when you don't really know the material. And here is the finding that genuinely stopped me in my tracks, because it's so unfair it almost feels personal.

It's often the most capable learners who get hit hardest. In a study of young math students, researchers found that math anxiety harmed achievement primarily for the children with the highest working memory (the very kids who would otherwise be top performers) because their worries depleted the exact cognitive resources their sophisticated strategies depended on. The kids using simpler methods were relatively unbothered. The high-capacity kids, the ones with the most powerful mental hardware, were the ones who choked… because they had the most to lose and the most resources for anxiety to hijack.

Read that twice, because it reframes everything. Overthinking isn't a tax on the weak. It's a tax on the powerful. The bigger and better your mental engine, the more damage a runaway anxiety process can do when it commandeers it. If you've ever thought "I'm clearly smart enough to get this, so why do I keep freezing?"… this is your answer. It's not despite your capability. It's because of it. Your brain is a high-end gaming rig, and overthinking is the malware that specifically targets high-end rigs. Small comfort, but it's something.

There's a second flavor of overthinking that's worth its own warning, because it attacks a different stage: not learning new material, but performing something you've already learned. It's the phenomenon every musician, athlete, and public speaker knows in their bones… you can practice a skill until it's automatic, and then, the moment you start consciously monitoring each step, it falls apart.

Researchers call this "explicit monitoring," and it's one of the well-documented routes to choking. In work on how skilled performance fails under pressure, scientists showed that directing too much conscious attention to the step-by-step execution of a well-practiced skill actually disrupts it… the very act of watching yourself do the thing breaks the fluent, automatic process that made you good at it. It's the centipede who walked just fine until someone asked which leg goes first, and then tripped over its own hundred feet.

This matters for learning because a huge part of getting good at anything is letting the fundamentals become automatic so your working memory is freed up for the hard, new stuff. Overthinking sabotages that. When you consciously micromanage the parts you've already mastered (re-checking every keystroke, re-reading every line you already understand, second-guessing the basics), you're forcing an automatic process back into slow, effortful, conscious mode. You're taking a compiled program and insisting on re-interpreting it line by line. It runs, but it crawls, and it's far more likely to crash.

Now, before anyone screenshots this and starts a movement, let me be clear, because I promised you science and not a hype tweet. The problem is not thinking. Thinking is, on the whole, one of my top three favorite activities. Deliberate, effortful reasoning is how genuine understanding gets built, and the mild discomfort of grappling with hard material is a good sign, not a bad one.

The enemy is a specific, useless subtype: the recursive, self-monitoring, anxiety-driven loop that produces no new understanding and just narrates your fear back to you. There's a clean tell for distinguishing the two. Productive thinking is about the material: "how does this concept connect to that one?" Unproductive overthinking is about you, "am I smart enough, am I doing this right, why is this taking so long?" The first is the program doing its job. The second is the background process you need to kill. When your inner voice stops talking about the subject and starts talking about you, that's the alarm.

So what do you actually do? Lower the stakes on purpose… remind yourself, out loud if you have to, that a study session is practice, not a final judgment of your worth, because a huge share of the anxiety loop runs on manufactured pressure. Get the worry out of your working memory by putting it somewhere else: jotting down your anxious thoughts before a hard task literally offloads them from your mental RAM, closing the tab instead of leaving it running. And trust the automatic. When you hit something you already know, let it run without narrating it… Resist the urge to check the centipede's legs.

Overthinking convinces you that all that mental churn is the work. It isn't. It's the screensaver… lots of motion, zero output, quietly draining the battery. Close the tab. Read the second sentence. Let the machine do what it's actually good at.

Think less, learn more,

Ray