Parasitic Processing — The Cognitive Science of Overthinking

Every once in a while, we get caught up in a web of negative thoughts.

We worry about possibilities that may or may not happen. We create imaginary “what if” scenarios. We replay conversations in our heads. The thoughts race around in stupid loops, often taking a dark turn. It’s like we lose control of our own minds. Not a cool place to be.

To figure out how to break out of that state, we first need to understand and deconstruct the cognitive processing that goes on in our minds when we’re “overthinking”.

Let’s start at the beginning.

There’s a Problem

Something bad happens or something bad might be about to happen. This triggers stress, which makes you sensitive to future possibilities. So your brain tries to anticipate what’s going to happen in the future. It seeks to determine the probability of a “bad outcome”.

Now, your brain can’t take in all the information available to you. The number of variables that need to be processed and integrated is far more than the conscious mind can handle. So you use what are called heuristics to make implicit calculations. Heuristics are mental shortcuts, typically inculcated by evolution, that help us cut through and zero in on the relevant data when facing a complex problem or incomplete information.

Heuristics and Encoding Specificity

One of the heuristics you use is the representativeness heuristic. You judge how probable an event is by how prototypical it is, how much it stands out. For instance, say you’re an entrepreneur or an artist trying to make it on your own. And you keep seeing all these people who rise overnight and show exponential growth. In comparison, you feel like you’re moving too slow and getting nowhere. But the truth might be that those few people are not representative of reality at all. They just happen to stand out, distorting your expectations from yourself and the world. Remember, your personal experiences make up an infinitesimal fraction of what’s happened in the world, but a major portion of how you think the world works.

Another heuristic that interacts with the representativeness heuristic is the availability heuristic. You judge how probable an event is by how easily you can remember or imagine a similar event occurring. Not to forget we also have an inherent negativity bias wherein we give much more psychological weight to bad experiences than good experiences.

The above heuristics are influenced by what is called “Encoding Specificity“. Our memories have contextual information encoded in them, which affects the retrieval of those memories. For instance, there’s a classic experiment that shows that students who take a test in the same room where they studied perform better than students that were put in a different room. Another example — information encoded and stored while intoxicated is retrieved more effectively when you’re intoxicated as compared to when you’re sober. So if you get drunk and misplace your keys, one way to recall where you put them is to get drunk again (seriously lol).

Now guess what kind of memories will be more accessible to you when you’re stressed or sad? Emotional cues trigger memories associated with that emotion. This also goes the other way around — events that remind you of a certain memory trigger the emotion associated with that memory. This is why people who have gone through traumatic experiences struggle to navigate through life.

All these heuristics interact with the confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, favor, and recall information that confirms our current beliefs. So as you’re going through your memories, you’ll look for data points that confirm your forming judgment that the “bad outcome” is highly probable. And you won’t just imagine one bad outcome. You’ll imagine multiple bad outcomes and second-order effects, adding up the probabilities in the process.

Anxiety and Loss of Cognitive Flexibility

When you begin to conclude that the probability of a “bad outcome” is high, you experience what you call anxiety. One of the things that anxiety causes you to lose is your cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is your ability to change what you’re thinking about and how you’re thinking about it. It resides at the intersection of awareness, adaptability, and confidence.

As you lose your cognitive flexibility, your framing of reality becomes very restricted and rigid. Your mind operates from a place of fear. So your thinking becomes more and more narrow and obsessive. Possibilities collapse and the number of options in the world start to decline. You find it difficult to see a way out and your problem-solving skills take a major hit. And so, you lose your sense of agency.

Parasitic Processing — Self-Destructive Feedback Loop

When your ability to solve problems goes down, you are more likely to make mistakes and fail. Which will then increase your anxiety and reinforce your negative outlook. As you might have already inferred, this can become a vicious cycle. It feeds on itself. Dr. John Vervaeke aptly labels it parasitic processing. The whole system acts as a parasite and takes up life within you, causing your consciousness to contract.

But as you might have observed, not everyone is equally susceptible to fall prey to parasitic processing. Some people can easily get themselves out of it, while others can fall deep into it leading to intense anxiety or even depression. What makes the difference? Your level of self-esteem. Having that trust and belief in yourself enables you to break out of the negative spiral. Self-esteem acts as the immune system of consciousness, protecting you against psychological parasites.

Here’s a schematic diagram that puts it all together —

^{Source: “Relevance, Meaning and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom” (John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro) from the book The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom (pp.21-51)}

The important thing to note is that all this processing happens automatically, beneath your conscious awareness. And the “probability” you calculate presents itself as “intuition”, as a vague sense of doom.

Can’t Think Your Way Out of Overthinking

But the thing is, this is the same machinery that makes us adaptively intelligent. It helps us make complex, super-rapid integrations. We wouldn’t be able to function if we had to consciously make sense of everything around us. So the heuristics that “mislead” us are also indispensable to us.

And it’s a dynamic self-organizing system. If you try and intervene at one point the rest of the system will reorganize itself around your attempted intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you try to destroy it. That’s why you can’t think your way out of overthinking. You might even “know” that your thoughts are absolutely ridiculous, but that won’t make much difference. Factual knowledge is largely impotent when it comes to fighting against parasitic processing. An anxious mind can outrun, outpower, and outwit rationality any day of the week.

Escaping Parasitic Processing

So what’s the way out of the trap? The way to deal with a complex dynamical system that is operating against you is by cultivating a counter-active dynamic system that is operating FOR you. And to do this, you need to leverage psychotechnologies — psychological tools that can enhance your mind’s operations or alter your state of consciousness.

Mindfulness practice leads to the development of exactly the kind of dynamic system that counteracts parasitic processing. It makes you less susceptible to cognitive biases. It enhances your cognitive flexibility. It helps you create space between you and your thoughts. And so on.

Now mindfulness is something that you’ll develop over time. It’s like the equivalent of eating healthy so as to not get sick in the first place. But we also need psychotechnologies that can help us recover quickly in the event we get “sick”.

This is where embodied psychotechnologies come in — tools like physical exercise or breathing techniques. They trigger biochemical changes that help you restore a calm state. Remember that the brain and body are intricately intertwined. It’s a two-way feedback loop. So while we may not be able to think our way out of overthinking, we can always influence our physiology (through breathing, movement, touch, awareness) to get out of the anxious state.

If things go out of hand, pharmacological psychotechnologies like benzos or SSRIs can be leveraged to help you get out of the pit. But the mainstream and legal pharmaceuticals are among the most ineffective psychological tools. There are much more powerful pharmacological psychotechnologies out there. However, for some reason, our governments are immensely fearful of all consciousness-expansion technologies 🙂

Another simple psychotechnology that’s quite effective at combating parasitic processing is writing. The act of writing, labeling, and expressing moves emotional information from your emotional brain to your frontal lobes — the seat of rationality. It helps you see the logical fallacies in your thinking. Your racing thoughts also instantly slow down when you have to articulate them. And writing forces you to linearize your thinking, breaking those stupid loops of thoughts in the process.

Notice how these tools change HOW you’re thinking, rather than trying to change WHAT you’re thinking. The biggest mistake people make when dealing with parasitic processing is that they try to avoid their thoughts. It’s easy to distract yourself with mindless scrolling or entertainment or something else. But when you do that, things build up beneath the surface. People who do this then often experience difficulties falling asleep. Because all the thoughts that you suppress during the day come crashing in when the lights go off.

As always, the first step is acceptance. Learn to recognize whenever your perspective is getting distorted by parasitic processing. Know that in such a situation, your thoughts don’t reflect reality. They are temporary figments arising from your current emotional state. This awareness will give you the opportunity to leverage the right tools and nip the problem in the bud.

But remember, the most important thing is to put in the work to set up the counter-active dynamic system of mindfulness that prevents the parasitic processing from taking hold in the first place.

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Thank you for reading. Most of the content on this website has emerged from conversations with readers like you. Every Sunday, I send out an email dissecting some aspect of the human mind.

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