Overthinking: Stories about repetitive thoughts

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking about a problem or a situation over and over again, you might be an over-thinker like our storytellers. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers think about something too much and for too long.

Part 1: Clinical psychologist Saren Seeley can’t stop obsessing about her research.

Saren H. Seeley is a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychiatry Department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her neuroimaging research investigates mechanisms of adaptation (or difficulty in adapting) after life-changing events – such as the death of a loved one or trauma exposure. Originally from New York, Saren completed a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona where she received an NIH F31 fellowship for her dissertation work on dynamic brain network functioning in partner-bereaved older adults.

Part 2: In therapy, comedian Nat Towsen realizes he’s always thinking too much.

Nat Towsen is a comedian and nonfiction writer from Manhattan, New York. He has written for Esquire, Vice, CollegeHumor, and The Onion. He also works at Botnik Studios, using AI to write comedy. In pre-pandemic times, he toured the country and abroad to perform standup and work with cultural programs, teaching about comedy as a tool in activism and for addressing mental health.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

It was October 2021. I was two months into my dream postdoc position. I was straight up not having a good time. I'd just been broken up with by two people I really cared about. Postdoc was a lot more isolating than I had anticipated and there's a pandemic and my brain had coded ‘fun’ as selfish pretty firmly. But, mostly, I was sort of having an existential crisis about my work.

I study grief and trauma and I use brain imaging to understand why some people experience a severe chronic form of grief. I didn't go to grad school, initially, intending to study grief. Actually, I just wanted to work with a person whose lab I joined. But once I was in it, I was hooked.

I would talk to our bereaved participants and the work I was doing felt important. My dissertation study results actually made sense and I trusted the data. It felt like I was doing good science and I was contributing to how we understand prolonged grief. It was so much fun to lose myself in data even if the only thing I got done that day was troubleshoot one script.

Saren Seeley shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in March 2023. Photo by Erica Price.

I particularly loved talking about ideas with my PhD mentor Mary Frances. Near the end of my PhD, we were working together on a theory paper where we proposed that grieving is a form of learning, really relearning the world.

One of her ideas was about why the brain has so much difficulty coping with the loss of a loved one and that has to do with the part of the brain called the hippocampus. This is a part of the brain that's involved in a lot of different memory functions, but one of the things that it does for us is it builds spatial maps. It maps out our physical environment so that we can do things like remember that home exists even if we're not there at that moment. And we know how to get from here to there.

Her idea was that perhaps just as the brain does this for our physical space, it may also do this for our relationships. And what makes grief so difficult to deal with is that, suddenly, that mental representation where that person was on the map that we cared about, they're no longer there and we don't know how to find them. So, that was a lot of fun.

But, now, I moved across the country twice during a pandemic in two years and I couldn't stop obsessing about my work. The neuroscience work I was doing felt increasingly disconnected from what I was seeing people go through all around me. There was an overwhelming amount of grief and trauma and I felt completely unable to do anything about it. I couldn't stop thinking what is this all for? Am I just now wasting my second NIH fellowship's worth of taxpayer dollars to make these silly little brain images? I don't even know if they mean anything. They might not even be real. What the hell am I doing with my life and why is everything terrible right now?

At that point, my six years of training as a clinical psychologist finally kicked in and I recognized that I could probably benefit from therapy. I found a therapist named Alivia, spelled with an A not an O, and she was a really good therapist. Of all the therapists I've had, which have been many, I probably trusted her the most, enough to do the things that I didn't want to do which, in therapy, are usually the things that you should be doing.

I remember one time, we would meet on Mondays. I would be sitting at home on my couch and she would be on my laptop screen in front of a green wall hanging in New York wherever she was. I was sitting on the couch. I was crying about missing grad school and everyone I knew there, as usual.

I finally had to ball up the wet wad of Kleenex I was holding in my hand and I looked up at the screen and said, “Oh, my God. I need to get over this. I cannot be like one of those people whose peak of their existence was when they were high school football quarterback and they're 45 and they're still telling stories about that. I cannot be 40 in five years and still talking about my PhD.”

And she looked at me and she said, “Saren, you study grief, right?”

“Yes.”

“It's okay to be sad about everything you lost.”

Now, I'm someone who usually gets a little prickly when people try to validate me too much, but there was something about hearing it from Alivia that really meant something to me. I believed her.

When we terminated six months later, she told me that I was the first of her clients to ever show her a painting that I'd done inspired by a therapy exercise. Overall, things felt a lot less terrible, but I was still stuck on this issue with my work and the brain imaging. How do we even know? Is any of this real? Am I just particularly skilled at making up stories I'm seeing in patterns and statistical noise? What if none of this means anything?

About seven months later, it's 1:00 AM and I'm standing in my tiny bathroom brushing my teeth. On Sunday night, I had been working late on some lectures I was supposed to give to the Psychiatry residents that week, actually about grief and grief neurobiology. As I was brushing my teeth with one hand, I was scrolling through Twitter with the other hand, despite knowing that catching up on whatever science Twitter is beefing about this week is not a great way to wind down before you go to sleep.

As I scrolled, a post from one of my Twitter mutuals caught my attention. Now, this is someone that I don't actually know them. We had just done the thing where you've added each other at some point on Twitter because you're vaguely in the same field. But what stopped me in my tracks and made my stomach drop was I saw the name Alivia spelled with an A, the name of my therapist. And then I saw the last name of my therapist and a photo and a GoFundMe link for funeral costs. I felt so disoriented.

I finally spit out my toothpaste and thought about this doesn't feel right. This shouldn't be happening. I thought about everything Alivia had helped me with and all of the other people that I'm sure she had helped too and all of the people that she would have helped if she hadn't died. She did amazing work both for her clients in therapy and also for her community as an advocate for people affected by interpersonal violence and trauma.

I finally put down my toothbrush and, because my brain is an asshole, the next thought I had was, “You should have been the one who died. You don't do shit for anyone and Alivia had so much more to give to the world.”

“Thank you, brain. That is extremely helpful right now.”

And then the next thought I had after that was, “Wow! I cannot believe how disoriented I feel. This is a very spatial feeling. This is cool. This is what Mary Frances my PhD advisor was talking about with the spatial maps and the hippocampus.”

And I thought, “Well, maybe if the spatial maps idea is real then, fuck it. Maybe what I'm doing could be real too.”

A few months later, I am sitting in a hotel lobby continental breakfast bar with my mom. We've been visiting my sister in DC and I'm telling my mom about the latest grant that I'm writing, all about how our brains learn to adapt to loss.

And she starts telling me about her father who died when she was younger than I am now. I've never really heard her talk about him before. I'm watching as tears start to roll down her cheeks under her glasses and she asks me, “How does our brain know how to do that? How does it know to stop looking for that person that we love who's gone because I felt it happen? But how and why?”

And I say, “Yes. That is exactly what I'm writing this grant about. That's exactly the human experience I'm trying to understand.”

It felt like that was real.

The next day, I am on the train back to New York and nestled into the vinyl seat in my winter coat. I pull up my laptop. I'm supposed to be working on this assistant professor position application, which is really overwhelming. But, right now, it feels actually exciting. I like thinking about what my program of research is going to be in five years, ten years. What are the questions that I think are so important for the world to understand, for science to understand? That I can deal with the rest of this stuff. The losing my community, moving for academic jobs every couple of years, the trying to find someone to pay me money to run the brain scanner, the doubts about whether or not I'm doing the right thing, whether I'm helping anyone.

And in that moment, I thought, “Thank you, Alivia. I am clearly still learning from you.”

Thank you.

Part 2

I'm an overthinker or as I like to call it, a normal-amount-of-thinker. I don't think I should be judged negatively compared to the amount that the average person thinks. Personally, I think some people could speed up a little bit. But I do have a tendency to think about things until I ruin them for myself. I'll just keep going until I find the negative detail and that's why I didn't like it all along. I knew it. Don't tell me if you like a movie. I'll tell you the detail of the movie that makes the whole plot fall apart.

Nat Towsen shares his story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in February 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Recently got invited to go to a bachelor party. It might shock you that I'm actually not a bachelor party kind of guy. I know, I come off as a jock. I was talking to another friend who was invited to the party and I was like, “I just don't like bachelor parties. I don't like… It's disappointing what you learn about your friend.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around, like he thinks this is his last weekend of freedom, and he wants to spend it in a house with 20 straight men? Like, this isn't how we normally hang out. Who is this for? And what does it say about him that he wants to spend a weekend with his closest friends in the world and none of them are women? You're 38 and you don't have one strong female friendship? One person who would think it's weird that they weren't invited to a party?

And the friend I was talking to was like, “Yeah, you're thinking about this too much. What's going to happen is we're going to go get drunk and high and hang out with our friends for two days. And you have found a way to already be having a bad time, and it hasn't even started yet.”

And I was like, “Okay, point taken.” And I laughed, and I went to the bachelor party, and it was fine. I had fun, but I was thinking that the whole weekend I was like, “Why are we doing this?”

And the whole time I was kind of waiting for it to be over and everyone else seemed like they were in it, but I wasn't really all the way there. And I thought about this and, you know, it was fine, and it's funny sometimes. But I started to think, you know, like, “Am I stuck like this? Like, am I going to be this way forever? Is my whole life going to be not really fully enjoying or experiencing things because I'm always looking for what's wrong with them and I'm always fixating what's wrong with them.”

I don't have an answer to that, but luckily I go to therapy twice a week because you're not better than me.

And I asked my therapist about it. I said, “You know, I do this thing where I can't stop thinking and I always end up somewhere negative and I just don't know exactly what's going on.”

And he said to me, and I quote, “Well, you're a thinker.”

And I said, “Could you elaborate?”

And he said, and I quote, “Well, you have a lot of thoughts.”

You're not wrong, but it seems more like a symptom than a diagnosis.

So I asked him, “Well, am I always going to be this way?”

And he said, rather sagely, “Well, have you always been this way so far?”

I thought about that and I was like, “Huh?”

I tried to remember what was the first thing I ever ruined for myself. Like, what was the first time I searched for a flaw and then couldn't enjoy that thing anymore? And I went way back in my head and I remembered that when I was four years old, I was obsessed with The Berenstain Bears.

If you don't know. The Berenstain Bears is a series of children's books about a family of bears – Mama, Papa, Brother and Sister – that was created so that parents don't have to talk to their kids about issues. There is a Berenstein Bear book for every topic. And say, “Oh, you're getting bullied. That is tough. We are going to let the Bears tackle that one.” Slide the book across the table. Watch from a distance.

Every Berenstain Bear book has the exact same plot, but I loved it every time. Brother, Sister and Papa get into some typical suburban trouble. I think they get peer pressured or they watch too much TV or they cook meth. And then when things look hopeless, Mama solves the problem using her unemployed feminine wisdom, because these books started in the 70s, so they're stuck in 70s progressive.

Nat Towsen re-shares his story at Caveat in New York, NY in July 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Every Berenstain Bear book is like, “A woman did something, does that challenge your assumptions?” I was reading these in the early 90s like, “No, my mom has a Master's degree. The Berenstain Bears are in money trouble, she should have a job.”

Now, you see, I can't stop picking it apart. This is my brain will just do this no matter what. I'll tell you right now, these books are full of plot holes. When I look at them as an adult, I didn't notice this as a kid. I remember that I didn't notice this, but I can tell you right now. That Papa is a carpenter, but they live inside of a tree. And every other character in the book has a house. And at no point does any character ever say to Papa, “Do you realize that you have the skill set and the materials to build a home for your family?”

You see, I could just do this forever. But I didn't recognize this when I was a kid. I just loved them unqualified. Until one day, I discovered the loose thread that I couldn't stop tugging on that ruined the Berenstain Bears for me forever. I was reading The Berenstain Bears Go to the Doctor with my mom and I remember the page clearly. Brother is signing his friends cast and so far he has written in red letters B-R- O.

And I looked at that and I looked at my mom and I said, “Mom, what is he writing on the cast?”

And she said, “He's writing his name.”

And I said, “Excuse me? His name is Brother?”

I always thought people were just calling him that.

My mom says, “No, it's his name.”

And I said, “His legal name?”

She said, “Yes.”

And I was like, “His Christian name is Brother Berenstain?”

She said, “Yes. What's wrong with that?”

And I, for the first of what would become thousands of times throughout my life, said, “I'll tell you what's wrong with that.”

First things first, he's two years older than sister. Who names their only child Brother?

“Oh, no. Mom, is he the only cub from that litter that survived?”

How lucky for that matter, were they that the second kid was a girl? They were already locked into the name scheme and it was like, “Wait, mom, does that mean that their real names are Mama and Papa?”

And she was like, “Well, I don't know.”

I was like, “Wait, you mean to tell me that four other people thought this was a good idea? And then their kids happened to meet and fall in love and then they thought it was a good idea?”

My mom was like, “I think you're taking this a little serious.”

I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. They have a friend who's name is Lizzie. Real names exist in this universe. Wait, why do they live in a tree? None of this makes sense.”

And my therapist said, “Yeah, you're going to be like this forever.”

He said, “But it's not a bad thing. It's what makes you a good comedian, because you can look at things from every angle. It's what makes you a good writer and editor because you can see the flaws in anything. But it can also make you miserable because when you're upset, you can always find something bad to be upset about.”

And I said, “Okay, I'm aware of it.”

And he said, “It's not enough to be aware. Sometimes you have to stop yourself from thinking that way. You have to make the decision not to follow your thoughts to the ultimate negative endpoint.”

And then he said something I wasn't expecting at all. He said, “When you're in your head, looking for a flaw in things, you are not experiencing empathy. You're not thinking about the people around you. You're not caring for the people around you or how you could participate in society, in the situation that you're in, because you're so far in your head looking for something negative. And so, if you want to be an empathic person in the world, you need to be more present, and practice empathy instead of being so internal and negative.”

I said, “Okay.”

I took that with me and I tried to maintain aware of that. I thought about that because when I was younger, it was always felt like I was uncovering the truth. I realized that it's really a matter of what you choose to fixate on.

And a few days later, I was taking the bus, because the system only works if we participate in it. And I was a little in my head thinking about something else until the bus turned off. Power off. We’re at a station bus driver gets on the intercom and goes, “We're going to be stopping here for a couple of minutes. We are two minutes ahead of schedule.”

It happens. You see, if the bus is ahead of schedule and then it leaves the station ahead of schedule. People who are on time will miss the bus. It's annoying, but it happens. And everyone on the bus is accepting this, except for one guy. He's in the absolute back row, and he just pops up out of his seat and he makes a beeline for the driver. And as he passes me, I can see that he has the app on his phone that shows you on a map where all the buses are. And this guy is striding for him, and I can see him. And he's wearing like khaki shorts, a brown belt, blue shirt. Tall guy, kind of handsome. Kind of handsome in an offbeat way, I would say. Glasses. He's got glasses, for sure. Kind of big nose, but maybe it makes him look distinguished, and he's about 15 years older than me.

I'm watching this man get up in the driver's face and he starts going, “You got to move this bus. There's another bus right behind us. Why do we got to why do we have to wait for this? If people who are on time, they'll get the next bus. This bus will get them. Why do we have to be late? This is why you see all the buses together in the street. Because the bus is late. We shouldn't have to wait. Why are we punished for being early?”

He's being loud, and everyone on the bus is going, “Oh, this guy!”

And I'm looking around and I'm trying to be empathic and I'm like, “Oh, this guy!” Because I want to be people.

But in my head, I'm secretly thinking, “He's not wrong. Most people could get the next bus.”

But like empathy, I'm having empathy for the people around me who are annoyed. And then he goes too far. He gets like, right up in the driver's face. The driver goes, “Hey, I just go by the schedule.”

And he goes, “Oh, you must be new. Nobody does that. I've been taking this bus for 15 years.”

And he's right up in her face. And I'm like, “Somebody's got to say something.”

So I stand up and I go, “Hey, man!”

And he turns and looks at me, and the driver looks at me, and everyone on the bus looks at me.

And that was all I had planned. Couldn't be more present now. It's like, okay. So I'm like, “You gave it a shot.”

Because I wanted to be empathic to him too. Like, okay, practicing empathy. That's what I said out loud and what I desperately wanted to say, what was screaming inside of my head was, “Hey, man. How do I stop myself from becoming you?”

Because I realized in that moment, I looked at this man. You heard how I described him? Tall man, khaki shorts, blue shirt, glasses, brown hair. I realized, looking at him, that this was me from the future. And he looked back at me. I was like, “Oh my God, he's come here to warn me, that I have to get my overthinking under control. He's demonstrating.”

And he looked at me and he said, “Oh, you think you're aware of it? You think that's enough? You don't think you have to make hard decisions right now? It's enough to be aware of it. Well, maybe your life gets worse. Maybe your girlfriend breaks up with you. Maybe comedy doesn't work out the way you thought it was going to work out. Maybe you can't afford to buy new clothes for 15 years.”

And he looked me in the eyes and he said, “The bus schedule is going to get very important.”

I’m Nat Towsen. Thank you very much.