People with schizophrenia and depression are overwhelmed by too much possibility and are subject to a failure of the imagination.
“The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of experience. And the price of this kind of almost “extra-human” creativity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.” –Ernest Becker
Meditation for Anxiety, Schizophrenia and Depression
Time and again, we fall prey to the same trap: overthinking things. It’s understandable why we engage in this unhealthy pattern. With the sheer number of decisions that we have to make each and every day, and the plethora of options available to us, it’s easy to analyze every possibility in our lives ad nauseum. In fact, doing anything less than this can make us feel careless or lazy. We may convince ourselves that overthinking things is actually a healthy behavior, because it leads to better, more predictable outcomes.
This is rarely the case, however. Instead, overanalyzing and engaging in endless amounts of rumination fails to bring us any closer to making good decisions. Instead, we cause ourselves unnecessary distress as we constantly attempt to arrive at the “perfect” decision, when no such thing is even possible in the first place.
