Over-Thinkers = Creative Geniuses. Here’s How.

Can you relate to this?

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Are you sitting in your corner, wondering things you should have said but didn’t? Weaving in your mind just the spot you want your life to take you? Are your thoughts shifting between the gloom in the weather and the hot steamy paranthas your family must be sharing right about now, miles apart?

Are you the one who thinks so much that you start to worry about overthinking, and then you start to worry about worrying about thinking, and the web just keeps on adding the many annoying threads to it?

Yes, overthinking is a clingy monster to most of us… it is saddening, it is maddening, and it leaves a vivid impact on our mental well-being. But hey, don’t you remember that phrase- Every cloud has a silver lining?

Overthinking is not necessarily a bad trait to have. In fact, if you address to each of your thoughts, they might as well become advantageous for you!

Mainly, because a research shows…

 

Overthinkers = Creative Geniuses

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A recent research study revealed that those who worry and overthink have a highly creative bent of mind.

Dr. Adam Perkins, an expert in Neurobiology of Personality, specifically said:

“It occurred to me that if you happen to have a preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts, due to high levels of spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern conscious perception of threat and you also have a tendency to switch to panic sooner than average people, due to possessing especially high reactivity in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdale, then that means you can experience intense negative emotions even when there’s no threat present. This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator.”

In simpler terms,

 

Here’s how living with an utterly anxious, thought-eating head rewards you:

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You worry over problems. You enter the phase of ifs and buts, and in the process, think of ways that could solve the problem. And in such a case, your problems become opportunities for creative solutions.

It is in human nature to find solutions, isn’t it? Early men made those tools because seemingly, they first worried over food issues, then they thought, and came up with the idea of hunting tools.

Also,

  • Worrying over something that might not even be a true risk gets your mind running.
  • Your running mind starts generating thoughts.
  • You panic and start to think of ways that can help you deal should the worst arise; in simpler words, you become a risk manager of your own kind.
  • You come up with ways to handle what you consider a potential danger.
  • And since, you overthink and worry a bit too much, you come up with ideas that seem like the mother of all solutions!

Yes, unhappiness and creativity are served on the same platter. And being creative can always give you that strength to deal with unhappy thoughts that ride your mind a bit too much, isn’t so? Ask the writers!

 

An analogy

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Can you imagine how difficult times would be if the son whose father died miles apart, remained unaware of the sad news for days simply because the letter took that long to reach his mailbox? Sure, that feel of holding a hand-written letter in times of today is unparalleled, but, how would they help the son know that his father died, instantly?! Don’t you think our elders too found this thing troublesome. So, thank Martin Cooper, the man who knew that someday, everybody will own a cell phone.

More so,

 

You can wind your clocks back in time, and you will find history filled with creative geniuses…

who used to think, think hard.

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The great artists

Now, I don’t know the facts, but once I read through the many letters the brilliant Vincent Van Gogh used to send to his siblings, and all I could think was- Man, his head just kept rolling!

The great writers

They even go numb due to overthinking and enter the place where there’s no flow of thoughts at all. And thoughts, are the fodder for beautiful sentences. Imagination, for writers, is the most important tool. Their imagination has no bounds and it can float to distances unthinkable (yet thinkable), and the result? It is sitting in your shelf in the form of some of the most famous novels ever. And why just novels? Poetry is a beautiful medium to express things that only a creative writer can imagine.

The great scientists

Who would have known of the upward buoyant force if it weren’t for Archimedes and his head contemplating things while he was in his bathtub.

The inventors, the philosophers, the entrepreneurs, must be the regular overthinkers, because how else would they be able to produce ingenious ideas?

 

So, Think Away.

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All epic creations require explosion of random thoughts in one’s mind. So think away, until you hit your mark, creatively. 🙂

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