Suffering in Advance

Thinking is one of the most extraordinary capacities humans possess. It allows us to imagine what does not yet exist, trace causes backward and consequences forward, build systems, diagnose failures, and make meaning out of chaos. Entire civilisations rest on it. So do sciences, institutions, and families. And yet the same faculty that enables clarity so often becomes the source of quiet, persistent distress. Not dramatic suffering—the kind that announces itself with catastrophe—but the slow, draining kind that steals sleep, fragments attention, and leaves us tense long before anything has actually gone wrong.

This tension is not new. Ancient traditions noticed it long before psychology gave it technical names. Zen warned that the mind’s greatest mistake is not ignorance, but attachment—to ideas, to outcomes, to narratives. Stoicism observed that most distress does not come from events themselves, but from the judgments we layer on top of them. Modern psychology arrives at the same conclusion through different routes, calling it rumination, worry, or cognitive fusion. Different languages, same recognition: suffering often arises not from what happens, but from the mind’s unchecked activity around what might.

There is an important distinction that often gets lost in contemporary conversations about overthinking. The problem is not thinking itself. When thinking is directed—when it has a purpose, a boundary, and a reason to exist—it can be exhilarating. Anyone who has worked deeply on a difficult problem knows this sensation: attention narrows, distractions fall away, time dissolves. A scientist shaping a hypothesis, an engineer diagnosing a system failure, a writer structuring an argument experiences thought as disciplined energy. It serves its master. It moves toward verification, resolution, or action. And crucially, it knows when to stop. Once thinking produces something that can be tested or acted upon, it hands the question back to reality.

The trouble begins when thinking loses this relationship to purpose and will. When thoughts arise not because we summoned them, but because they insist. When one thought drags another behind it, and another, until the mind is crowded with possibilities, imagined consequences, and unfinished narratives that have no clear order or endpoint. At that point, thinking stops being a tool and becomes an atmosphere. It no longer serves life; it replaces it.

What makes this especially deceptive is that overthinking often disguises itself as responsibility. We tell ourselves we are being careful, prepared, conscientious. But preparation has a telltale quality: it leads somewhere. It produces decisions, experiments, conversations, or next steps. Overthinking does not. It circulates endlessly around imagined risks, extracting emotional payment in advance for outcomes that may never arrive.

I saw this with painful clarity in my own professional life during the development of a collection product that depended on a bank integration (a common product in the banking/payments world to help businesses to collect payments using “virtual” bank accounts from their customers from around the world; think, a Vietnamese business exporting to another business in the UK offering its UK buyer a local GBP based bank account to pay easily, rather than dealing with cross-border payments, foreign exchange conversion from GBP to VND, and so on). The idea itself was conceptually clean. Senders (say the UK based buyer) would remit funds using the beneficiary name tied to the virtual account (say the Vietnamese exporter). This was not a cosmetic feature; it was foundational. Everything we designed assumed this behaviour. We, as a payment company, holds the “master account” with the bank we are integrating with for building this “payment-collection production”.

Months went into architecture, alignment, and integration. The work was careful, deliberate, and deeply assumed to be sound. Then, during testing, something unsettling surfaced. The bank we were integrating with was not sending the credit notification messages our systems depended on to correctly process incoming funds when senders remitted money into virtual accounts. These messages were not incidental or secondary; they were essential. Without them, credits could not be reliably identified, attributed, or reconciled.

When we raised the issue, the bank’s initial response landed like a blow. The payments, they said, were not carrying the beneficiary name as expected. Instead, the beneficiary name was defaulting to our own—because, in their framing, we were the master account holder. This was not presented as a temporary anomaly or a defect, but almost as a matter of interpretation.

In that moment, thinking stopped being analytical and became visceral. If this was truly how the system behaved, the product was not merely flawed at the edges; its premise collapsed at the center. Months of work suddenly appeared fragile. Decisions that had felt settled re-opened themselves. Conversations replayed in my head with a new, harsher light. Futures that had seemed straightforward moments earlier began to fracture.

None of this had happened yet. No formal conclusion had been reached. And still, the mind rushed ahead, filling the absence of certainty with catastrophe. Each thought generated another: what if this had been obvious earlier, what if it could not be fixed, what if all that effort went to waste?

None of this thinking helped. It did not uncover new information. It did not accelerate resolution. It did not improve judgment. It merely ensured that I experienced the emotional weight of failure long before failure had occurred. The body responded accordingly—tightness, fatigue, restless nights—while the mind congratulated itself for being vigilant.

What eventually happened was almost mundane. After deeper investigation, it turned out to be a defect on the bank’s side—a configuration issue. Something adjustable. They fixed it within a short span of time. The credit notifications flowed correctly. The product logic held. The catastrophe I had rehearsed never arrived.

What remained was the recognition that the suffering had been real even though the danger had not been. I had paid the full emotional price of an imagined future. This is one of the quiet cruelties of uncontrolled thinking: it extracts payment upfront for outcomes that may never materialise.

The same pattern appears in far more personal contexts. When my son began having trouble with his knee, my mind again outran reality. A symptom became a story. A story became many. What if it is chronic? What if it affects him long-term? What if something was missed earlier? None of these thoughts were irrational. But they were premature. They had no immediate action attached to them. The situation required observation, medical follow-up, patience, and care—not relentless forecasting.

What helped was not trying to stop these thoughts. Suppression only gives thoughts something to fight against. Ignoring them often makes them louder. What helped was changing my relationship to them. When a thought arrived, I acknowledged it, almost formally, as if entering it into a register. Yes, this concern exists. Yes, it makes sense that it appeared. And no, it does not get to decide what happens next.

This distinction—between acknowledging a thought and obeying it—is central. Thoughts are not commands. They are events. When treated as authorities, they quickly become tyrants. When treated as arrivals—noticed, respected, and released—they tend to lose momentum. Like uninvited guests who are acknowledged but not entertained, they eventually leave. Once out of sight, they are often truly out of mind.

In everyone’s life, these stories repeat endlessly. A delayed message becomes rejection. A neutral comment becomes criticism. A pending decision becomes a looming disaster. Overthinking thrives in uncertainty, convincing us that if we just think enough, we can eliminate risk. But much of life resolves not because we worried correctly, but because information arrived, people clarified, systems adjusted, or time quietly did its work.

One of the most practical ways to restore authorship over thinking is writing—not as therapy or affirmation, but as governance. Writing slows thought down enough to examine it. When worries remain internal, they stay exaggerated and slippery. On paper, they become finite. You can separate what you know from what you assume, what you can act on today from what must wait. This does not solve the problem, but it restores proportion. Often, once this is done, the mind relaxes. It no longer needs to keep the issue active, because it has been recorded and ordered.

Another important discipline is containment. Thinking works best when it has a container. Decide consciously when you will think deeply about a problem—analyse it, write through it, plan next steps—and when you will not. Once thinking has produced its next concrete action, continuing to think is no longer responsibility; it is rehearsal. When thoughts about the same issue arise outside that container, they can be acknowledged and postponed. This trains the mind to respond to structure rather than hijack attention at random.

This is also where meditation fits naturally—not as escape, not as self-improvement, and certainly not as an attempt to stop thinking, but as training in authorship over attention. Meditation does not aim to empty the mind. The mind produces thoughts the way the heart produces beats. The practice is not to stop them, but to stop being carried by them.

A simple form requires nothing elaborate. Sit quietly. Let the body be still enough to stop feeding the mind new stimuli. Rest attention on something neutral and repetitive, such as the breath. Thoughts will arrive. They always do. That is not a failure; it is the point. Each thought is like a train arriving at a platform. In daily life, we board them automatically. In meditation, we practice remaining on the platform. We notice the train, perhaps even read its destination, and let it depart.

At first, this feels difficult, even frustrating. The mind boards trains before you realise what has happened. That moment of realisation—I am thinking—is the practice working. Each return to the platform strengthens the capacity to choose. Over time, this spills into daily life. Thoughts are noticed earlier, before they gather emotional momentum. The gap between thought and reaction widens. This gap is not mystical; it is practical. It is the space in which thinking can once again serve rather than rule.

There is an old image that captures this well. When water is muddy, the instinct is to stir it in the hope of clearing it. But stirring only keeps the sediment suspended. Clarity comes not from force, but from stillness. Overthinking is mental stirring. Writing, meditation, pauses, and deliberate attention allow the sediment to settle on its own. The mind clears not by effort, but by restraint.

None of this is an argument for passivity or indifference. Thinking has its place. Analysis matters. Planning matters. The danger lies in letting thinking replace engagement with reality. Thinking should begin when summoned, move toward a purpose, and stop when its work is done. When thoughts arrive without invitation, they need not be expelled or indulged. They can be acknowledged and released. But the thinking the thoughts beget should in our control.

The deeper discipline here is sovereignty. Thinking should serve you, not rule you. When it serves, it is powerful, precise, even joyful. When it rules, it is exhausting. Much of modern suffering comes not from what happens, but from living ahead of reality—arguing with futures that never occur, rehearsing losses that never arrive.

To think deeply when depth is needed, and to stop when it is not, is not a mystical achievement. It is a practical skill. Reclaiming it does not simplify life, but it makes it truer. Energy once spent suffering in advance becomes available for the only place it can ever matter: the present moment, where things actually happen.