What Is Overthinking, Explained Simply

Overthinking is a word almost everyone uses, and almost nobody explains. A person sends a message, then reads it ten times, wondering if one word sounded rude. A person chooses between two ordinary options and spends an hour going back and forth. A person lies awake replaying a conversation from three days ago, finding a better reply each time, long after the conversation has ended. None of this is careful thinking. Careful thinking helps you decide. Overthinking keeps you from deciding, and it leaves you more tired than when you started. This article explains, in plain words, what overthinking is, how it differs from normal thinking, why it becomes a habit, and what helps a person step out of it.

The first thing to understand is that overthinking is not a sign of intelligence, and it is not a sign of stupidity either. It is a habit of the mind, and like most habits, it grows because it feels useful. Thinking hard about a problem feels like taking it seriously. Going over a decision again and again feels like being thorough. Replaying a conversation feels like learning from it. Each of these things is true in small amounts. The problem starts when the amount grows and the benefit stops. The mind keeps working long after the work is done, like a person who keeps stirring a pot after the food is cooked. The stirring does not improve the meal. It only wears out the cook.

Overthinking in Plain Words

Overthinking means thinking about the same thing for too long, in too much detail, without reaching a conclusion. The thought goes round in a circle. You think about what happened, then about what it might have meant, then about what you should have done, then about what might happen next, then back to the start. Hours can pass, and at the end of them you know no more than you did at the beginning. The only difference is that you are more tired, more unsure, and more likely to doubt the decision you finally make.

There are two common shapes of overthinking, and most people recognise at least one of them. The first looks backwards. It replays the past: a conversation, a mistake, a missed chance, an awkward moment. The mind examines it from every angle, finds fault in every detail, and imagines how it could have gone better. The second looks forwards. It previews the future: a meeting, a message, a journey, a decision. The mind lists everything that could go wrong, imagines each version, and tries to prepare for all of them at once. Both shapes feel different, but they do the same thing: they keep the mind busy with a time that is not now. The past cannot be changed by thinking, and the future cannot be controlled by imagining it. Only the present can be acted on, and overthinking pulls attention away from it.

It is worth saying clearly that thinking itself is not the enemy. Thinking is how we solve problems, learn from mistakes, and make good choices. A person who thinks carefully before a big decision is doing something sensible. Overthinking begins where that sensible thinking ends. The line is not always easy to see from the inside, because overthinking feels like thinking. But there is a simple way to tell them apart, and it is the same test that works for worry: has this thinking produced anything new in the last twenty minutes? A new idea, a new fact, a new step? If the answer is no, and the same thoughts are simply returning in the same order, the thinking has stopped being useful. It has become a loop.

Thinking, Planning, and Overthinking: Where the Line Is

Normal thinking has a shape. It starts with a question, gathers what is known, weighs the options, and ends with a choice. Even when the choice is hard, the process moves forward. Planning is the same shape, stretched over a longer time. You think about what needs doing, you put the steps in order, and then you act. Overthinking has no shape. It starts with a question and never reaches the end of it. It gathers the same facts again and again, weighs the same options again and again, and never chooses. The mind feels busy, so it feels productive, but nothing moves.

One useful way to see the difference is to look at what happens to your body. Careful thinking usually leaves you calmer, because you know more than you did before, or you have made a decision. Overthinking usually leaves you tenser, because the same uncertainty is still there, only now it is louder. Another way is to look at the clock. Careful thinking takes the time a problem deserves: a few minutes for a small choice, longer for a big one. Overthinking takes far more time than the problem deserves. An hour spent choosing between two shirts, or a whole evening spent deciding the wording of a short message, is a sign that the thinking has passed its useful point, whatever the decision is.

There is also a difference in the questions each kind of thinking asks. Careful thinking asks questions that have answers: what are my options, what do I know, what will I do first? Overthinking asks questions that have no answers: what if they thought I was rude, what if I choose wrong and regret it forever, what if everyone notices? These questions cannot be settled by thinking, because they are about other people’s minds and about a future that has not happened. So the mind keeps asking them, and the person keeps feeling worse. Learning to hear the difference between a question with an answer and a question without one is one of the most useful skills a person can build, and it is a skill that grows with practice, not with effort alone.

The Loop: How One Thought Turns Into Many

Overthinking rarely starts with a big problem. It usually starts with a small, ordinary thought, and then grows, one link at a time. A person sends a message and notices that the reply is short. That is the first thought, and it is a fact: the reply was short. Then comes the second thought: perhaps the other person is annoyed. That is not a fact. It is a guess. Then the third: perhaps the message sounded rude. Another guess. Then the fourth: perhaps the friendship is damaged. Another guess, bigger than the last. Within minutes, a short reply has become a damaged friendship, and the person feels as bad as if the friendship really were damaged. This is the loop, and it runs on a simple rule: each guess is treated as if it were a fact, and the next guess is built on top of it.

The loop is hard to stop from the inside, because each step feels reasonable on its own. It is reasonable to wonder if a short reply means annoyance. It is reasonable to check your own message for a rude word. What is not reasonable is the speed at which the guesses grow, and the way they are never checked against reality. A person in the loop does not ask the other person how they are. They do not wait for the next message. They do not consider the simplest explanation, which is often that the other person was busy, tired, or typing in a hurry. The loop prefers the dramatic explanation, because the dramatic explanation feels like it needs attention, and attention is what the loop feeds on.

Breaking the loop does not require solving the whole chain. It requires stopping at one link and asking a plain question: is this a fact, or is this a guess? The reply was short. That is a fact. The other person is annoyed. That is a guess. Once the two are separated, the loop loses its fuel. A guess can be tested, and testing is usually simple: wait, ask, or look for more information. A guess can also be left alone. Not every guess needs an answer today. Some guesses fade on their own when the mind is given something else to do, and that fading is not failure. It is the mind returning to its normal size after being stretched by fear.

Why the Mind Keeps Going Over the Same Thing

There are several reasons the mind returns to the same thought, and none of them mean the person is weak. The first is uncertainty. The mind dislikes not knowing. When a decision is unclear, when a message is unanswered, when a result is still to come, the mind tries to fill the gap by thinking. It would rather have a bad answer than no answer, so it invents one, and then worries about the answer it invented. This is why overthinking is strongest before a result: before an exam result, before a reply, before a meeting. The mind is trying to end the waiting by thinking, but thinking does not end waiting. Only time does.

The second reason is fear of regret. Many people overthink because they are afraid of choosing wrong and regretting it later. They believe that if they think long enough, they will find the perfect choice, the one with no downside. But most real choices have no perfect version. Every option has something good and something less good, and the perfect choice does not exist. The mind that searches for it will search forever, and in the meantime, the person loses the time and energy they could have spent living with the good-enough choice. A good-enough choice, made in time, is almost always better than a perfect choice that never arrives.

The third reason is habit. A mind that has overthought for years does it automatically, the way a path through a field becomes easier to walk each time it is used. The same hours, the same quiet moments, the same kind of decision: the mind slides into the loop without being asked. This is why overthinking often feels like it happens to you, rather than something you choose. In a sense, that is true. You are not choosing each thought one by one. You are walking a familiar path. But a path can be left, slowly, by walking a different one often enough that it too becomes familiar. That is slow work, and it is worth doing, because the old path leads to the same tired place every time.

What Overthinking Costs in a Normal Day

Overthinking is not free. It costs time first, and time is the one thing a day cannot give back. An hour spent deciding what to wear, what to cook, or how to word a message is an hour that could have been spent working, resting, talking, or walking. Over a week, those hours add up to a large part of a person’s waking life, spent not on living but on preparing to live. Many people who overthink are surprised when they add it up. They thought they were being careful. They discover they were being busy, and busy is not the same as careful.

It also costs energy. Thinking hard uses real energy, and overthinking uses it without giving anything back. A person who has spent the evening replaying a conversation feels as tired as a person who has worked a long shift, even though they sat still the whole time. That tiredness is real. The mind has been working, turning the same thoughts over, and the body feels it. Sleep is often lighter after such an evening, because the mind is still running when the person lies down. The next day starts with less energy, and less energy makes overthinking more likely, because a tired mind is worse at making decisions and letting them go. It is a circle, and it turns quietly, day after day.

The third cost is the hardest to see, and it is the cost to confidence. Every time a person goes over a decision again and again, the mind learns a lesson: my first judgement cannot be trusted. Over months and years, that lesson grows. Simple decisions start to feel risky. The person asks more people for advice, checks more often, delays longer, and each delay teaches the same lesson again. Confidence is not built by thinking more. It is built by deciding, acting, and seeing that the result, even when imperfect, can be handled. A person who decides quickly and fixes mistakes as they come learns that mistakes are survivable. A person who tries to prevent every mistake by thinking learns only that thinking never feels like enough.

Overthinking also costs relationships, though quietly. A person who replays every conversation will start to hear meanings that were never there. A short reply becomes coldness. A pause becomes disapproval. A joke becomes an insult. These readings are rarely checked, because the overthinker is afraid to ask and look foolish, so the misunderstanding grows in silence. Over time, the person may pull away from people they like, not because those people did anything wrong, but because the imagined version of them became too hard to face. The real people, meanwhile, have no idea any of this is happening. That gap, between what was imagined and what was real, is one of the saddest costs of overthinking, and it is entirely avoidable once the pattern is seen.

Overthinking and Sleep

Night is when overthinking is strongest, and the reasons are easy to understand. During the day, the mind is held by real things: work, food, conversation, movement. At night, those things stop, and the mind is left alone with itself. With no new information coming in, it replays the day. It finds the one awkward moment in an otherwise ordinary day and examines it for an hour. It previews tomorrow and finds ten things that could go wrong. Because the mind is tired, it does this badly, choosing the worst version of each memory and each plan. A small mistake from the morning becomes a large failure by midnight, not because it grew, but because the mind that looks at it grew tired.

The effect on sleep is direct. A mind that is still arguing with itself cannot settle into sleep easily. The person lies awake, turns over, checks the time, and the checking itself becomes another thing to think about. Sleep comes late, or it comes in broken pieces, and the morning starts with the same tired mind that caused the problem. It helps to know that this is a pattern, not a personal failing. Almost everyone who overthinks knows the feeling of a mind that will not switch off at night, and almost everyone finds the same thoughts smaller in the morning. Daylight, food, and movement change the mind’s judgement, and a thought that seemed urgent at two in the morning often looks ordinary by nine.

There are small things that help, and they are worth trying before the night begins rather than during it. Writing down the thoughts that are circling, in a few plain sentences on paper, gives them a place outside the head. Making a short note of the one thing to do tomorrow, and then closing the notebook, tells the mind that the matter is held safely until morning. A regular time for sleep, a dark and quiet room, and no long thinking in bed all help the mind learn that the bed is for sleeping, not for solving the day. None of this is a cure, and none of it works perfectly every night. But over weeks, the pattern loosens, and the nights get a little quieter, which is often enough to change the days as well.

Simple Ways to Step Out of the Loop

The most useful step is also the simplest: put a limit on the thinking. Give yourself a fixed amount of time for a decision, and let the size of the decision set the size of the time. A small choice gets five minutes. A medium choice gets an evening. A big choice gets a few days, with a date for deciding written down. When the time ends, decide, even if the decision is not perfect. A decision made in time can be adjusted later. A decision postponed forever cannot be adjusted at all, because it was never made. This one habit, practised for a month, changes more than any amount of extra thinking ever will.

A second step is to write the options down. Overthinking lives in the head, where thoughts move quickly and repeat themselves. On paper, they slow down. Write the two or three real options, write one good point and one bad point for each, and then look at the paper. Most of the time, the choice is clearer on paper than it was in the head, because the paper does not repeat itself and does not add fear to the facts. If the choice is still unclear, ask one trusted person, listen to their answer, and then decide. Asking ten people is not more careful than asking one. It is only more confusing.

A third step is to move the body. Overthinking is a still activity: sitting, lying down, staring at a screen. Movement breaks it, not by solving the problem, but by giving the mind something else to follow. A walk, even a short one, changes the rhythm of thought. Many people find that the answer they could not find while sitting arrives halfway through a walk, without any effort. That is not magic. It is the mind working in the background while the body is busy, which is how the mind often works best. The same is true of a simple task: washing dishes, tidying a room, cooking a meal. A mind with a small real task worries less than a mind with nothing to hold.

A fourth step is to test the guess instead of debating it. If you fear that a message sounded rude, reread it once, and if it reads fairly, let it go. If you still worry, ask the person, in plain words, whether everything is fine. Most of the time, the answer is yes, and the loop ends in a minute. If you fear a decision will go badly, take the smallest step towards it and see what happens. Reality gives better information than imagination, and it gives it faster. A person who tests one small guess learns more in a day than a person who debates a hundred guesses in their head for a week. And if the loop is heavy every day, or it stops you sleeping, working, or living normally, talk to a doctor or a qualified health professional. That is a sensible step, not a sign of failure.

Overthinking Small Decisions

It is strange how often the biggest overthinking is about the smallest choices. A person can decide a large matter, like moving house or changing a job, in a few days, and then spend a whole evening choosing what to wear to a simple gathering, or which of two nearly identical items to buy. The reason is that small decisions have no clear right answer, and the mind that wants certainty cannot accept that. It keeps searching for a reason to prefer one option, and when it finds none, it invents one, then doubts it, then starts again. The result is an evening spent on a choice that will be forgotten by tomorrow, whatever is chosen.

The cost of this is easy to miss, because each small decision feels too trivial to matter. But a day is made of small decisions, and a person who overthinks each one arrives at the evening exhausted, with no energy left for the decisions that actually matter. The way out is to give small decisions small amounts of time, and to accept that a good-enough choice is a finished choice. Pick one, act on it, and move on. If it turns out badly, fix it then. Most small choices can be fixed in minutes, and the ones that cannot be fixed were never worth an evening of thought. Learning to decide small things quickly is not carelessness. It is saving your careful thinking for the places where it can actually help.

My Take:

If you ask me what I think overthinking really is, I will say it is thinking that forgot its job. Thinking has a job: to help you decide, learn, or solve something. Overthinking is thinking that keeps working after the job is done, like a labourer who keeps digging after the hole is deep enough. I do not say that to mock anyone, because I know how it feels from the inside. It feels serious. It feels responsible. It feels like the careful thing to do. But when I look back at the evenings I spent going over the same thought ten times, I cannot find a single one where the tenth look taught me anything the first look had not. The extra thinking did not make me wiser. It made me tired, and tired thinking is worse thinking, not better.

I think the most honest test for overthinking is a simple one, and I use it on myself. After twenty minutes on one thought, I ask: do I know anything new? Have I found a new fact, a new option, or a new step? If the answer is no, I am not thinking any more. I am circling. And circling is not a flaw in my character. It is a habit, and habits can be changed, slowly, by doing something different at the moment the circle starts. For me, that something different is usually small: I write the thought down, I stand up and walk, or I ask myself what the smallest next step is. None of these is dramatic. None of them feels like a solution in the moment. But they break the circle, and a broken circle is the beginning of a quieter evening.

I also think we praise overthinking far too much. People say “I think too much” almost proudly, as if it meant they were deep or careful or intelligent. Sometimes they are deep and careful and intelligent. But the thinking itself is not proof of any of those things. Deep people also know when to stop. Careful people also know when a decision is good enough. Intelligent people also know that a mind can be wrong about its own fears, and that a thought repeated a hundred times is not a hundred times truer than a thought thought once. I would rather be known as a person who decides and adjusts than as a person who thinks beautifully and never acts, because in real life, the deciding person gets things done, learns from real results, and sleeps better at night.

There is something I want to say about the past, because that is where my own overthinking used to live. I would replay conversations for days, finding the clever reply I should have given, the kinder word I should have used, the mistake I should have avoided. Each replay felt like learning. But I was not learning. I was rehearsing a play that had already closed. The other person had moved on. The moment had passed. The only person still in the theatre was me, performing to an empty room. What helped me was not a technique or a book. It was a plain question, asked at the right moment: can I change this now? If the answer was yes, I changed it, with an apology or a correction or a second try. If the answer was no, I tried to leave it where it belonged, in the past, and to spend my energy on the next conversation instead of the last one. That question still helps me, years later, because it is honest, and honesty is the one thing overthinking cannot survive for long.

I think the future version of overthinking is harder, because the future has not happened, and the mind can invent anything it likes about it. A meeting next week can be imagined in fifty ways, and the mind, being cautious, will choose the worst five and rehearse those. I have learned to ask a different question about the future: what is the most likely version, not the worst version? Most meetings are ordinary. Most messages are friendly. Most results are in the middle, neither wonderful nor terrible. The mind that prepares only for the worst is not being careful. It is being unfair to the future, and unfair to itself. I try to prepare for the ordinary version, with one small plan for the bad version, and then I stop. That is enough preparation for most days, and it leaves the evening free for living instead of rehearsing.

I want to be honest about confidence, because overthinking and confidence are tied together in a way people rarely notice. Every time I went over a decision again and again, I was teaching myself a lesson without meaning to: your first judgement is not good enough. After years of that lesson, simple decisions started to feel dangerous, and I needed other people’s opinions before I could choose anything. What I did not understand then is that confidence does not come from thinking more. It comes from deciding, seeing what happens, and discovering that the result, even when it is not perfect, can be handled. A person who decides quickly and fixes mistakes as they go learns that mistakes are survivable. A person who tries to prevent every mistake by thinking learns only that thinking never feels like enough. I would rather make a small mistake and fix it than spend a week trying to prevent it and lose the week.

There is also a quiet cost to relationships that I think is worth naming. When I overthought conversations, I started hearing meanings that were never there. A short reply became coldness. A pause became disapproval. A joke became an insult. I never checked these readings, because I was afraid to ask and look foolish, so they grew in silence, and I pulled away from people I liked, for reasons that existed only in my own head. The real people had done nothing wrong. That still saddens me when I think about it, because some of those distances took years to close. What I learned is that the cheapest cure for an imagined meaning is a plain question, asked kindly: is everything all right? Most of the time, the answer is yes, and the loop ends in a minute. A minute of courage saves weeks of guessing, and that is a trade I would make every time.

Night overthinking deserves its own honest word, because it is the form most people know best. I have lain awake going over the day, finding the one awkward moment in an otherwise ordinary day and examining it until it filled the whole night. What I have learned is that a tired mind is a bad judge, and the night is the worst courtroom for any thought. The same thought that seems urgent at two in the morning usually looks small by nine, after light, food, and a walk. So I try not to hold trials at night. I write the thought down, I put the paper aside, and I tell myself I will look at it in the morning, when my mind is rested enough to judge it fairly. Most mornings, I do not even need to look. The thought has shrunk on its own, the way a shadow shrinks when the sun comes up.

I think the advice people give about overthinking is often unhelpful, and I want to say why. “Just stop thinking about it” is not advice, because nobody can stop a thought by ordering it away. “Think positive” is not advice either, because the opposite of overthinking is not positive thinking. It is action, even a small one. The things that actually helped me were far plainer: a limit on decision time, a list written on paper, a walk outside, a question asked instead of guessed. These are not impressive. They do not sound like wisdom. But they work, because they move the thought out of the head and into the world, where it can be tested, and tested thoughts are smaller than imagined ones. I would rather have one small, tested fact than a hundred imagined possibilities, and I think most people would too, if they gave the fact a chance.

If a friend came to me and said they could not stop overthinking, I would not give them a lecture or a list of rules. I would ask them to tell me the thought in one plain sentence, and then I would ask whether it was a fact or a guess. That one question does more than any speech, because it separates what is known from what is feared, and fear shrinks when it is separated from fact. Then I would ask what one small step they could take tomorrow, not tonight, in daylight, with a rested mind. And then I would tell them to go for a walk, eat something, and sleep, because the thought will still be there in the morning if it is real, and if it is not real, the morning will show them that. That is the kindest advice I know about overthinking: do the one small thing you can do, test one guess against reality, and let the rest wait for daylight. The mind is a good servant and a bad master, and the way to keep it a servant is to give it real work, real rest, and a limit on its hours.

One last thought, and I mean it seriously. Overthinking is not who you are. It is something your mind learned to do, and what was learned can be unlearned, slowly, one decision at a time. You will not stop it in a week, and you will not stop it by trying harder to think your way out of it. You will stop it by deciding a little faster, by testing a guess instead of debating it, by walking when the thoughts circle, and by forgiving yourself when the loop starts again, because it will start again, and starting again is not failure. It is practice. And practice, done kindly and steadily, is how any habit changes. That is what I believe about overthinking: not that it can be switched off, but that it can be loosened, day by day, until the evenings belong to you again, and the mind, for once, is quiet enough to let you live.

I also want to say something about small decisions, because that is where I practise most. I used to spend twenty minutes choosing between two ordinary options, as if the choice would decide my whole week. Now I give small choices five minutes, and when the time ends, I choose and move on. Most of the time, the choice works out fine. Sometimes it does not, and then I fix it, which usually takes less time than the thinking would have taken. This small practice has done more for my confidence than any amount of careful thought ever did, because it taught my mind a new lesson: a decision made in time is better than a perfect decision that never arrives. Confidence, I have learned, is not the feeling you have before you decide. It is the feeling you earn after you decide, act, and survive the result.

Talking to someone is the other thing that helped me more than I expected, and I want to name it plainly. Overthinking grows in silence, because a thought kept inside can grow without being checked. Saying it out loud to one trusted person often shrinks it in a minute, because the other person hears it with fresh ears and can say what you cannot say to yourself: that sounds unlikely, or that happened to me too, or let us look at the facts together. I am not talking about asking ten people for reassurance again and again, which only feeds the loop. I mean one honest conversation, once, with someone who listens properly. That kind of talk does what hours of thinking cannot do, because it puts the thought outside your head, where it can be seen clearly, instead of leaving it inside, where it can grow in the dark.

Finally, I think patience matters more here than any technique, and I want to be plain about that. A mind that has overthought for years will not quiet down in a week, and anyone who promises that is not being honest. What changes first is not the thinking itself but your relationship with it. You notice the loop sooner. You name it faster. You believe it a little less. Then, over weeks and months, the hours it takes shrink, and the evenings come back, one at a time. That is slow progress, and it is real progress, and it is worth more than a quick fix that fades by the weekend. If you are working on this, be patient with yourself the way you would be patient with a friend learning something new. The mind that overthinks is also the mind that cares and pays attention, and it deserves kindness while it learns a quieter way to work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is what is overthinking, explained simply a normal part of everyday life?

Yes, it is very common. Almost everyone overthinks sometimes, especially before an important decision, after an awkward conversation, or late at night. Thinking carefully is a normal and useful part of life. Overthinking becomes a problem when it takes up hours every day, stops you deciding, disturbs your sleep, or leaves you exhausted by thoughts that lead nowhere. Occasional overthinking is normal. Constant, heavy overthinking that takes over your days is worth talking about with a doctor or a qualified health professional.

How long does what is overthinking, explained simply usually last in a normal day?

It varies a lot from person to person. A short bout of overthinking may last a few minutes and fade once you are busy with something else. A stronger loop can return in waves across a whole day, especially in quiet moments or late at night. What matters is not a fixed number of minutes but the pattern: if the same thoughts keep returning for hours without producing a new idea, a new fact, or a new step, the thinking has stopped being useful, and a small action, a walk, or writing the thoughts down usually helps more than thinking them over again.

Can what is overthinking, explained simply affect sleep and rest?

Yes, it often does, and this is one of the most common effects. Overthinking keeps the mind busy when the body wants to rest, so sleep comes late or in broken pieces, and the person wakes up tired. A tired mind then overthinks more the next night, which makes the pattern harder to break. Writing the circling thoughts down before bed, making a short note of the one thing to do tomorrow, and keeping a regular sleep time can help. If poor sleep goes on for weeks, it is worth speaking to a health professional.

What is the simplest way to handle what is overthinking, explained simply?

The simplest start is to put a limit on the thinking: give a small decision five minutes, a bigger one an evening, and decide when the time ends, even if the decision is not perfect. Writing the real options on paper, with one good point and one bad point for each, also helps, because thoughts slow down on paper and stop repeating themselves. A short walk and testing one guess against reality, instead of debating it in your head, are the next simplest steps. Keep the step small enough to survive a busy day.

Does what is overthinking, explained simply feel the same for everyone?

No, it does not feel the same for everyone. Some people overthink mainly about the past, replaying conversations and mistakes. Others overthink mainly about the future, previewing everything that could go wrong. Some feel it as thoughts that will not stop, others as tension in the body, poor sleep, or difficulty deciding even small things. Differences in sleep, routine, stress, and daily life mean the same habit can look quite different from one person to another.

When should I talk to someone about what is overthinking, explained simply?

Talk to someone you trust, or to a doctor or qualified health professional, if overthinking is heavy every day, if it stops you sleeping, working, deciding, or leaving the house, or if it has gone on for weeks without easing. It is also worth talking to someone if the same thoughts keep returning no matter what you try, or if overthinking is pulling you away from people you care about. Asking for help is not failure. It is a sensible step, the same as seeing a doctor for a pain that will not go away.

Sources

This article is general information only. It is not medical advice and it does not diagnose, treat, or cure anything. For personal concerns, speak to a qualified health professional.