Your brain doesn't spiral in one direction. It ping-pongs. Hope, then doom. Confidence, then collapse. "This is going to be fine" immediately followed by "this is going to be the worst thing that's ever happened to me," and then back again, and then forward again, and the speed of these oscillations is genuinely dizzying even to you, the person who lives inside this head. You got The Anxiety Oscillator, and your particular brand of overthinking isn't about the past or the future or other people — it's about your own internal state, which refuses to pick a lane.
Here's what's actually happening neurologically, and it's more interesting than "you're just anxious." Your brain's threat-detection system and your rational processing system are essentially in a tug-of-war, and neither one is strong enough to win definitively. Your amygdala fires a threat signal ("this is bad"), your prefrontal cortex responds with a correction ("actually, it's probably fine"), and then your amygdala fires again ("but WHAT IF it's bad"), and this back-and-forth creates the oscillation you experience as constant emotional whiplash. Other overthinkers pick a direction — past, future, other people — and commit. You can't commit, because every direction your thoughts go, the counter-signal immediately pulls you back.
The somatic component of your pattern is the part most people don't talk about. Your overthinking doesn't just live in your head — it lives in your body. The chest tightness when you're waiting for a reply. The jaw clenching when you can't make a decision. The way your shoulders creep up toward your ears when your brain starts its ping-pong routine. You're not just thinking about your anxiety — you're physically marinating in it. This is because the oscillation pattern keeps your nervous system in a state of sustained activation. Your body doesn't know which signal to follow — "we're safe" or "we're in danger" — so it stays revved up for both, which means you're exhausted by thoughts that technically haven't concluded anything.
Your decision-making process is where this pattern becomes most visible and most destructive. You can see the merits of every option. You can also see the catastrophic potential of every option. And because you can see both simultaneously, you're stuck in an infinite toggle between "yes" and "what if no." Other people see this as indecisiveness. What it actually is: you're running two complete simulations at the same time and they're producing contradictory results, and your brain doesn't have a tiebreaker protocol. So it just keeps running both simulations, hoping one will eventually produce a clear winner, and it never does.
In relationships, your oscillation is felt by the people around you even when you don't voice it. You're the person who's fully present and warmly loving one moment, then visibly anxious and distant the next — not because anything changed externally, but because your internal pendulum swung. Partners and friends learn to read these shifts, and the caring ones ask "are you okay?" But here's the catch: you often can't explain what happened because nothing happened. Your brain just switched channels without warning, and now you're processing a completely different emotional reality than you were two minutes ago.
The thing you want most — and the thing that feels most impossible — is certainty. Not about outcomes (though that would be nice), but about your own feelings. You want to KNOW that you're happy without the undercurrent of "but for how long?" You want to feel safe without the asterisk of "but what if." The oscillation isn't really about the external thing you're overthinking. It's about your own emotional ground feeling unstable — the sense that you can't trust your own feelings to stay put.
Your growth isn't about stopping the oscillation — it's about changing your relationship to it. Right now, you treat each swing as equally valid and urgent. "I'm going to be fine" and "I'm going to ruin everything" both get the same weight, the same attention, the same emotional investment. The practice is learning to observe the swings without climbing aboard each one. Your brain is going to ping-pong. That's okay. But you don't have to ride every serve. You can notice the doom thought, nod at it, and wait for the next swing without investing in either one. Over time, this changes the oscillation from an emergency to weather — something that happens around you, not something that defines you. And the space between the swings? That's where you actually live.