03/23/2026
"The achievement orientation still running modern culture, including most of self-help and spirituality, is the very thing you have to relax. The addiction to thinking is, at root, an addiction to wanting things to be different from how they are.” I found this recent piece by Alex Olshonsky on Substack very helpful, and insightful - about something which perhaps most of us never really ask, or challenge: what exactly 'is' thinking?
It follows a basic mindfulness/Buddhist approach but really probes the links between thinking and our (emotional) need for control, and our compulsive problem-solving strategies - which turn the whole world and everyone in it into a problem to be solved. What's that all about, really? “The nervous system learned that if you can think your way through something, you don’t have to feel it. Thinking became your protector", he suggests.
And it's full of rather nice observations, like this one: "Carl Jung once described addicts as frustrated mystics. I believe that’s true for all of us. We’re all chasing, with increasingly sophisticated tools, relief from the chase itself - as well as helpful tips for actually how to find that 'relief from the chase':
"If there’s been a throughline to my work over the last decade, it’s that addiction gets subtler the further you follow it. First I had to get sober from the obvious “bad” stuff, the narcotic chemicals that nearly killed me. Then I had to reckon with the legal drugs like Twitter, Instagram, PornHub, and yes, The New York Times politics section, which I used to read cover to cover as if it were oxygen. After that came other socially sanctioned drugs I had long mistaken for purely virtuous: achievement, ideology, productivity, optimization, and having a sharp take on everything.
I started calling it “modern addiction” when it became clear that this wasn’t just about me and a few other broken individuals, but a pattern that defines contemporary life. We are, all of us, drawn into dopamine-driven loops that gradually narrow our perspective and agency around whatever helps us avoid pain, a dynamic called reciprocal narrowing.
What surprised me most, though, was where the road eventually led. If you keep tracing addiction to its root, if you keep asking what engine is driving the meta-engine, you arrive somewhere far more fundamental than he**in or TikTok.
You arrive at the addiction to thinking itself.
We may be the first generation in history rewarded for maintaining a nonstop internal commentary—curating who we are for an imaginary audience, staying informed, and responding in real-time online. Now we’re building machines that can out-think us at literally everything, and the reaction has mostly been to double down… think faster, stay sharper, keep up. Few are asking whether we should instead be strengthening the capacities that machines will never have, the ones that dwell entirely below thought. But when mental activity has become synonymous with intelligence, even maturity, it’s nearly impossible to see that thinking itself might be operating as a dependency.
And yet addiction to thought does not look dramatic. It’s elusively ordinary.
If you’re anything like me, it looks like rehearsing how you will respond to a text from a friend you want to impress, lying in bed replaying something slightly dumb you said six hours ago, pre-adjusting your personality before a work event, or zoning out at dinner while strategizing your next career move as your kid and wife sit right in front of you—and then she asks you what you think, and you nod along, having no fu***ng clue what she just said.
The tricky part is that none of this looks like addiction. A good therapist might diagnose it as anxiety. Most people, if pressed, will say something like, “that’s just how my brain works,” as if it’s a personality trait. And it passes for being a responsible, informed, “together” adult.
None of this is an indictment of the mind, which is extraordinary and has built civilizations and, on a few occasions, saved my life. I’m very pro-brain. The problem is not that we think, but the compulsive way we think, and the fact that we cannot simply let our minds rest. For most of us, thoughts do not arise and pass as Eckhart Tolle assures us they should. They obsessively loop, sometimes at 2:17 a.m.
And like any addiction, there is a hit. You replay the conversation, and for a brief moment, there’s relief, the feeling that you’re on top of it. In control. But the relief never lasts. The body is still left with whatever sensations you were trying not to feel. The uncertainty returns as discomfort in the body, and the mind reaches again, this time for another thought, sure that one last round of analysis will settle it. And this all happens at the speed of thought, which is to say, instantly, before you realize it’s happened.
Over time, the field of experience narrows until the story narrated, on loop in your head, feels more real, more important, than the miracle of life unfolding directly in front of you.
It took me roughly a decade of enthusiastic self-destruction, followed by an unexpected brush with the Absolute, and then another decade of recovery, including working in the addiction space myself, to realize it’s addiction all the way down.
We change the object, but keep the mechanism.
The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this. It grants you the feeling of control.
The thing is, the nervous system cannot distinguish whether the object you’re reaching for is a substance or a thought. The underlying physiology remains the same: the body tightens. Next time you catch your thoughts racing, notice what your brow, jaw, shoulders, or belly are doing. Even if it’s subtle, some part of you is bracing.
But once that compulsion to think through everything relaxes, you find there’s something wiser and more effortlessly responsive that’s been running the show. A way of being in the world, amid all the trappings of modernity, that doesn’t revolve around constant internal commentary. And it doesn’t render you dull or passive. If anything, you move through life more spontaneously, more lovingly, more playfully, and, somewhat annoyingly, more effectively.
You trust yourself to respond to the text when it comes, rather than rehearsing it. You let the dumb thing you said six hours ago dissolve without a post-mortem. You walk into the work event without pre-adjusting anything and speak from the core of your being. At dinner, career domination thoughts might still come and go in the distant background, but you’re there, and the people you love can feel it. You start to see that much of what you’d been strategizing can, and does, happen all on its own.
I took a first pass at this in a previous essay on the shift from left to right-hemisphere dominance. But the addiction frame I’m exploring here goes somewhere different, and I think closer to the root. That piece was about changing how you perceive. This one is about loosening the compulsion that keeps you locked in thought in the first place.
The most important thing to realize is that you cannot stop thinking. Trying to is counterproductive. The issue is not that thoughts arise, but that you believe they’re yours. A thought shows up, and because it showed up in your head, you assume it’s important, meant for you, and worth following. So you follow it. And by the time you notice, you’re already three thoughts deep.
And like all addictions, this happens compulsively, and it has consequences: you miss what’s more primary in experience, such as your body, the room, or the person right in front of you.
All addictions are intelligent, and the compulsion to think is no different. For many of us, staying in our heads was the safest place to be, especially early on. The nervous system learned that if you can think your way through something, you don’t have to feel it. Thinking became your protector. At the time, it was a smart strategy.
The temptation is to wage war on your own thinking. What helps instead is recognizing, with as much compassion as you can muster, that a part of you has been working overtime to keep you safe. And giving it permission to take a break.
This is also why pop-psychology advice on stopping overthinking often doesn’t work. You can’t override a nervous system response with a mental command. That’s a top-down instruction to a bottom-up problem. The body has to feel safe enough to stop gripping before the mind will let go.
So the first move is to relax the body.
Can you stop sounds from arising? Can you stop the visual field from appearing? Can you, despite your best efforts, not taste chili when you spoon it in your mouth?
You can’t. And the same applies to thinking.
When thoughts become just another sense, something that just happens like the weather, your identification with them can soften. Loud construction outside your Zoom meeting is annoying, but you don’t believe it says anything about you. Meanwhile, a harsh thought shows up, and suddenly it’s you and all your failures. That is the addictive hook.
It feels like we control those thoughts when, in fact, we do not."
To read the full article, please click here: https://deepfix.substack.com/p/youre-probably-addicted-to-thinking
