My overthinking has done more harm than help

Published 1:30 am Friday, June 12, 2026

I overthink things because I’m careful. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Maybe I’m careful because I overthink things. Or maybe it’s — oh, goodness, I’m doing it again.

I’m repeating the word “maybe” a lot.

Perhaps — ah, my favorite “maybe” substitute — I should do something about the overthinking.

Perhaps therapy would help. Perhaps journaling would. Perhaps — oh, no. Same problem.

What will my editor think? What will YOU think, Dear Reader?

Oh, ew, Dear Reader? Who uses that phrase anymore? Not that you’re not a Dear Reader. Of course, you’re a Dear Reader.

I should delete that. But if I delete it, you’ll know I deleted it. And then you’ll wonder what else I deleted. This is how distrust begins.

It’s not my fault. I’ve always been an overthinker.

Whenever my family went on road trips, I was always the one who worried about how much gas was in the car and the tire pressure and whether or not we had enough Cheez-Its in the trunk to survive a nuclear apocalypse if one happened to occur.

I was always the one imagining what would happen if we got caught in a snowstorm in the middle of July or drove straight off a cliff somewhere in the Great Plains.

Or accidentally check into an inn run by the mafia, who would immediately sense we didn’t belong and punish us by charging for minibar peanuts.

Or be booted out of our hotel for smuggling our dog in with our luggage.

It would have been easy if he were a chihuahua, but we had a golden retriever. When you sneak that past hotel security (and especially mafiosos), you feel like you can do anything.

And my overthinking has helped on occasion. Once, we locked ourselves out of our hotel room, and it was only my quick suggestion that we go to the front desk to ask for a spare key that got us out of what might potentially have been a troublesome situation.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t such a brilliant suggestion. But you have to consider that we only had my mom’s purse to hide our golden retriever in at that moment, and it was a very tight fit.

Still, the overthinking has harmed more than it has helped. I spend a lot of time worrying about things that just don’t happen.

No one has discovered our golden retriever in our luggage. We’ve never run into a single mafioso in a foreign city. And we don’t have just Cheez-Its but plenty of Goldfish crackers in the trunk, assuming the dog hasn’t eaten them all.

It’s hard being the only one who worries. No one appreciates it more than I do.

I wish I didn’t worry so much. I wish it were easier to be carefree and funny and happy to eat Goldfish on a road trip instead of stressing about the sodium content.

But this is the brain God gave me, with stressful thoughts and all. Perhaps I should be more grateful for it.

Or maybe — perhaps — possibly — oh, heck — I can try to breathe deep and be a little calmer.

After all, I’m on vacation with my family. That’s never stressful at all.

Copyright 2026 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.