Don't Overthink It

Don't Overthink It

Anne Bogel is sitting at her kitchen table in Louisville, twenty-seven hours before she is supposed to drive to Nashville to start work on a new book. Her bag is packed, her hotel is booked, the audiobook for the drive is downloaded. There is one problem. A storm front is sweeping across the Southeast, the same stretch of I-65 where her family had been caught in the worst thunderstorm of her life a few weeks earlier, and she has spent the entire week clicking refresh on The Weather Channel hoping the radar will give her a better answer. It does not. Each click makes her more agitated. Her work is not getting done. She knows the spiral is pointless. She keeps clicking anyway. At some point, the absurdity catches up with her. She texts a friend, "Current situation: massively overthinking my trip to Nashville to begin work on a book tentatively titled Don't Overthink It."

That is the opening scene of the book, and it tells you everything about what kind of book this is. Bogel does not write as a recovered overthinker dispensing wisdom from the other side. She writes as someone who still does it, regularly, knowingly, while in the middle of writing a book about how to stop. The whole project is built on the assumption that the reader has been there, will be there again, and is not interested in being lectured by anyone who claims to be cured. What Bogel offers instead is a set of small, practical, gentle tools that she has put together over twenty years of trying to keep her own thinking from running her life.

Don't Overthink It came out in 2020 from Baker Books and went on to become one of those quiet bestsellers that reaches its audience through word of mouth, women's book clubs, and the kind of podcast appearances where the host says, "I read this in one weekend and now my whole desk drawer is organized." Bogel is not a psychologist. She is not a productivity guru. She is a reader, a writer, and a friend, and the book reads exactly like that.