Overthinking is not a thinking problem. The 14th-century Jewish philosopher Gersonides — Levi ben Gershon — argued in his Wars of the Lord that the intellect has a natural endpoint: a point where further analysis produces not clarity but what he called 'circular opinion,' the mind rehearsing positions it has already considered, mistaking repetition for depth. He was writing about cosmology, but he had mapped something exact about the cognitive trap of going around the same loop and calling it deliberation. What Gersonides understood, and what modern decision researchers like Paul Slovic have confirmed in a different vocabulary, is that the feeling of thinking-more is not the same as the function of thinking-better. Past a certain threshold, additional analysis doesn't resolve uncertainty — it amplifies it, because each new angle generates a new doubt that demands its own round. The practical leverage point is not to think less, but to introduce what Gersonides called a 'limiting condition' — a deliberate external constraint that ends the loop not by answering every question, but by making further circling structurally impossible. Decide before Friday ends on something you've been rotating in your head all week. Not because the analysis is complete. Because the loop is.

Name the specific decision you've been 'still thinking about' for more than two weeks. What would you decide right now if you had to answer in thirty seconds?

Drawing from Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Judgment and Decision Research — Gersonides / Levi ben Gershon (Wars of the Lord, 1317–1329) synthesized with Paul Slovic (information overload and preference construction research, 1990s–2000s)