The trouble is in learning how to distinguish between unhelpful overthinking and the [right kind].

I think it's necessary to balance thought with awareness of emotions and intuition. To listen to the gut, which is also an intelligent signal, but doesn't translate to verbal thought.

Thinking more and thinking harder often creates an illusion of some kind of progress or of triangulating on the best decision. And this can be the case, but can also lead to a kind of decision paralysis and/or overconfidence in a decision (I thought really hard about this, so it must be better) when we don't actually have enough underlying knowledge to justify the decision.

If we could measure such a thing, I'd love to see a plot of decision accuracy vs. time spent reaching the decision. This will highly depend on one's deeply ingrained biases. I'm overly pessimistic, so thinking more helps me temper my pessimism and reframe when needed, but thinking too much eventually leads me back to where I started.

I find that writing my thoughts is my antidote to this problem. Circular paths of thought are quickly squashed and I have something to visually audit when I ask myself if spending more time thinking will likely enable me to make a better decision.