Effective Overthinking Solutions for Adults
Asking Kids for Solutions Can Unstick Your Overthinking Adult Mind
I sat at my desk last Tuesday, surrounded by three separate legal pads, two cold cups of coffee, and a mind that felt like a ball of wet yarn. I was trying to solve a problem. Specifically, I was trying to figure out how to restructure my working hours to avoid afternoon fatigue without sacrificing my morning creative window, while also maintaining a reasonable boundaries-first approach to client communication. I had drawn Venn diagrams. I had charted my energy levels on a scale from one to ten. I had written down words like optimization and synergizing.
My seven-year-old nephew, Leo, walked into the room carrying a half-eaten piece of toast with peanut butter. He stood next to my chair, stared at my scribbled-on pads, and pointed a sticky finger at a messy drawing of a clock.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m trying to figure out how to work without getting tired and grumpy in the afternoon,” I said, trying to distill my existential productivity crisis into terms a child could grasp.
Leo didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even stop chewing. “Just take a nap,” he said. “And if you can’t nap, play outside. When I get grumpy, my teacher makes us run around the big tree until we laugh.”
He turned and walked out, leaving a tiny smudge of peanut butter on the edge of my desk.
I sat there, frozen. I looked at my Venn diagrams. I looked at my scales of energy. Leo’s solution was embarrassingly simple. It was also completely correct. I had spent three hours trying to build a complex bureaucratic system to manage my energy, when the biological reality was that I just needed to move my body or close my eyes. We do this all the time. We build massive, towering structures of thought to solve problems that require nothing more than a shovel.
The Curse of Knowing Too Much
We are educated out of our simplicity. As we grow, we learn that the world is a complicated place, full of rules, structures, and unspoken social contracts. We begin to believe that a simple answer is an uneducated answer. We assume that if a problem makes us feel heavy, the solution must also be heavy.
Psychologists have a term for part of this mental trap. They call it functional fixedness. It is a cognitive bias that limits us to using an object or a concept only in the way it is traditionally used. If we see a hammer, we only see a tool for driving nails. We forget it can also be a weight, a lever, or a piece of art.
Children do not suffer from functional fixedness. To a four-year-old, a cardboard box is not a container for shipping a blender. It is a spaceship. It is a fort. It is a cave where a friendly dragon lives. They see the world before the labels have been dried and glued onto everything.
[ The Adult Mind ]
│
┌─────────────┴─────────────┐
▼ ▼
Functional Fixedness Over-Sophistication
(Only seeing one use) (Complexifying simplicity)
│ │
└─────────────┬─────────────┘
▼
[ Mental Static ]
When we ask a child for advice, we are not asking for technical expertise. We are asking to borrow their fresh eyes. We are asking them to look at our complicated life-scaffolding and tell us which parts are actually holding up the roof, and which parts are just decorative dust-catchers.
We think in straight lines because we have been trained to follow paths. Children run across the grass because they do not care about the gravel walkway. They see the shortest distance between where they are and where they want to be.
The Fear of the Simple Truth
Why do we resist the simple answer? We resist it because simple answers demand immediate action.
If my problem is that I am unhappy in my current job, a complex adult analysis allows me to draw up five-year career projection maps, schedule coffee dates with industry mentors, and analyze the fluctuating trends of the market. This makes me feel incredibly busy. It makes me feel smart. Most importantly, it protects me from having to make a scary choice today.
A child looks at the same situation and asks a terrifyingly direct question: “Why do you go to a place that makes you sad?”
Adult Solution Child's Solution
┌──────────────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐
│ - 5-Year Career Map │ │ │
│ - Market Trend Analysis│ VS. │ "Why go to a place │
│ - Networking Coffee │ │ that sad-makers?"│
│ - Pro/Con Spreadsheets│ │ │
└──────────────────────┘ └────────────────────┘
│ │
▼ ▼
[ Safe Delaying ] [ Scary Action ]
That question hurts. It strips away all the intellectual armor we use to protect ourselves from change. The child’s mind operates on a basic, binary emotional scale: Is this good or is this bad? Does this bring joy or does this bring pain?
We have spent decades learning to tolerate slow, low-grade pain in the name of maturity. We call it compromise. We call it being realistic. Sometimes, though, we use those words as shields to hide our fear of walking away from things that are actively breaking us.
Three Questions to Ask a Kid When Your Brain Is Spinning
You do not need to have children of your own to use this way of thinking. You can talk to a niece, a nephew, a neighbor’s kid, or even just look back at your own memories of being seven years old. When you find yourself trapped in a loop of endless analysis, try running your problem through these three childhood filters.
“What would we do if we weren’t allowed to worry?”
Adults are professional worry-merchants. We construct elaborate disaster scenarios, projecting our anxieties weeks, months, or years into a future that does not exist yet. We don’t just solve the problem in front of us; we try to solve every potential problem that might stem from our solution.
If you ask a child what to do when you are scared of trying something new, they will usually tell you to just try it anyway, or to do it with a friend. They do not calculate the social cost of failure because they have not yet been taught that failure is a permanent stain on their identity. To a child, falling off a bicycle is just the clumsy prelude to riding it.
When you remove the weight of social consequence, the right path usually becomes obvious. We often know exactly what we want to do; we are just looking for a way to do it that guarantees nobody will ever judge us. That guarantee does not exist. The child knows this implicitly, which is why they keep climbing the monkey bars even after scraping their knees.
“Can we draw a picture of the problem?”
We love our words. We love our jargon. We use complicated language to obscure simple, uncomfortable realities. We say we are “re-evaluating our relational alignment” when we really mean we are lonely and want our partner to talk to us more.
If you ask a child to help you with a problem, try asking them to draw it with you. Or try to draw it yourself using only basic shapes and colors.
If you try to draw a picture of a toxic work environment, you might draw a giant grey cloud over a small, sad stick figure. If you try to draw your financial stress, you might draw a mountain of red scribbles falling on your house.
This exercise sounds silly, but it forces us to bypass the linguistic filters of our prefrontal cortex. It forces us to look at the emotional weight of our circumstances. You cannot hide behind professional jargon when you are holding a blue crayon. You have to face the raw feeling of what you are dealing with.
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ [ Sophisticated Jargon ] │
│ "We are experiencing a lack │
│ of collaborative synergy..." │
└───────────────┬───────────────┘
│
(The Crayon Test)
│
▼
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ [ The Reality ] │
│ *Drawing of a big grey kid │
│ sitting alone in a box* │
└───────────────────────────────┘
“If we could fix this with cardboard and tape, what would we build?”
This is about the beauty of constraints. Adults believe that big problems require expensive, high-tech, or highly structured solutions. We buy productivity apps to fix our lack of focus. We buy expensive organizational systems to fix our cluttered closets. We spend money and time trying to purchase discipline.
A child has no budget. They have no access to specialized tools. If they want to build a castle, they have to use couch cushions and blankets. If they want to play a game, they have to make up the rules on the fly using whatever toys are scattered on the rug.
This resourcefulness is something we lose when we start relying on money and systems to solve our internal struggles. When we ask how we would fix a problem using only the simplest, most immediate tools available to us, we find that the best solutions are usually free. We do not need a new app. We need to put our phone in the other room. We do not need an expensive gym membership. We need to walk down the street.
The Art of Intellectual Regression
Let us be clear: this is not about being childish. It is about being childlike.
There is a vast difference between the two. To be childish is to avoid responsibility, to throw tantrums when we do not get our way, and to refuse to see other people’s perspectives. To be childlike, however, is to maintain a sense of wonder, to remain open to simple truths, and to possess the humility to admit when we are making things harder than they need to be.
We carry a great deal of pride in our intelligence. We have degrees, jobs, mortgages, and titles. We want our lives to look like they were designed by a master architect. But sometimes, the architect gets so caught up in the blueprints that they forget how to build a comfortable room to sit in.
[ Intellectual Pride ]
│
┌──────────────┴──────────────┐
▼ ▼
Childishness Childlikeness
(Escaping Reality) (Clarity of Reality)
│ │
▼ ▼
*Avoiding Duty* *Solving Simply*
The next time your mind is running in circles, find a child. If you do not have one nearby, close your eyes and remember yourself at seven years old. Ask that younger version of yourself what they would think of your current dilemma.
They would probably tell you to stop worrying so much about what other people think. They would tell you to eat something good, to go run around outside until you laugh, and to stop looking at that glowing rectangle in your hand.
They would tell you that the monster under the bed isn’t real, and that the only way to find out what is in the dark room is to turn on the light.
And they would be right.
