FILE: ARCH-NUM-007  /  STATUS: PUBLISHED

    THE NUMBERS / THE STACKS

    Overthinking statistics, each one read in its source

    Pick a number, open its source, and check it yourself. Every number below links to the text it came from.

    LAST CHECKED: OCTOBER 10, 2026

    Every number here was read in its source on October 8, 2026, and links to it.

    Each number below was read at source. We opened each paper or page on October 8, 2026. A number stayed only if it was in that text.

    Counts are the source's own. We did not round, convert or combine them. Where a figure is widely repeated and we found no study behind it, this page says so.

    Worry, worldwide

    1. 39%

      Share of adults worldwide with a lot of worry for much of the previous day, in 2024.

      State of the World's Emotional Health Report. Gallup, 2025. Open the page

    2. five points

      How much higher that worry figure was than in 2014.

      State of the World's Emotional Health Report. Gallup, 2025. Open the page

    A wandering mind

    1. 46.9 percent

      Share of waking hours people spent thinking about something other than what they were doing.

      Wandering mind not a happy mind. Harvard Gazette, 2010. Open the page Reports: Killingsworth and Gilbert's study in Science, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind, whose abstract we read gives the finding without the number.

    2. 2,250

      Volunteers a phone app contacted at random moments to ask what they were doing and thinking.

      Wandering mind not a happy mind. Harvard Gazette, 2010. Open the page Reports: Killingsworth and Gilbert's study in Science, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind, whose abstract we read gives the finding without the number.

    3. 250,000

      Moments of thought, feeling and action the app gathered from them.

      Wandering mind not a happy mind. Harvard Gazette, 2010. Open the page Reports: Killingsworth and Gilbert's study in Science, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind, whose abstract we read gives the finding without the number.

    How many thoughts a day

    1. over six thousand

      Daily thoughts the authors estimated, from about 6.5 shifts of brain state a minute.

      Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism. Tseng and Poppenk, 2020. Nature Communications. Open the paper

    2. 184

      People whose brain scans that estimate rests on.

      Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism. Tseng and Poppenk, 2020. Nature Communications. Open the paper

    3. about 6,200

      Thoughts a day, as the university's news story puts the same estimate.

      Discovery of 'thought worms' opens window to the mind. Queen's Gazette, Queen's University, 2020. Open the page

    Who ruminates

    1. d = .24

      Average gap between women and men on rumination, across 59 studies of 14,321 adults. Women scored a little higher; the effect is small.

      Gender differences in rumination: A meta-analysis. Johnson and Whisman, 2013. Personality and Individual Differences. Open the paper

    Numbers that get repeated

    • “We have 60,000 thoughts a day, and 80% of them are negative”

      We could not find a study behind this figure. The one measured estimate we read puts the count at over six thousand a day. It says nothing about how many are negative.

      Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism. Tseng and Poppenk, 2020. Nature Communications. Open the paper

    • “85% of what we worry about never happens”

      We could not find a study behind this figure in the records we read.

    • “73% of 25 to 35 year-olds are overthinkers”

      We could not find a study behind this figure in the records we read. The page it is credited to could not be opened.

    How we checked

    A runner opened each source on October 8, 2026, and saved what it read. A number appears here only if it sits in that saved text, word for word.

    The link beside each number opens the source, so you can check it yourself. Rumination means going over the same thought again and again.

    The pattern behind it

    Overthinking is not one of the nine patterns. It shows up most often inside one of them. The Perfectionism Trap is the pattern of not finishing what is not perfect.

    The draft gets rewritten in your head long before it reaches the page. The numbers above say how common a wandering, worried mind is. They do not say why yours wanders.

    Catch is the first move. Catch means you feel the body signal and name the pattern before it becomes the behavior.

    The body signal is what you feel in your body as the pattern starts. It might be a held breath as the same thought comes round again.

    The free Crash Course, short lessons on your pattern, starts by naming it.

    HOW TO CITE THIS PAGE

    The Archivist Method (2026). Overthinking statistics, each one read in its source. The Numbers. https://thearchivistmethod.com/statistics/overthinking