Have you ever found yourself totally overthinking a problem? Maybe you are trying to solve a problem with really complex thinking and when you finally arrive at the solution you found that it was really a simple thing. Has that ever happened to you? No? Me neither. Engineers never overthink things.
Actually that's a lie. Engineers do this ALL THE TIME! I am no exception. Let me tell you a story.
One time I was on a completions team of mostly engineers and we were trying to figure out why the wellhead bolts appeared to be loosening during frac stages. Here's the background: A wellhead contractor would torque the wellhead bolts to spec. Then we'd frac a stage. Then they would torque the bolts again, and find that the bolts would move slightly, indicating that the bolts were not as tight as we thought. This lead to an assumption that the bolts were loosening during the frac stage. In a matter of hours we came up with all kinds of crazy theories about thermal contraction from the cold water pumping through a warm wellhead. We really thought we were onto something big, and kind of scary. Our problem however is that we forgot to ask the stupid questions first.
As it turns out, the bolts were not loosening at all. The appearance of loosening bolts came from the fact that the wellhead contractor had a crew change, which meant the new crew used a different torque wrench that was calibrated slightly different. This means that when they torqued to 700 ft-lbs, they actually got 705 ft-lbs, thus causing the bolts to move a tiny bit. It turns out the there really was no problem at all and the whole thing was giant, meaningless fire drill. The best part of the story is that the person who found the solution was the only guy on the team who was NOT an engineer. Thus he didn't overthink the way that engineers tend to do. Every time I look back on this story I laugh.
Here's my point: start with the simple solutions first. Ask silly questions and rule those out before moving on to more complex theories. This will often help you solve your problem more quickly and you're less likely to feel like an idiot at the end.