Rumination
Rumination is the mental habit of repeatedly thinking about specific events within the past or present.
Dwelling on past mistakes.
Replaying other people’s offenses against you.
Obsessing over your flaws and weaknesses.
Replaying events with a goal of alternative outcomes
While it is very easy to slip into, and it is a common response to experiences of loss or trauma, the negative effects can be quite serious; increased risk of depression, low self-esteem, anger issues, insomnia, and substance abuse to name. Fundamentally rumination is a habit that was learned, and can be reduced or even eliminated through increased insight and consistent practice. Individuals can develop structures to let go of the past, and free themselves to live their lives more fully moving forward.
Healthy reflection is productive thinking about negatives in the past, with a goal towards changing thoughts, emotional responses or behaviors. Rumination is unproductive thinking about negatives in the past, with the goal of Changing The Past.
A few more ways to distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy rumination:
Intentionality. Typically, unhealthy rumination is habitual and reflexive—something you just find yourself doing. Healthy reflection, on the other hand, tends to be deliberate and purposeful. Rumination: "I can't help it...I just start thinking about him" Reflection: "I am purposefully taking the time to think about him and what I can learn about myself"
Motivation. Healthy reflection is motivated by a desire to learn and grow and be better. Rumination, on the other hand, is usually motivated by a desire to feel better. Stewing about how wrong someone else was, for example, may make us feel justified in our anger or sadness, but it doesn’t actually accomplish anything productive towards our own future choices.
Timing. After something bad happens—an individual makes a big mistake or someone does something bad to them—it is rational for one's mind to be automatically drawn to it and to think about it a lot. In other words, some amount of overview and analysis is inevitable immediately after the negative event. But continually thinking about an event or interaction, even though it is well in the past, can be an indicator of unhealthy rumination.
It’s important to clearly distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy rumination because it’s very easy to start with the desire to genuinely reflect but then unintentionally slip into unhealthy rumination.
Reflection- "I need to learn something about myself to take forward."
Rumination-"I need to spend time in the past, because I want to go back"
Individuals often feel as though rumination is something that happens to them—like an illness they catch. In reality, rumination is actually a behavior—something one does and, to a large degree, has control over.
This is critical to understand, because the reason a habit of rumination remains prevalent, despite all its negative side effects, is it’s filling some kind of psychological need. In other words, rumination is doing something for a person, even if they are not aware of it.
Here are a few examples of subtle psychological needs which rumination fills:
Need for control. When something bad has happened in the past, we’ve lost someone dear to us or made a grave mistake, we are distressed because we cannot alter that outcome. It’s in the past and done. As a result, individuals very understandably can feel helpless in the face of that kind of finality. But, because helplessness is such an uncomfortable feeling, individuals ruminate to temporarily alleviate the painful feeling of helplessness and to feel more in control. While the sense of control and relief meets a need, it is illusory. But because rumination “works” to temporarily make one feel less helpless, there can be a strong incentive to develop the practice into a habit.
Need for certainty. Similar to the need for control, individuals crave certainty and structure. When an event happens which causes one discomfort and pain, it is natural to want to understand why. But unfortunately, there may not be simple answers to provide that clarity; or even any satisfactory answers at all. Rumination provides the illusion of certainty because it can be perceived as problem-solving and “working on” understanding why.
Need for novelty. Individuals crave novelty and excitement in life and dislike boredom and disengagement. And for all its negative effects, rumination can serve to provide something to think about and stay stimulated. For many individuals who struggle to find meaningful connection with others, purposeful work or stimulation, rumination can be a tempting alternative because it temporarily alleviates the pain of boredom and malaise.
Ruminating about a loss can actually interfere with a healthy grieving process and the ability to accept the loss and move forward.
This might sound counterintuitive, as the common wisdom is that healthy grief is stymied by avoiding processing the loss and our grief. So wouldn’t thinking about it as much as possible be good and valuable?
Not quite. The key distinction here is that a major component of healthy grief is to process not only the loss but also our feelings about the loss—sadness, anger, guilt, etc.
Ruminating about the facts of the loss can actually serve as a way of distracting oneself from the authentic feelings associated with the loss. Although it may look and seem that an individual is working to deal with and manage the loss and grief, they may actually be avoiding the hardest part—the sitting with and Feeling of emotions. In order to actually process the feelings after a loss, it can help to purposefully plan a time to do this formally; to schedule and attempt to experience the emotional on purpose. This serves to teach that, while sometimes painful, emotions aren't to be feared and avoided. By opening to your emotions intentionally, the emotional energy is drained of much of its excessive pain and intensity.
In practicality, this may look like a time on the calendar each day or week which one commits to be present with the experiences of loss and sadness for example, and accept wholeheartedly that the emotions are valid for that time. "From 2pm to 2:20, I will be present with my grief and see if there is anything which I can feel which can teach me." "At 2:20, I will give myself permission to move out of the Grief and Loss space."
Change your relationship with anger and helplessness
Angry rumination is a particular type of rumination where, instead of ruminating on one's own perceived mistakes or flaws, an individual ruminates on the perceived mistakes or flaws of others.
For example:
Replaying examples in your mind of when your spouse was just as critical to you as she says you’re being now
Cataloging all the ways people of a gender are not intelligent, lacking in empathy and understanding, harmful, etc...
There are many downsides to angry rumination, including chronic stress, relationship difficulties, lost productivity, workplace issues, etc. So why is it done? Why is there an impulse to stew over the mistakes and flaws of others?
Because angry is conceptualized as powerful, and anger can feel purposeful and actionable.
It’s a common misconception that anger is solely a negative emotion. It is assumed that because unhealthy expressions of anger can lead to bad decisions and regrettable actions that it must always be negative. And so, it seems logical that we would avoid anger at others in rumination, because it couldn't be tied to anything deemed pleasurable, or that it could be used to feel good about oneself.
But anger at others can also serve to provide a sense of power and agency, and provide contrasts to worries or doubts around one's own sense of inferiority. For example, when criticizing someone else for being an idiot in rumination, the implication for the individual is that they can feel smart. Or when judging someone else for being immoral or unethical, the individual in contrast can feel justified and righteous.
Many individuals get stuck in the habit of angry rumination because they can’t forgive someone who’s wronged them. Years or even decades can go by, and yet, they still can't seem to “let go” and “move on.”
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. As long as a person has a functioning memory, they will always remember painful events from the past. Each time those memories surface, so too can difficult emotions such as anger or sadness can emerge. Forgiveness can’t magically wipe away those difficult feelings. Forgiving someone doesn't mean never having to think about the pain they caused and never experiencing any difficult feelings. Believing otherwise can lead to continual disappointment and increased rumination.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean endorsement. Another common misconception that makes it hard for people to truly forgive and move on is that they assume forgiveness implies that they are somehow okay with the wrong someone did. Forgiveness is not about the other person or what they did; forgiveness is about the individual and how they want to spend their time and energy. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean whitewashing or ignoring harm,
Forgiveness is a process, not a decision. The decision to forgive someone is an important first step but it’s not the end. It’s important to acknowledge that forgiveness is something one continues to do. While it usually gets easier with time, it is ongoing work and effort. It is a process, a journey to make the future more of priority for oneself than the past focus on other's actions, statements, etc...
One way to make the above steps and process a little easier is to clarify the true costs of the rumination habit. Seeing the extent to which suffering from rumination is taking place, can make letting go significantly easier.
Common costs people incur as a result of being stuck in a habit of ruminating:
Chronic stress. While rumination may lead to feeling good in the moment, the long-term effects are often pretty negative. Chronic stress is one of the most serious. Many people who have struggled with rumination experience negative symptoms like muscle tension and aches, fatigue and low energy, or chronic pain.
Insomnia and poor sleep. A very common result of chronic rumination is that it often interferes with sleep. Many people find that their rumination habit often rears its ugly head right as they’re lying down to fall asleep, resulting in hours of lost sleep and stress. If it goes on long enough, this can eventually lead to full-blown insomnia.
Concentration problems and procrastination. Serious consequences of ruminating is that it easily distracts, breaks focus, and kills productivity. Creative work can be sidetracked by a cascade of rumination.
Anxiety. Rumination and worry are really two sides of the same coin. While rumination is overthinking about the past, worry is simply overthinking about the future. This means that it’s actually very easy to begin ruminating about something in the past and then end up worrying about something in the future, which leads to a lot of anxiety.
Depression. Perhaps the most serious result of rumination, depression can be an extremely painful and debilitating experience. For many people, rumination is actually the main engine and driver of their depression; constantly criticizing, judging, and berating oneself for past mistakes and perceived flaws.
Opportunity cost. There are many good things given up through the effort poured into rumination. How many hours of time are wasted ruminating which could have been invested into positive relationships? How many hours or days of lost productivity on meaningful work have resulted from rumination? How many dreams, passions, and goals not realized? How much of the present and future have been sacrificed to the ruminated past?
Retreating into one's mind and “solving problems” in rumination is often more palatable than trying to address challenges in the 3-D world. In other words, rumination can be a form of procrastination from life. Intentionally stepping away from rumination often means doing what needs to be done despite feeling pulled to run the other way, pursuing the changes you want despite feeling afraid or uncomfortable, and taking action to break free from the thoughts on repetition cycle.
Here are some small ways to make a conscious choice away from rumination:
Move. Often the best way to break free of rumination is to simply start moving. Go for a walk, hit the gym, do some pushups, or put on your favorite song and dance. Almost by definition, rumination means being stuck in one's head. And one of the simplest ways to get out of the head is to get into the body.
Make. There’s something almost magical about using creativity and productivity to combat unhealthy mental and emotional states. Bake a batch of cookies, mow the lawn, write a short blog post, fix that leaky faucet in the bedroom, organize a batch of old photos. Just doing something—even something very small—that’s either creative or productive is often a great way to break free.
Meet. We human beings are social creatures. And even the most introverted among us benefit from the right kind of social interaction and connection. Harnessing the power of social connection can be a really useful tool to break free from thought spirals and to re-engage with life. Anything that gives you a sense of genuine connection with important people in your life can be a powerful way to get unstuck from rumination.
