Why You Keep Going Over The Same Thoughts Again And Again.

“If only I’d done X instead of Y. My life was so much better back then, how did I end up like this? What’s wrong with me? Why is this happening to me? It’s my fault that I am in this mess, I’m a terrible person and everyone hates me, I should have known better, I’ve messed up my life, things will never change…”

Does this sound like you? You may be ruminating and it will be taking a serious toll on your physical and mental health.

Rumination is when we keep going over and over the same negative thoughts about the past in an endless self-attacking loop.

Rumination is closely linked with depression because (big surprise) a tendency to dwell on the shortcomings of ourselves and our lives is pretty exhausting and upsetting, and drags us down, making us feel powerless.

However, rumination also acts like a kind of cognitive smog; it stops us seeing through the thoughts and it also stops us from seeing the bigger landscape.

We’re unable to process our thoughts and emotions in order to resolve them because all the bandwidth in the brain is taken up with rumination, so we stay stuck and start to think there’s no way out: a perfect recipe for suicidal ideation or depressive lethargy.

In this blog post I offer some ways out of the rumination trap and explore how therapy can help with rumination when it shows up in your life.

Rumination can emerge from life stressors and also perpetuate them. It’s a very easy habit to fall into, especially if we’ve experienced traumatic events along the way or grown up in adverse circumstances.

You may believe that trying to analyse your thoughts by going over and over them is a sure-fire way to come up with a plan and solution to why life sucks. However, rumination is not the same as problem-solving. Because the focus in rumination is “why?, we never arrive at “how”.

“Why am I like this?” (rumination) hooks us in and disempowers us by amplifying self-criticism and threat, whereas “How am I going to change this?” (problem-solving) shifts us into an action-based framework involving a vision of where we want to get to and how we’re going to get there.  

In a nutshell, rumination makes us feel worse whereas problem-solving increases our sense of control and feels better, even if the action we need to take is going to take some time to improve things.

Dr Ed Watkins, Professor of Experimental and Applied Clinical Psychology has developed Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and he identifies a number of reasons why we ruminate:

1. Rumination is a process that is driven by unresolved goals

2. Rumination is habitual

3. Rumination is a form of avoidance

4. Rumination and worry can create a perfect storm with rumination about the past driving worries about the future, completely immobilising us.

Rumination then, has a landscape and a map.

Four steps to crushing rumination in therapy. 

1.      Noticing - First of all we need to spot how, why and when you’re ruminating as this may have become your new “normal”. Rumination to you may have become like water to a fish, and so step one is to get you to notice the psychological water you’re swimming in.   

2.      Functioning - Secondly, we look at the function of rumination for you, it will be serving an avoidant purpose and we need to uncover what that is. Once we know this, we can then develop ways of heading rumination off at the pass by spotting the warning signs and coming up with other ways of dealing with it rather than sinking into it.

3.      Acting – Once we’re aware of rumination and what we may be avoiding we can try out new ways of acting in behavioural experiments to increase our activity levels and also to test out whether rumination helps or hinders us.

4.      Investigating – Finally, we use a number of mindfulness based exercises and visualisations to undermine the sticky, sludgy way that rumination clogs up the brain so that we move from what Watkins describes as the “abstract style” of rumination (“everything is awful and I’m a terrible person”) to a “constructive thinking style” (“everything is workable and I’m willing to make some changes”). This involves building up problem solving skills; ways of shifting your attention when rumination shows up; and work around discovering your values. The aim being for you to learn to let go of stuff that quite frankly rumination has made into a mountain rather than a molehill.

If you suspect that rumination is causing trouble in your life and you’re ready to kick it to the kerb, why not make contact with us at Rhizome Practice where we can offer Rumination-Focused CBT and some other nifty tools to help you  supercharge your life again.

Don’t think about it too long though!