What is Rumination and How Can We Overcome It?
When most of us deal with a disturbing event we may have an initial stress response of where we face stress, anger, regret, or guilt and dwell on it, maybe brood on our emotions, for a day or two but then we learn, and move on — that is healthy adaptation.
Rumination happens when we can’t let go of these negative thoughts — even when we know we should. Dwelling on a traumatic or disturbing event/situation longer than we should stirs up intense feelings of regret. We keep playing that tape over and over in our minds around something that happened recently or in the past. Rumination can be immobilising; we can’t move forward because we have difficulty with our thinking and ability to process. Rumination may even be a predictor of episodes of being depressed or anxious or may lead to us becoming depressed or anxious.
We wonder how we could have prevented it from happening, what we could have done differently, or why we didn’t act when we had the chance. “You’re saying I should aim to live free of regrets?”
Not exactly. While it’s tempting to proclaim that we have no regrets, they’re not inherently bad. It’s how we process our experiences, learn from them and move forward that matters.
Drawing the Line Between Healthy Regret and Rumination
Regret is healthy. It shows compassion and inspiration to change ourselves.
As Brené Brown said in her book Rising Strong, “Regret is a fair but tough teacher.” So true! Regret teaches us lessons and lets us know when we’ve made a mistake. It goes even deeper than that: Regrets also help our brains remember patterns so we can use them to make better decisions in the future.
When we think back to our first teenage romances, for example, we can admit we made some mistakes we regret, right? But we learned from that regret and changed our behavior in future relationships.
Our brains use all types of pain to remind us to avoid danger or harmful situations — both mental and physical. Regret is simply a form of emotional pain.
What Does Rumination Look Like?
Ruminating is the opposite of inner peace. Like a tornado, overwhelming negative thoughts start swirling around in our mind uncontrollably. The negative thoughts often come in cycles, repeating themselves over and over every day — sometimes for years. When we start ruminating, however, regrets aren’t so healthy. They consume us and interfere with our ability to make smart decisions and we get stuck. Instead of using regret as a learning experience to improve ourselves in the future, we become overwhelmed with certain emotions like shame and guilt. We beat ourselves up, lose sleep, lash out in anger, and often fall deep into depression of anxiety related traps. Our sleep suffers because our mind simply can’t calm down. Ruminating causes our quality of life to plummet.We might even experience suicidal thoughts as result of our ruminations.
Ruminating prevents us from processing trauma or certain disturbing experiences so we can use it to grow and improve our resilience.
Months or years of rumination can lead to us digger ourselves into more rigid and unhealthy patterns. Our altered personality may cause rifts in personal relationships, financial trouble, and problems in our personal lives, our relationships or work. Of course, these fresh problems make us feel even more guilt and shame over our actions which keeps feeding into the ruminating cycle. Like anxiety, ruminating prevents healthy problem solving because we’re constantly trying to stick a square peg into a round hole. We simply can’t see the mental trick our brain is playing on us.
Getting to the Source of Our Rumination
To overcome our ruminating cycle, it can help to identify the root cause of our suffering, be it anxiety or depression.
It often helps to take step back and ask what events cause us to start ruminating. Then we have to ask ourselves what makes us respond with chronic regret instead of moving forward.
Sometimes our egos get hurt because we react poorly. Sometimes someone acts against our personal value system. Sometimes we fear self-expression. Other times, we simply see no other way to react.
Once we nail down the “why” behind our ruminating, we can start planning a way to process the experience, develop a new response, learning how to act/behave differently, and find ways of letting go. For some people, identifying the “why” behind their ruminating habit serves as a launchpad to where actionable therapy can begin.
I really like using CBT techniques when noticing myself starting to ruminate. I stop myself and identify any automatic reactions and emotions I’m experiencing so I can move beyond the superficial feelings. Sometimes using simple distraction strategies gives our mind respite to get some perspective later on. It’s helpful to work through CBT techniques within therapy sessions because therapists provide a nice third-party perspective we can’t see for ourselves — even if we don’t feel like it’s working. Unless we deal with the rumination, the side effects of certain situations certain symptoms associated with anxiety and depression will continue.
Practicing Self Forgiveness
Sometimes it helps to learn to rebuild trust in ourselves.
We can’t look at our idealized version of ourselves — the superhero. We have to start looking at ourselves objectively as we are in the moment. From there, we can work towards acceptance, healing, and strengthening our sense of self. We have to acknowledge that screwing up a few times doesn’t dictate our future actions, and it’s not who we are.
We have to dig deep to uncover the shame we hide from ourselves so we can become the person we want to be. The superhero doesn’t exist but we can be a better human than we were yesterday — every day.
Therapy Can Help with Overcoming Rumination
Sometimes we get stuck inside our own thought patterns and it’s hard to find the exit door. Different distraction and mindfulness techniques can help break the cycle of rumination.
Therapy can provide an awesome avenue for establishing mindfulness and self-compassion: two useful strategies to help us sit with emotions and deal with them instead of ruminating.
If you’re feeling stuck in the same unhealthy patterns of regret and guilt, I encourage you to book an appointment. Together we can help dig you out.