I find myself occasionally in the same rumination pits. There is a clear pattern and a trigger. Then 15 minutes later, in a good case, I will realise that I’m doing it again. By the time the thoughts have their own momentum, like a friction car, they are not as easy to stop immediately; it’s a bit of a process. Over the next 30 minutes my brain wants to cling on to what’s left of them and restart the whole thing again.
One thing is to notice the rumination; another is to stop it. I think most of us have built up some form of addiction to our phones and social media feeds, as they offer a distraction from those thoughts. I think a lot of people, myself included, as I catch myself doing it, grab their phones subconsciously. From an unnoticed unpleasant thought to “Wait, why do I have a phone in my hand and why am I looking at the pointless LinkedIn feed?” in the snap of a finger.
I find myself in that place with particular rumination topics, which I’m slowly working through. It’s a very odd particularity of the topic, though, so I ponder… and there I am in those thoughts again as I write this, walking away from my desk.
As a fairly “analytically” oriented person, I wonder where the line is between learning from the past and overthinking and ruminating. Spending some time thinking about the past to learn and figure out what went wrong is not necessarily bad. I think it’s hard to learn if you don’t do that at all. At some point it becomes a bit obsessive, and the time spent becomes a bit more depressive, involuntary and repetitive. It’s hard to catch the sweet spot.
I do take some pride, I think, in my ability to analyse, learn and try to figure out a solution or approach moving forward, and ideally I would like to keep this ability without the switch to rumination.
Unfortunately, they are two sides of the same coin. It’s the thinking and overthinking pattern in the brain, just caught from a different angle, and I’m not sure at this point whether you can have one without the other.
What I have found works really well for me is taking action. Something useful, but also with some healthy challenge. To give the brain something to tire itself on. To feed it something you can be happy about. For example, writing something down, as I’m doing just now, doing some new DIY, getting the kitchen cleaner than I’ve ever done before, or going for a 3k run. Whatever it might be.
I think rumination comes with slightly depressive undertones by default, which leads to regret. Doing something helps refocus the regret and take the momentum away from the thoughts. Almost like tricking yourself. I’m not sure who came up with the analogy about human experience being like riding an elephant, our subconscious being the said elephant, but this is effectively a trick to distract the elephant for a while whilst making it walk in the direction you want.
The healthy challenge is important as well, as it can’t be too big, but it can’t be frictionless either. Social media doom-scrolling is frictionless. It just puts a pause on your thoughts, but they come back as they were. They aren’t going anywhere. Your brain hasn’t been satisfied, just distracted.
Imagine you are on your elephant in a jungle and you are trying to get to the other side of it. If your elephant gets distracted by a family of monkeys that aren’t going anywhere, and you are standing still, it won’t help much to try to distract it with peanuts, as it will still stand still, and after finishing them the elephant will still want to play with the monkeys. You haven’t moved, and you are slowly conditioning the elephant to wait for the treat. You need to find a way to make the elephant move for long enough that you’re no longer around the monkeys.
A job with a healthily challenging environment is brilliant in a way. It uses the same recurring pattern in thoughts, but it gets directed into action, into doing things, whilst tiring it out in a necessary way. The elephant is moving forward through the jungle (don’t tell it that it’s an endless jungle and there is no end, except for the big one).
I wonder whether people who tend to get analysis paralysis and have to actively talk themselves into a decision are people who ruminate heavily. The brain is doing exactly the same thing; we just call it something different. Taking action helps with both.
Anyway, let’s figure out if I have spent long enough writing this for the recent run of rumination to pass.
Just above average 