The Squeaky Wheel

How to protect your psychological health, improve your relationships, and enhance your self-esteem.

How We Take Something Bad, and Make It Worse

 

A common mindset may feel natural but damage your mental health.

Published on August 26, 2014 by Guy Winch, Ph.D. in The Squeaky Wheel

Andrzej Wilusz/Shutterstock

When upsetting or distressing things happen to us, we tend to mull them over in our minds. Self-reflecting on problems and experiences in this way helps us make sense of them so we can learn and problem-solve, which in turn allows us to let go and move on.

Only sometimes, we can’t let go.

Many of us get stuck replaying a breakup conversation, stewing over how our boss embarrassed us at a meeting, dwelling on an argument with a friend, or obsessing over the cold shoulder we got from a family member. We replay the distressing scenario in our minds and get upset, angry, or sad all over again each time.

Brooding (or ruminating, to use the psychological term) in this way is highly common but also incredibly misleading. The powerful urge to replay an event to get it out of our system makes us feel as though we’re doing something emotionally healthy. But in fact, we’re doing something that's emotionally damaging, because we’re not getting the thoughts "out of our system" by brooding—we’re embedding them in out minds even more strongly.

Brooding, by nature, is not solution-focused thinking but emotionally-activating thinking—and not in a good way. Besides getting us upset and releasing stress hormones into our bloodstream, brooding has been linked to a host of psychological and physical problems such as alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and cardiovascular disease.

But the biggest danger of self-reflecting in this way is its impact on our long-term mental health. Indeed, the seemingly harmless habit of brooding can put us on the fast track to depression.

This link between brooding and depression (as well as its other risk factors) is not new (read The Seven Hidden Dangers of Brooding and Ruminating), but now a new study breaks down the two mechanisms that contribute most to that link and by doing so actually offers hope to habitual brooders.

Ben Grafton and Colin MacLeod of the University of Western Australia looked at two dimensions of unhealthy rumination—the onset and the persistence of such thoughts. Ruminative onset refers to the likelihood of you falling into brooding when you feel upset, and ruminative persistence refers to the chances that your bout of brooding will continue once it begins. The team found that people who are more likely to slip into a brooding thought pattern when they are upset or triggered, and whose bouts of brooding are most likely to persist, are at significant risk for depression.

The problem is that once brooding has become a habit, such thoughts can pop into our head unbidden, making it all the more difficult to prevent bouts of brooding before they begin. In another new study, Maxime Freton and colleagues in France examined what happens in our brains when we brood. They found that brooders’ struggle to use self-reflection in solution-focused ways was even mirrored in their brain activity.
But the good news is that while it might be hard to prevent brooding from commencing, it is possible to bring a cycle of brooding to a sharp and sudden halt once it does. There are techniques you can use to shorten the duration of ruminations (and by doing so, minimize rumination persistence) which can in turn significantly reduce the risk of depression.

How to Snap Out of a Cycle of Brooding
There are various techniques to disrupt cycles of brooding, but the simplest and most user-friendly is to employ distraction. Your mind cannot focus on two things at once. When it starts to focus on brooding thoughts, making it focus on something else will automatically shut down the brooding process, at least in that moment.

The best distractions, then, are those that require concentration, such as a crossword or game of Sudoku, a memory task (such as recalling the songs in a playlist), or, yes, even Candy Crush. Studies show that a two-minute distraction can be sufficient to disrupt the urge to brood—and restore your mood.

To be clear, if you really want to reduce the risks to your mental and physical health you have to develop a zero tolerance policy for brooding. This is a form of habit change, and changing habits requires mindfulness (to catch the brooding when it begins), determination (to distract yourself even though it’s really tempting to indulge the distressing thought), and persistence (continuing to use distraction whenever you brood until the habit and urges to do so have subsided).

The Seven Hidden Dangers of Brooding and Ruminating

How ruminating and brooding impacts our physical and mental health

It is natural to reflect on painful experiences or worries. By going over such scenes in our minds, we hope to reach new insights or understandings that will reduce our distress and allow us to move on. But this natural process of self-reflection often goes awry such that instead of attaining an emotional release, we simply play the same distressing scenes in our head over and over again, feeling even sadder, angrier, or more agitated, every time we do.

We replay the scenes of a painful breakup and reanalyze every nuance of that last conversation, we go over the play-by-play of the last moments before we were impacted by trauma or loss, we relive all the meetings in which our boss criticized us in front of our colleagues, or play out various versions of an angry confrontation even when it is one we might never have. The urge to ruminate and brood can strike at any moment, taking over our thoughts when we are commuting to work, when we’re in the shower, when we’re making dinner, or when we’re trying to get our work done. Before we know it our mood is ruined and our emotions feel rawer than ever.

The 7 Hidden Dangers of Getting Caught in a Ruminative Cycle

Ruminating is considered a maladaptive form of self-reflection because it offers few new insights and it only intensifies the emotional and psychological distress we already feel. It might seem obvious that such ruminative cycles are emotionally distressing but less apparent are the significant risks they pose to our mental and physical health.
1. Ruminations create a vicious cycle that can easily trap us. The urge to ruminate can feel truly addictive such that the more we ruminate, the more compelled we feel to continue doing so.
2. Rumination can increase our likelihood of becoming depressed, and it can prolong the duration of depressive episodes when we do have them.
3. Rumination is associated with a greater risk of alcohol abuse. We often drink to take the edge of the consistent irritability and sadness that result from our constant brooding.
4. Rumination is also associated with a greater risk of eating disorders. Many of us begin using food to manage the distressing feelings our ruminations elicit.
5. Rumination fosters negative thinking. Spending such a disproportional amount of time focusing on negative and distressing events can color our general perceptions such that we begin to view other aspects of our lives too negatively as well.
6. Rumination fosters impaired problem solving. As an example, one study found that women with ruminative tendencies who found a lump in their breast waited 2 months longer than non-rumintators to schedule a breast exam.
7. Ruminating increases our psychological and physiological stress responses to such a degree that it can actually put as at greater risk for cardiovascular disease.

Breaking the Rumination Cycle
Because of the ‘addictive’ nature of ruminations, the best way to break the compelling allure of our brooding is to go ‘cold turkey’. Specifically, we must try to catch ourselves ruminating as quickly as we can each time, and find ways to distract ourselves so that we occupy our minds with something other than the focus of our ruminations. And to be clear—anything else will do. Whether it’s watching a movie, working out, doing a crossword puzzle, or playing Angry Birds, anything that requires us to concentrate will force us to stop ruminating. Over time, by preventing the rumination from playing out and by not reinforcing its allure, the urge to revisit it will diminish.


Source:

Guy Winch, Ph.D, The Squeaky Wheel, Published 13 June,  www.psychologytoday.com (date accessed 10 September, 2014)