How To Stop Ruminating Thoughts
“The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased.”
Sonja Lyubomirsky
What is rumination?
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines rumination as “obsessional thinking involving excessive, repetitive thoughts or themes that interfere with other forms of mental activity.”
Rumination is an obsessive, repetitive thought pattern that is a form of protection from feeling and processing painful feelings. It is usually used as a bargaining chip to attempt to control a situation and get another outcome. While the goal is to help us to escape from our painful feelings, rumination has the opposite effect. It keeps us stuck in painful fear-based mental conceptions and stories instead of in our bodies where true healing can occur. Unhealed grief frequently drives rumination, so to move past this painful defensive pattern, it helps to become willing to face our feelings and uncomfortable physical sensations and grieve that which remains unhealed.
Where does rumination come from?
Rumination has connections with anxiety, depression, and past negative experiences and trauma, and keeps us stuck in negative thought loops. Rumination keeps us stuck in the past, and in feelings of helplessness and fear, and can be a symptom of OCD, anxiety disorder, chronic stress, or complex PTSD. Patterns of rumination can also be a symptom of a nervous system with a limited capacity to handle emotional stress.
Examples of ruminating thoughts/emotional states:
Focusing on frightening “what if” scenarios and possibilities
Replaying traumatic memories in your head over and over
Overthinking and overanalyzing situations
Replaying regretful conversations or situations in your head
Obsessing over past mistakes
Fear-based thoughts about what might happen
Seeing your cup as always being “half-empty”
Feeling more hopeless and a loss of faith that things can improve
The Impact of Rumination on Our Health:
Impairs our ability to properly process emotions and grief
Contributes to toxic stress levels
Creates patterns of inflammation in the body
Aggravates anxiety, fear, and panic
Causes issues with sleep
Exacerbates physical and mental health issues
Prolongs and intensifies depression and feelings of helplessness
Tips that Help With Ruminating Thoughts
Practice grounding exercises.
Since rumination has a lot to do with your nervous system and how you are “wired,” it needs to be addressed through the nervous system to change it.
You can become more grounded by connecting with the present moment through:
Connecting with your senses: name 5 things you see, 4 things you hear, 3 things you can feel, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.
Splash cold water on your face
Walking barefoot in nature
Deep, self-paced breathing (box breathing is wonderful too)
Get moving - take a walk, go on a hike, or do some yoga
2. Don’t take your thoughts so seriously.
You are not your thoughts. Thoughts are just thoughts, and they constantly pass through our mind, like clouds in the sky, and just like clouds, they are ephemeral. The issue is that we take our thoughts to be who we are, and we allow them to dictate our feelings and actions. One thing you can do that can help when you notice ruminating thoughts is to simply label them “thoughts” or “thinking.” This pulls you into the present moment and serves as a reminder that your thoughts are not who you are. They are just visitors passing through.
3. Take action when you can.Since ruminating thoughts are always fear-based, one of the best things we can do to mitigate them is to take focused action. If there is nothing that you can do about the situation, then the best thing to do is to come into your body and allow yourself, a little bit at a time to feel the sensations that are associated with the thoughts you have been having. Take it slow. If you can do something to change the situation, sit down and write out a plan (journaling can help so much, in so many ways) to change things.
4. Allow yourself to be human, and therefore imperfect.
So much of the time, rumination is focused on what we think we did “wrong.” We all make mistakes and have missteps in life…it is part of the human experience. It may be helpful to look at “mistakes” more as opportunities for learning and personal growth than horrific things that we messed up somehow. I always use the example of scientists in a lab performing experiments. They don’t say they “made a mistake” or “messed up” if something doesn’t go well in the lab. Instead, scientists know that this kind of experimentation is part of the learning process, and of seeing what works and what does not work well. With each thing that doesn’t work well, we gain more information and insight into what will, and we can apply this learning to how we do things moving forward. This is how we grow.
5. Thought stopping and reframing.
When you notice limiting and fear-based thoughts, you can imagine a stop sign, which will stop the pattern in its tracks. Once you stop the thoughts, you can then reframe them, for example, if you feel like someone else was mad at you because they seemed irritated when you spoke, you can say to yourself, “Maybe they were having a hard day, and it has nothing to do with me at all.” One other option with thought stopping is to notice the stop sign and then add a helpful and supportive affirmation, like “I am enough, and I love myself.” The idea is to create new neural pathways in your brain that allow for positive, self-supporting thoughts. The more we do this, the more our thoughts and lives can change in positive ways.
When To Seek Help
If your attempts to manage your habits of rumination are not effective after some time, you may want to reach out for help. Since rumination can be a symptom of a burdened nervous system with little to no capacity for stressful emotions, somatic healing can be especially helpful. Somatic healing and trauma recovery coaching offer both bottom-up (body-based) and top-down (cognitive) approaches to healing, making for a well-rounded approach.
Please reach out if I can help you in any way. I offer healing and coaching mentorship programs and signature sessions to assist you on your healing path.
