We all have experiences that we find hard to let go of. Whether you have repetitive thoughts about a relationship that didn’t work out, replay old family arguments or get stuck on times you felt humiliated in front of your peers, you can develop a habit of ruminating.
What is rumination, exactly? You can think of the unhealthy relative of self-reflection. Instead of promoting growth and self-knowledge, rumination involves being stuck in a negative thinking cycle.
Rather than letting go of past difficulties, you relive them and torture yourself about what you might have done differently.
If you’re a ruminator, however, it is possible to change. In this article, we’ll explore the details of what rumination involves.
We’ll go through six techniques that can help you develop more productive thinking patterns.
With time and effort, you can become more focused, more positive, and more able to embrace new experiences.
Let’s start by fleshing out the concept of rumination. Ruminative thoughts can be about virtually anything in life, though they’re often centered around things that matter to you a great deal.
Such as relationships, friendships, career, and how others perceive you. Healthy thinking does involve acknowledging the importance of these things, and everyone spends at least some time thinking about their mistakes.
However, obsessive rumination is when you really struggle to let things go and devote large amounts of attention and energy to repetitive thoughts.
And this kind of rumination comes at a cost – psychological research shows that those who ruminate are more likely to struggle with mental health issues like anxiety, depression, substance misuse, PTSD, and eating disorders.
Why exactly do we have repetitive thoughts? One of the most common reasons is trying to gain important insights into your experiences or some problem you’ve had. In addition, those who have been through physical or emotional trauma in the past tend to ruminate on new difficulties they encounter.
Regardless of why you ruminate, there are two main aspects to the process. We’ll look at both to help you understand why rumination can be so damaging.
Dwelling on past mistakes is a huge part of ruminating. For some people, this involves effectively relieving painful memories in vivid detail.
You might see yourself falling in front of a laughing crowd at school, being dumped by someone you love, or freezing during a job interview.
When you ruminate, these memories can feel excruciatingly real, as though they have just happened. For others, dwelling on past mistakes is more about combing through every last detail, trying to figure out what would have made things go well.
While it’s always good to try and learn lessons in negative and difficult circumstances, rumination takes this so far that you never feel able to move on.
You may entertain an endless parade of “what if”s, desperately longing for a world in which you have a chance to repeat some situation without making mistakes.
However, the past is the past, and no amount of rumination can change this. Once you’ve understood what has happened and drawn the main life lessons, it’s healthy to let go of that experience.
In the next section, we’ll look at how you can begin to move on from the past and focus more attention on the future.
Overthinking is the second key aspect of rumination. While this can be directed toward the past, it can also focus on the future and on imagined mistakes you have yet to make.
You may tell yourself that you’re just thinking ahead, trying to plan so that your life goes well.
However, if you spend hours feeling anxious and stressed as you imagine potential disasters, you’ve gone past the healthy planning stage and vaulted straight into self-destructive rumination.
Part of rumination involves a subconscious belief that if you think about a situation enough, you can control the outcome.
In truth, however, you can’t control other people, and nor can you plan for the influence of luck.
To get the most out of life, it’s vital to learn how to live in the present – and truly enjoy the present.
That’s the other goal that we’ll set when working through our six anti-rumination techniques.
Now that you understand what it looks like when you ruminate, you should have a good sense of whether this is a problem for you.
For example, perhaps you struggle with overcoming rumination in all areas of life, or maybe there’s one specific context (e.g., dating or work) in which you exhaust yourself by overthinking.
Regardless, the following six techniques will help you develop more balanced, positive ways of thinking. If you want to learn how to stop ruminating anxiety, begin the process of putting these into practice today.
First, try to come up with a set of things that you can do when you catch yourself ruminating excessively.
These should be things that are especially effective at distracting you.
Shifting to a physical mode can be particularly helpful, so try and add some form of exercise to your list of distractions.
Listening to music can also help to shift your mood, as can immersing yourself in a fictional world via books, movies, or TV shows.
As long as your chosen distraction is healthy and not-self destructive, you can repeatedly come back to it to stop yourself from ruminating.
Whether your rumination is about the past or the future, there are probably some things you can do to facilitate positive developments related to the theme of your ruminations.
So, when you find yourself over-thinking, make a list of actions that will help you improve your life.
For example, suppose you’re ruminating on a bad job interview.
What are three things you can do to boost your interview performance?
You might add practice interviews to your list, as well as learning pre-interview techniques to beat anxiety.
The key idea is to turn your unproductive ruminations into points for positive change and action.
Another key technique involves actively questioning the things you think when you’re in a ruminating loop.
Often, these thoughts will become unproductive or paranoid, and if you don’t exercise any control then your thinking can easily spin out of control.
For example, suppose you’re ruminating about a relationship that failed, and you begin to think about how you were to blame.
You might end up telling yourself you’ll never have a successful relationship.
Catch yourself, and pull back to a wider perspective. Ask yourself what competing evidence there is that might disprove your ruminations. Perhaps you need to understand love languages?
Choose to turn your attention toward an entirely different kind of action. In particular, you can shift focus to broader, unrelated life goals and start thinking about how to accomplish those.
For example, suppose you’re ruminating about an argument with a family member. You start replaying all their unkind words and how it felt to hear them.
One technique for dealing with this is to consciously shift focus to a different goal, such as developing your career.
Could you make a new website? Search for new networking events?
This move stops rumination in its tracks.
Mindfulness and mindful meditation practices are wonderful resources when you struggle with habitual rumination.
Making a habit of doing a mindfulness exercise every day actually changes your brain over time, making you better at self-regulating negative emotions.
You can also choose to do a mindfulness exercise any time you feel your thoughts spinning out of control.
There are lots of exercises you can learn, but a simple breathing exercise is a great way to center yourself.
Sit comfortably and quietly for 10 minutes, simply focusing on your breathing. Inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. When you get distracted, gently redirect your attention back to your breath.
Finally, most of us have particular types of experiences that trigger our ruminations.
Try to figure out and note down your own triggers, so you can know when you’ll likely have to deploy one of the above strategies.
Be aware, too, that you may have different triggers for different topics.
For example, in personal relationships, your rumination triggers might be feeling disrespected or undervalued.
Meanwhile, at work, perhaps you ruminate most often when you feel someone outperforms you. Ask yourself about the roots of these triggers, too.
The more you understand why you think the way you do, the better equipped you’ll be to adapt it.
Hopefully, reading through the above techniques has given you some confidence in your ability to stop ruminating. We all go through times when we overthink or struggle to let go of the past – you’re not alone.
However, there are proactive and healthy things you can do in order to stop yourself from becoming stuck in a negative spiral, and it’s important that you do so.
While it requires patience and dedication, time is a great healer, especially when it comes to the urge to ruminate on old wounds.
The more you work to improve yourself, look after yourself, and develop your life, the more distance you create between the person who experienced those wounds and who you are now.
In addition, the more you develop your confidence and your skills, the less you’ll feel the need to overthink. You’ll come to trust that you can handle whatever life throws at you, even if you haven’t prepared for it.
Through techniques like meditation and mindfulness, you’ll also start to see and enjoy the benefits of truly living in the present moment.
However, don’t beat yourself up if you can’t stop ruminating overnight. It takes sustained effort in order to change an entrenched habit, and it will be easier some days than others.
If it helps, you can start out by allowing yourself an allotted “daily rumination time”. For example, set 15 minutes to think about the subject as much as you want, and firmly stick to that limit.
Then, work to reduce it every few days. You will be surprised by how unappealing ruminating becomes, once you dedicate space for it. After all, the part of your mind that ruminates feeds on your anxiety and doubts, not on your self-compassion.
You now have a set of tools for tackling the urge to ruminate, and an understanding of where this urge comes from.
But what if you’re really struggling to live in the present moment? If you feel like you could use some extra support and motivation, self-hypnosis could give you just the Kickstarter you need to begin your new life of mindful, healthy thinking.
Our “Stop Overthinking Hypnosis” program can help you relax your mind and slow your thoughts, no matter what you tend to focus on.
When you’re worried, frustrated, and prone to obsessive thinking loops, these sessions bypass your conscious defenses and get to the heart of the subconscious anxieties that are holding you back.
Self-hypnosis is entirely voluntary – it can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Instead, it helps give you the extra boost you need to do something you already desire.
Further, it provides you with a deep sense of relaxation that stops overthinking in its tracks. So, if you want to stop the habit of obsessing over your past mistakes and frantically trying to predict the future, this self-hypnosis program could be the perfect solution.