What Causes Rumination?
There are many different reasons why you might suffer from rumination, which is, as mentioned, the tendency to repeatedly focus on the causes, circumstances, outcomes, and effects of negative emotions. Its frequency depends in part on your personality and how you view the world and yourself. Some of the leading causes include:
- The belief that rumination can help you understand the problems you’re facing or your emotions
- A history of emotional or physical trauma
- Ongoing struggles with stress factors that are beyond your control
- Personality traits like perfectionism and anxiety
How Does Rumination Harm You?
Rumination itself can be a symptom of certain mental health issues, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). But it also has its own effects on our physical and mental health, including:
- Causing, worsening, and prolonging depression
- Impairing cognitive functioning and emotional processing
- Worsening anxiety, sleep problems, and impulsive behaviors
- Exacerbating the body's response to stress and creating chronic stress
- Increasing the risk of inflammation and health issues (due to stress)
- Increasing the risk of addiction to drugs and alcohol
Tips for Coping with Rumination
Those who suffer from rumination may overly focus on negative past events and blame themselves for them, view current events negatively, and feel hopeless about the future. It’s a cycle that’s very hard to break, but it can be done by stopping the intrusive thoughts, and the sooner you do so, the more you can prevent the problem from worsening. So how do you stop the endless intrusive thoughts? Here are 8 tips to help you:
1. Distract Yourself
It’s okay to distract yourself with activities that may seem “pointless” or unhelpful to you right now, because what you need to remember is that the intrusive thoughts themselves aren’t really leading you to a solution, but are only worsening the state you’re in. You can distract yourself by:
- Talking on the phone with friends and family
- Doing chores around the house
- Watching a movie or series
- Reading books
- Creating art like painting or music
- Exercising
2. Create an Action Plan
If your goal is to truly reach a solution, it will help you a lot to break your thoughts into smaller parts and create an action plan for each one. Write down the thoughts that trouble you on a piece of paper, detail them as much as possible, and be realistic about your expectations of yourself. Once you’ve created an action plan to deal with each thought, carry out the plan in small steps, and don’t move on to the next step until you’re ready for it. The goal of this whole process is to break the negative cycle you’ve entered, and as you start to make progress in addressing your concerns, you’ll feel more in control of your life.
3. Learn to Deal with Experiences You Can’t Change
When writing down your problems, you will realize that there are things you won’t be able to influence much. These are usually the experiences you’ve had that trigger negative thoughts, but you can still address them. For example, if you weren’t accepted for a job you applied for, you can revise your resume and try again, and if you made a mistake in the past that can’t be fixed, you can think about how to avoid it in the future and what it taught you.
4. Change Your Perspective
When you find yourself repeatedly thinking about mistakes you made in the past, it might help to change your perspective and try to think about them in a slightly different way. For example:
- Think about the impact your actions and mistakes had on reality – did they really have an impact?
- Think of a similar event from the past and its consequences – were they as negative as you fear they were in relation to the mistake that preoccupies you?
- Apologize to those who need it – it’s not always easy, but if it’s required, it can free you from the guilt that’s eating away at you.
5. Set New Goals in Life
If your rumination stems from perfectionism, it’s possible that the goals you’ve set for yourself aren’t realistic, which leads to anxiety, feelings of failure, and repeated thoughts about it. Setting unrealistic goals can make you think about why you haven’t achieved them yet and what you need to do to achieve them, but setting more realistic goals will show you that there are indeed things you are capable of achieving, without risking overthinking without the ability to take any action to relieve it.
6. Work on Your Self-Esteem
Many people who suffer from rumination struggle with low self-esteem, and scientists even suggest that there is a connection between low self-esteem and the tendency to ruminate. To improve your self-esteem, you first need to work on your self-confidence, which will help you see yourself in a more positive light. You can click here to learn how to do that.
7. Understand What Triggers Your Rumination
Whenever you find yourself thinking negatively and feeling like you can’t break free from those thoughts, check:
- Where you are
- What time of day it is
- Who you’re with
- What you’re doing
- What happened just before you started thinking about these things
If you’re aware of the factors that triggered your rumination, you can avoid them or know how to prepare for them, reducing the chance of getting stuck in the negative thought cycle again.
8. Talk to a Friend or Seek Professional Help
Some people can get rid of rumination by talking to a good friend who can offer an outside perspective that changes their viewpoint. Others, however, need more professional help, and conversations with a psychologist can help them understand the root of the problem and how to deal with it. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you develop new approaches to dealing with the situations that bother you, and the counseling itself can provide you with opportunities to address your problems in ways you hadn’t thought of and that can benefit you.
