Rumination: How to Disrupt Obsessive Thoughts | Being Well Podcast

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back it's normal and healthy for us to try to process our experiences emotionally but sometimes during that processing process something strange happens and we just get stuck if you find yourself returning to the same painful memory current anxiety or disturbing thought over and over and over again you might be experiencing something known as rumination rumination is the habit of obsessive thinking and it occurs when you just can't move on from something most people have experienced this at some point and just speaking personally for a moment here it's one of the most frustrating and frustratingly common psychological experiences we are just haunted by this thought that we can't get free of and part of what makes it so frustrating is that all of this thinking is often not really getting us anywhere so today we're going to be exploring rumination and obsessive thinking we'll cover where it comes from and how we can break away from those thought black holes that tend to suck us in so to help me do that i'm joined today as usual by dr rick hansen rick is a clinical psychologist he's a best-selling author and he's also my dad so dad how are you doing today i'm doing great and i'm thrilled about this topic it's a wonderful one it's deep it's also a portal into the basement of the mind what's going on there so i'm looking forward to taking the elevator down including into the murky depths love that great context for it before we get started with today's episode i do want to give people a couple of quick reminders here first of all if you've been listening to the podcast for a while and you've been enjoying it we'd really appreciate it if you would subscribe to it through whatever podcast player you happen to be listening to it on right now then second if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple dollars a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return this includes things like transcripts of the episodes ad-free versions of our episodes and expanded show notes where i dive into the research that goes into everything that we produce and for this episode there was quite a bit of research so dad to kind of set us up here how do you think about rumination and what are some of the key distinctions in this territory it helps me to start with the origin of the word which comes from ruminants in other words those cows and other large land mammals that have i believe cloven hooves who chew their cut and are doing so to slowly maturely digest things like grass that have a high i guess cellulose and fiber content and actually processing them so when we're ruminating in effect we're chewing our mental cud with a connotation and emphasis on negative processes so just like you said when we're going over something it could be a conversation we had with somebody it could be something we did it could be something we wish would happen when we go over it again and again and again tinged with negativity that's rumination and in the spectrum of rumination people can be aware of a degree of how much there is deliberate engagement with the material and how much is it a matter of the mind is wandering drawn into negative loops sort of into the gravitational field of these you know nasty planets that we're sucked into um it's one thing to have your mind wondering including in positive ways you're just sort of daydreaming there is evidence that the more that people tend to wander the more they tend to get sucked into negative preoccupations thus rumination so that's my quick summary and i'm sure we'll get into a lot of details about nuances and especially what to do about it yeah my version of this is what do i think about in the shower and it's that version of it where your brain is just sort of turned off you're thinking about whatever you're thinking about and then something pulls your attention and often for me it gets pulled by a frustration a negative experience a conversation i had with somebody else that didn't go the way that i wanted to and you do some normal mental processing about it you have the conversation in the shower with the imagined person that you've had 10 times where you say everything that you wanted to say but you'd never actually say it to them in real life and there are perfectly healthy and normal levels of that and then there are levels of it where it starts to interfere with our ability to think about other things our ability to enjoy some other aspect of life because the thoughts are so negative and so pervasive and in terms of defining it the best language that i've personally found comes from the buddhist tradition where there is this phrase from one of the the buddhist sutas that includes the line invade the mind and remain talking about both negative experiences and positive experiences and that just that phrase it invaded the mind and remained i think is a great encapsulation of rumination oh it's beautifully said yeah i think the crux feature of rumination is that it's not productive and the difference between human rumination and bovine rumination is that the cows actually digest what they're ruminating on but for us we don't digest it we just keep doing laps around the rumination track and in those laps we're actually unfortunately tending to reinforce that negative material through the negativity bias of the brain and just natural processes when we're in the simulator sometimes i call the ruminator which as you'll talk more about i'm sure later what typically involves the default mode network uh when we're doing uh laps around the track there in the ruminator those neurons are firing together and tending to wire together as well so if the key for me is is the mental preoccupation productive and in the sense that either we're releasing material we're mindfully aware of it we're we're experiencing it out we're releasing it but actually rumination doesn't tend to release emotionally negative material it reinforces it and in some ways it often is a way to defend against really really feeling it so it's not like you're allowing it in your mind in big spacious field of awareness associating spacious awareness to it and then helping it gradually ease out the door you're not doing that so it's not productive in that sense and also typically in rumination there's not effective problem solving it's not like we're working our way to a good solution that we believe in including just accepting some kind of loss and finding a way to live in peace nonetheless so right there we have not productive in terms of releasing negative emotion and second not productive in terms of problem solving these are for me two principle characteristics of problematic rumination so if rumination isn't doing anything for us we're it's not helping us uh effectively solve a problem and it's not helping us release painful feelings associated with that problem if it causes us discomfort if it doesn't really teach us anything why do we ruminate it's a really interesting question people have banged away at this and i want to distinguish rumination from mind wandering in general wandering mind and the operations of the default mode network in general can often have some positive features there's research that shows it's a way to somewhat deepen life learning as we kind of go over things again it sort of clears the memory systems you know releases the clutter and also gives us a break from effortful task doing as we just sort of chill out and kind of also disengage from the stream in the world so there you are wandering mind that's fine you know that probably has some benefit negative rumination i don't see much evolved benefit from it i think it's just an unfortunate capability that mice cats and monkeys do not have they don't ruminate they're in the present they're not dwelling in the past or worrying about a future and i think that uh it doesn't have much of a function to negatively ruminate it doesn't really have a function and still we kind of sort of do it yeah yeah you're totally right it and maybe i should have been a little bit more precise with my language because i'm gonna i'm gonna offer a theory here that other other better educated and psychology people than me have offered so this is not an original idea i just want to be clear about that rumination is just another coping behavior in a lot of ways psychologically it's a behavior that we perform in response to stress and i do think that they're just i'm not sure what exactly the right language to use here is some design flaws that are overall you know we're not perfectly evolved animals we've just got some features that are problematic but i do think that we can look at it and go okay what are we getting out of this if anything and i do think that anxiety release is a great example of something that some people do feel like they're getting out of rumination because it gives us the feeling that we're dealing with a problem it gives us the feeling that we're preparing ourselves for some future event that could be really painful speaking as a sex fear point in the endogram big time natural propensity for rumination i would say that i've worked on a lot if you chew on something enough you feel like you can better address the issue in the future and one of the things about rumination to be very careful with is that i think it's quite a seductive experience because it makes you feel like you're getting somewhere when you're really not getting anywhere at all so that's why i think that people engage with that it can feel productive even if it's not actually productive i'm really glad you said that for us and i was um interestingly i think i was trying to correct or balance my somewhat evolutionarily functional kind of frame and you're totally right i i can say for myself that there are two functions in rumination that i'm aware of when i do it which is one it's a way to avoid feeling my feelings i'm running the loop i'm seeing the movie i'm cognitively caught up typically in a sense of a case against great cognitive bypassing techniques yeah my goodness and how they did me dirt and what ought to happen and why didn't other people help me more those failed protectors where a lot of the action is in our relationships including in situations that are traumatic so it's a way to avoid just feeling what i'm feeling and second depending on the type of rumination particularly if it's related to loss it can be a way to help oneself feel that you are still in relationship with the situation the group or the individual that there's been a loss of it's a way to maintain a kind of attachment let's say there's been a rift an estrangement in our family system we did a whole episode on this not at all uncommon um and to ruminate about to obsess about to keep dwelling in the last time you talked with that person or the thing they said when they broke contact with you or the letter they wrote you and you're still thinking what letter to write back even though several years have already gone by i can speak from some personal experience here in a way it's a way to stay in contact with the internalized other and i want to be careful and i'm glad you let me slow down because there are ways in which grieving and mourning in natural not pathological even if painful ways even over months and years can look a little like negative rumination but i want to call out that i don't think of them in that way i think of that as a metabolic process to go back to healthy rumination we should do an episode what we can learn from the cows that's right i mean our stress episode was basically what we could learn from the zebras so might as well include the cows in this too why not yes and the ultimate fruits if you will of their bovine rumination is fuel that many people use to light fires so you know there's a good result here right not too bad [Laughter] what is i never thought that cow patties were going to make an appearance on this podcast dad but i'm glad we got there yeah and don't forget psilocybin mushrooms grow out of cow patties we're just not going to go down that road any farther right now [Music] back to river yes yeah let's see if we can how would you kind of sort out or distinguish between problematic rumination and the natural processes of grieving and mourning this is one of those things where i think you kind of know it when you see it um and i want to be a little careful about that because people can absolutely get trapped in negative thought cycles that they don't recognize as negative and problematic but i think that for most people you know if you've spent not just day three but week three month three year three chewing on the same idea and you just haven't made any progress so for me that idea of have you made some progress around this is a very central question to ask yourself are you thinking different thoughts today than you were three months ago and if the answer is no that is a big red flag does it feel like there's a an opening a gentling or releasing which i would think are characteristics of what i'll call healthy uh grieving and mourning even over years there's a softness in it rumination feels contracted there's a contracting around what we're eliminating about and the sense of self in the rumination can also feel contracted and there and there's often a sense that the the self in the rumination is has been mistreated and has grievances whereas i think a general what we could call healthy grieving natural grieving natural morning it's not so much around being mistreated oneself uh nor is there typically a strong case about the way the world ought to be that we're getting caught up in internally including with a certain righteousness one other feature of certain kinds of rumination especially obsessive thinking is what's called magical thinking it's this notion going back to your question of functions that sometimes people believe that if they do something repetitively in their mind like keep saying a thing over and over and over again or if they are counting the cracks in the sidewalk that they walk over there's this kind of belief that that this behavior including mental behavior as well as more overt actionable behaviors like an overt compulsion are warding off disasters of various kinds and so it goes to the theme also of loss of autonomy when you're caught up in magical thinking and people can be aware of what do you think is there a notion that if you stop ruminating what might happen what if you could just stop ruminating what's the fear and right there you might notice that within a second or two there's something that pops up like whoa whoa well that thing goes to the function of rumination and what you're maybe trying to prevent or ward off through ruminating let's spend a little bit of time here talking about where rumination comes from in people because as i said a little bit earlier i definitely feel propensity for rumination inside of myself that maybe some other people don't have as much and sorting out the roots of this is always a bit complicated and we can say with some confidence that rumination comes from a combination of nature and nurture so whatever goes into making us biologically who we are combined with the experiences that we have out in the world and one thing that we do know from research is that people who have experienced a lot of stressful life events stuff has gone on in your life that's put some additional pressure on you tend to ruminate more and really really really interestingly the presence or absence of a ruminatory process in the brain is a major mediator of whether or not those stressful life events tend to lead to long-term anxiety and depression and here's where we get into a little bit of a complex chicken in the egg thing because rumination is a major feature of some of the most common psychological challenges that people have anxiety disorders depression ocd ptsd rumination features and all of these things and you start to ask yourself some questions about okay is the rumination causing the anxiety is the anxiety causing the rumination it gets very complicated but one of the things that we are pretty confident in is that when stressful things happen to us if we're able to avoid ruminating about them there's some reason to believe that that can protect us from developing more long-term issues so finding ways to decrease rumination after something painful happens to us is really really important for our long-term psychological health well i hope you keep going i'm reminded of a saying attributed to sochni rinpoche think the same thought again and again that's fine but 10 is enough ted is enough yeah absolutely so with that as some context uh let's talk about how rumination functions in the brain a little bit because we've already alluded to this earlier on in the episode and cognitively with some exceptions of course rumination as near as we can tell is based largely on processes that occur as part of the default mode network that's one of the major networks in the brain and we talked about the default mode network a lot during our recent episode with judd brewer on the self so if you have already listened to that one you got a nice crash course and everything that that network does but a major role that it has is what we sometimes call wakeful rest which is basically all of the time where you're awake and you're staring off into space and you're daydreaming you're imagining possibilities your mind is wandering you're not applying top-down focused deliberate attention and we can think of it as the autopilot network of the brain and another way to think about it is that it's our distraction network because in a healthy brain it's really suppressed when somebody is performing an intention demanding task so more attention less default mode network less rumination and interestingly many psychological disorders like schizophrenia are associated with an over activation of the default mode network so more default mode network more rumination more of these problems and in depression in particular there's some evidence that a hyperactivity of that part of the brain is related to these negative forms of rumination that we're focusing on all of that spiel aside if you just want one bullet point out of all of this one way that we can decrease rumination is by hello leaning on practices that tend to deactivate that part of the brain and so we can learn a lot from some of the fmri imaging studies and such that are done on the brain and we can go okay what turns down the volume knob on the default mode network and how can we do that deliberately if we're trying to decrease rumination what a great setup so thank you dad i have one that was a lot of research went into that five minutes that was awesome well thank you thank you really now in terms of what to do about it you know i have a list of 17 items you know 12 grid but i'll try to not do that okay maybe we'll just go back and forth or something yeah i love that so uh first i'll just make a general observation that for those who do any kind of meditation essentially what that's a lot about is recognizing when you're sucked into the simulator the default mode network and you're swept along with various mini movies and when you're not and so much of what meditation is about especially sort of fundamental mindfulness meditation is about recognizing the early hooks the allure of the little trains they want to get you to hop on board and then letting them go on by because if you were to hop on board suddenly or you'd be in the ruminator you'd be in the default mode network an example i've often used is there you are watching your breath breath breath shopping list we need more milk i better get some milk on the way home we need more money my partner needs to make more money right and it's that coming back very very common yeah yep that's the training of attention is very normal and that's a lot of what you're doing you're basically trying to establish a foundational steadiness of mind real-time recognition of you know when you're in when you're not in the ruminator and also what's going to kind of hook you early into it and disengaging from that right so i'll tell you three things that i think are just right up front uh and also neurologically informed vis-a-vis staying out of the default mode network and negative rumination one is uh task positive behavior in other words when you're actually doing something useful and productive on mission for you in some way you're doing the dishes deliberately you're building a business deliberately you're thinking productively about a problem as you said earlier when we're engaged in deliberate doing of something useful hopefully being functional being focused getting stuff done hopefully productively that's one second tune into the internal sensations of your body bingo you engage the insula when you do that through interior reception and as soon as you engage the insula with the internal sensations of your body in a deliberate way that acts like a circuit breaker of the default mode it brings you into sensation brings you in a sensation in real time continually changing that's really effective third simple is to move more into the present moment rumination takes us out of the present moment it's typically very involved with mental time travel a wonderful neurological development over the last couple million years a beautiful servant and a terrible master though mental time travel and so when we come into the present we're less involved with the mental time travel aspect of rumination and going to the thing i said earlier when we are alerted to something new something has happened we may not know what it is or where it is or what to do about it but we're involved in the very front end front edge of the processing stream the emergent edge of now to put it somewhat metaphorically when we're right there in the present we're being alerted continuously to what's con to what's arising and that right there bingo engages ancient circuitry involved with attention and especially the initial alerting aspect of attention that acts like a circuit breaker on the default mode network and group takes us out of the ruminator i want to point to something that's implicit in everything you just said that is a subtle but very important point all of those things that you named are about bringing our attention toward something else not trying to push away very intimidating thought that's a very very important distinction so this is something that's known as thought suppression and it never goes particularly well and research generally indicates that the more that you deliberately try to not think about something the more you end up thinking about it a classic example of this comes from political science actually um my thesis advisor at uc berkeley was a guy named george lakoff who's done a lot of work in political linguistics and he has a book titled don't think of an elephant the point being that people immediately think of an elephant if you tell them not to oh that's great i know it's like ordering somebody uh don't think about the fact that this elevator might break before you get into it it doesn't work and so your point's great it's shifting over uh i i i don't know if you'll include this kind of out there stuff but i'll just toss it in you may know from uh chaos theory this term strange attractors it's this idea that of all the different states that a system might take you can imagine that as different you know temperatures or the ways interactions with a certain person might go attractors are the the versions of those states that are particularly powerful and um pull you right in and so the question is what are the strange attractors in the complex dynamic system the unfolding dynamism of your relationship with a person or the way a group operates a company or a country or your mind and one of the things that happens when people do the work you and i have talked a lot about of developing positive wholesome traits inside oneself you're creating strange attractors that are really positive they're beneficial they feel good and they work well they are good people who ruminate are reinforcing and deepening the pocket the divot of a negative attractor state they're getting increasingly drawn into it now if you fight that you're just reinforcing it so much as you're saying and in this kind of complex systems metaphor when we shift attention elsewhere we are gradually training the brain to deepen the strange attractors that are positive and thoroughly geeky as this is still somehow it works for me and then there is the story of krishna and the gopis oh great love this yeah i'm probably going to mangle it i i r and i don't you know it's this okay here we go uh basically krishna in the hindu religion framework historically and so forth an embodiment of what is good krishna is a beautiful musician and as the story goes which i'm thoroughly mangling uh he appears one day to a whole bunch of gopis who are female cowherds in ancient india tending to their cattle dealing with their worldly concerns cows i know i'm on to you here i'm on to you here dad this is a cow-themed podcast now okay all right and so krishna starts playing his beautiful music drawing people in this framework you kind of have to accept the premise of the framework drawing the the gopis to to the divine the point of the story is that then the gopis leave their cows behind their worldly concerns their preoccupations let's say even their negative ruminations and they're just attracted they're just drawn to krishna he doesn't have to tell them that the cows smell bad and leave poop behind he does not have to argue against that he's not critiquing their life he's just playing beautiful music and drawing them to him which is another example of the power of the principle of attraction which i think is a really really kind of undervalued principle both in raising kids especially teenagers highlighting what we're trying to appeal to and draw toward rather than uh just say no to this this and that yeah and also in our own minds what is it that we are leaning toward okay and by leaning toward it we increasingly dwell there and it dwells within us i think that's great dad i think it's uh it hey you might have mangled the story but i didn't know any better because i'm not familiar with the story so it sounded great to me okay um and so i think that this gets us to an obvious question right which is well that all sounds well and good but if you're telling me not to push the thought away what do i do when this thought boils up into my consciousness and what people who know more about this than me often say and i would love your take on it dad um is a basic practice here is what's called sometimes thought acceptance which is really consistent with an act and an acceptance and commitment therapy sort of approach you're with the experience you're recognizing that the thought is there you're accepting the presence of the thought you're being honest with yourself i am having this thought it is intrusive it is annoying and it's happening right now and then you're doing your best to distract yourself with something new and different you're allowing yourself to be drawn toward something else uh maybe it's krishna maybe it's just whatever else you want to be doing with your time maybe it's washing the dishes in a mindful way whatever it happens to be um and that's a good way to relate to those experiences in the moment and then you can catch yourself each time that this thought tries to re-emerge into your consciousness and go okay i'm having this thought the thought is coming back it's time for me to be drawn towards something else as opposed to actively trying to go no brain don't think about that thing and one way to support that is to label that thought to yourself uh noting practice research shows that when we just start labeling it very lightly like um oh argument with my brother-in-law right or oh these days politically people do a lot of negative rumination politically about various figures or things they said or you know outrage or what i would say if i was on cnn talking to that person i've had more of a few of those you know it's to just note them oh okay me arguing with the tv oh okay me and you know so-and-so politician uh when you note you increase activity in prefrontal regions behind your forehead that are regulatory executive regions that kind of top down and also it tends to dial down activity in the amygdala the alarm bell of the brain which is very involved with highlighting threat typically and initiating the stress cascade so yeah naming them uh i think dan siegel as they're saying name it to tame it yeah there's there's name entertainment uh there's name it so you don't shame it there's a lot of different phrases that that emerge inside of that totally and one of the things that you mentioned to me before we started recording that that feels very obvious once you say it but just the way that you said it really landed with me for whatever reason was one of the biggest things that people ruminate about is just about how they're a bad person yeah they're ruminating about their own defects defects where i am a bad person i've always been a bad person and this bad thing that i did recently that i'm ruining ruminating about is yet more evidence that i will continue to be a bad person in the future and i think that that indicates something which is that these obsessive negative thoughts that we have often rely on a very uh a world without a gradient you know a very clearly codified this is the way the world is sort of view and so one of the ways that we can to steal a fancy phrase from cognitive behavioral therapy one of the ways that we can disconfirm the pathogenic belief we can push back on these negative thought streams is by deliberately bringing to mind what you sometimes refer to data as antidote experiences or antidote memories just examples of times when this wasn't actually the case can you activate a memory of a time when things turned out okay if you're being really caught up in an anxious spiral about something can you bring to mind a time when you really were a good person when you came through for somebody else when you supported somebody else in a meaningful way if what you're caught up in is some negative story about yourself how about times that other people supported you in authentic ways if the story you're telling is about other people and these are just all little ways that we can push back on the negative story that our brain is telling us that's beautiful for us and we can use those antidotes uh in the moment as states of being great and a person can step back from chronic rumination maybe they're the chronic rimination is has themes in it what are the themes okay so one would be a theme of anxiety like oh a bad thing could happen all right another theme could be grievances with others resentment mistreatment okay or a theme let's say third could be worthless morbid self-preoccupation that's a phrase with one's reported defects well if you step back from let's say those themes or maybe there's another theme by the way which is quite common contamination and obsessions and sometimes compulsions are really about managing the threat of contamination or feeling contaminated in some way right so then if you know strategically that you're prone in this direction and what i'm naming here is really important for people who have chronic rumination if you know you're prone to rumination around these particular themes then the question becomes the really useful one what if it were more present in your mind in general would really address that particular theme balance it regulate it and help you dwell in happier more beneficial places for example if your theme in general is around anxiety they're classic resources we went through them a lot in the resilient book we've talked about them in this podcast such as calm strength recognizing that in the present you're all right right now and training your mind cognitively to not overestimate threats and underestimate resources including your own strengths and capabilities so you could strategically build those traits up so that you have them more to draw upon in the moment when you're dealing with a particular kind of rumination and you could do similar things if the themes in your ruminations are things like a name such as personal worthlessness or feeling mistreated by others and that's a very useful thing that you can do strategically i love that as a strategy and that whole concept of building something new really pulls me into the final thing that i wanted to really stick a flag in talking about different techniques for dealing with rumination which is novelty change things being different now than they were back then because a lot of rumination as you mentioned earlier dad is driven by these very rigid very contracted thought structures that we have that are strongly strongly oriented toward a view of the world as being unchanged and unchangeable and so something that we can do deliberately is we can look for novelty we can look for the things that are different we can look for how things have changed uh sometimes there's a place for validating our concern about the way things really were back then and maybe they really were problematic and maybe the environment really was scary and maybe you did say something that you probably shouldn't have said to this other person okay okay okay okay but that doesn't mean that that concern is still real for you in the present or that it will continue to be real for you in the future so looking for ways that you can find some novelty inside of your experience which is also by the way a great way to distract yourself talking about those distraction techniques that we were mentioning earlier because the brain is a magnet for novelty if something is new or different inside of the space it draws our attention extremely strongly so it's a great way to break some of those entrenched patterns of thought as you're talking here and i kind of am looking into my own experience of rumination and some research on it i want to talk about another aspect of this which has to do with the sense of self me myself and i so clearly when we're ruminating there's a very strong sense of self or references to self embedded in rumination there is the subjective the self of the eye who is sort of witnessing the show of what it is we're imagining or recalling or saying or thinking about and then there is the me in the show who's being mistreated by other people or who's having certain experiences there's a lot of self-constructing going on in ruminating which is one other reason why i as someone like you know some other people are skeptical of the presumption of a rigid contracted entity self and consider it to be a major source of suffering so if one has a general agenda to not continually construct reify and you know reinforce that sense of the self-contraction that's one more good reason to be careful about ruminating still the actual experience of rumination in a weird kind of way can shore up the sense of a coherent self especially if you have felt fragmented so if a person's been traumatized or deeply mistreated as a young child or is also maybe just temperamentally prone to a less glued together psychological structure uh ruminating in a weird kind of way feels self-cohering it kind of pulls you together and that can be a function it serves that draws people into doing it so that's something to be certainly yeah what's the background feeling of that point one and then point two related to self-referentiality the the rumination about inadequacies or ways you know that a you've been let's say excluded or devalued by others which b links to feelings in the inside yourself of being less than others that you don't like and want to defend against by having them be more impressed by you around around you go one way through that is to accept being defective what i mean by that and this goes to someone we're going to have on the show soon dr ron segal who's written this recent book that i found deeply deeply interesting i think it's called the extraordinary gift of being ordinary in which he really addresses the whole self-esteem project all together here okay yeah coming from a deep mindfulness background and one of the ways into this is just to accept you got some warts right yeah like yeah okay that thing i blew it and for me i don't get free and things that upset me that i'm ruminating about that are strange attractors in a bad way for me i don't get free related to them until i take complete responsibility accurately for whatever my bits were and have compassion for the other people involved and myself those are the two keys for me and really releasing around something that's chronically upsetting for me and part of that is well yeah i did all that and this part was so skillful this part was just clueless i didn't know that part yeah that's worthy remorse that was a moral fault i'm gonna let myself feel that so you just kind of accept it about yourself you lighten up about yourself and you realize you know none of us are perfect like how good do you have to be to be a good enough human um right to be worth someone saying hello to you or opening a door for you or listening to you in a meeting oh how brilliant do you need to be for people to just kind of listen to you and i think there's something here around broad self acceptance allowing defectiveness you know allowing warts and all just being okay with that that it can undermine rumination really from the bottom up well i think that that was a beautiful little teaching their dad that was really lovely and really appreciated myself and just seems like such an important thing for everyone to keep in mind during this whole process because i think that there are these ways where particularly maybe inside of mental health psychology personal growth traditions there is often such a focus on the process on the meat on what's going on inside of the coconut uh that it's really easy to start getting caught up in scaled against what a lot of people experience pretty small issues that a person has and really fixating on them and going ah how do i how do i twist this nut in the brain so it just gets exactly the way that i want it to get when the truth is that you know we've all got our issues i've certainly got plenty and i host a self-help mental health podcast and we've been engaged in this work together for the better part of five years um from writing the book to today and i grew up in an environment that was enormously supportive enormously psychologically woke like very thoughtful about these kinds of things and yet i still came out of it with all kinds of different psychological bumps and bruises and so i think that it's a great teaching to lean into our extraordinariness and also our ordinariness are the beautiful characteristics that we have and the bumps and bruises yeah a kind of wild version of this and i don't know if you're going to allow this to air and i want to well i'm not here to censor you dad but you know we do make some editorial decisions from time to time well you may remember you and and laurel and jan and i were sitting around the dinner table i think you were roughly 10 nine or ten i think oh gosh probably around five or six right around that time or so maybe seven and um jan and i had done the s training created by werner earhard we did it back in the mid 1970s and one of the aspects of that training which was for me at least enormously valuable while definitely you want to take it with a grain of salt still in that one of the things they did is they basically had this part where the trainer who the very charismatic powerful speaker basically said vulgar term alert here we are all everybody in this room is an i the trainer i'm an you and you start pointing to people or she would you are you you are you and you are an just turn to the person next to you and say i'm an or look at them and go you are a nestle versions of that all right so that's kind of the context so i was explaining this to you and laura a little bit and then what your mom and i just did is like and we didn't tend to swear much in our household so we didn't normally use this kind of language i and i found myself saying you know well you know i i'm an jen you're an and she looked at me and said rick you're an at this point you and laurel were stupefied and then i turned to you said forrest you're an and then laurel you're an and you both started laughing and laughing i was about to say we probably started laughing yeah yeah yeah and there's a kind of freedom in it oh crystal clear this is not about countenancing and enabling abuse it's not about turning a blind eye to people who are really okay yeah sure you know at all scales whether you know in your neighborhood or running your country you know we want to be careful about that but just to kind of tolerate and accept like yeah you know there's a part of me it's kind of asshole-ish or there's a part of me that's stupid there's a part of me that's addictive there's a part of me that's loses my temper there's a part of me that thinks i'm superior there's a part of me that thinks i'm inferior both of them they're in the mix and kind of lightening up about all that yeah i totally love that and to not to not let the the presence of the part distort your perception of the whole yeah um is i think what you're really pointing to here at the end of the day so to bring together a lot of the stuff that we've talked about during this episode i really enjoyed doing this one and um i think that it might be helpful for people to have a little road map here for dealing with a negative thought or a ruminatory experience while they're having it so this is one that i threw together let me know if there's anything you would like to add to it dad so let's say that you have some rumination that appears in the mind step one is to do what you said a little while ago which is to label the presence of the thing identify the source of it name it so you don't shame it go oh this thing is appearing in my brain again if this thing is linked to an experience linked to a fear something like that you can accept that that negative thing did in fact happen or that that difficult thought is in fact present be honest about the situation you don't try to deny it or suppress it wow it's frustrating that you're having this experience then from there third you can seek some psychological flexibility can you be creative can you be curious can you be open what are some possibilities that exist for how you could make some form of change or address a concern or create a situation where you would no longer need to obsess over this thought that you're having then alongside that we can create a different attractor as you were talking about earlier dad we can take in the good we can be grateful for the positive parts of our life that are still true we can see the parts of our past that are untouched by the negative thought and we can give ourselves a break maybe uh connected to what you were saying at the end their dad about seeing the part and yes the part is present but that part doesn't contaminate the whole and then we move into practices that allow regulation of the thought stream without suppression of the negative thought this is everything we were just talking about from mindfulness practice to distracting yourself to uh doing something that draws your attention out of selfing in a positive way to disconfirming the pathogenic belief and moving toward those antidote memories whatever it is that works for you regulation without suppression which ties into what i was talking about earlier in terms of the brain functions that rumination is based upon and how we can turn down the volume knob a little bit on those so how does that sound to you dad sounds like an incredibly thorough fantastic summary and if i'm just wondering about adding kind of maybe one more little thing yeah i love that super well formed in me but there's something about the direct experience of ruminating so first when you're actually in it it's not a pleasant experience you're suffering and so one thing to really emphasize here and talk about is compassion for yourself yeah it hurts to ruminate itself what you're ruminating about is typically a concern of some significant kind all the above you can bring compassion to yourself you might also find that it's freeing to bring compassion to some of the other players that you're ruminating about maybe beings you're worried about and also beings who are your adversaries who even mistreated you remembering that compassion is not approval does not let them off the hook it's not forgiveness and still you can have a feeling through common humanity for the ways that they're suffering as well so flagging compassion here i think is important and then maybe one last thing which goes more to what i was saying in the very start about opening up into you know the murky depths is there something about rumination in which we're we're sort of right at that liminal boundary zone the twilight zone between the light of consciousness and the shadows of the unconscious we're right at that edge sometimes when we're involved in ruminating and one function of rumination if it's repetitive and kind of brittle is that it's it's warding off that which could be more creative or fertile or is pushing to come forward that is actually kept at bay functionally perhaps by the ruminant of loops that we're engaged in and so if you're involved in ruminating one thing you can actually do is to go oh okay i've been ruminating what's underneath all this is there a deeper hurt here under these pain points i'm looping through is there a deeper meaning to what happened that's pushing forward is there something more universal because rumination tends to be very much about the particularities of me me me me can there be an opening into broader themes i mean the inherent tragedy of life in terms of it's one of its major features uh the center doesn't always hold most people do disappoint one way or another right even if you love them dearly you know accepting these things opening to them so something about this including the subjective experience of engaging rumination as an opportunity kind of a portal to open into the murky depths including their predominantly non-verbal imagistic and somatic features well you really brought it home there at the end dad and we could spend a lot of time and have certainly spent a lot of time on the podcast already talking about what lies underneath the experience we're having and those what exists inside of the uh the basement of the mind which is a phrase that you've sometimes used in the past and i think that it's a great point to raise here at the end as we uh close our episode here today but i think that that's about all we have time for at the moment today we explored a lot of information having to do with rumination and obsessive thoughts and how we can start to disengage from those negative thought streams we begin today's episode by talking about what rumination is and making some useful distinctions between negative forms of rumination and other forms of dwelling on different kinds of thoughts if you have persistent negative thoughts that you just can't shake those thoughts are interfering with your ability to enjoy some aspect of life and you aren't exploring any new aspects of things you're just chewing on the same old aspects of things if the thought hasn't changed very much in the days or weeks or months or even years that you've been chewing on it well you're probably ruminating at that point generally when we talk about rumination we're focused on negative forms of rumination where we're chewing on experiences that were uncomfortable painful thoughts that we don't like things that we really don't want to be thinking about anymore one of the key points about rumination is that unlike other forms of emotion processing it doesn't really generate any new ways of thinking about something or any new behaviors or any new possibilities for somebody when we ruminate we're just processing the same old stuff without any change or growth so if that's the case why do we ruminate and the answer is that rumination is a coping response it's a behavior that we do in response to stress and it's often a form of self-soothing for people where they feel like they're doing something about a fear or anxiety or concern because they're thinking about it a lot and it's often a form of self-soothing for people where they feel like they're doing something about a fear or an anxiety that they have just because they're thinking about it a lot but the truth is that they are just running circles around the track in their mind they are a hamster on the wheel we then talked for a little while about where rumination comes from and your individual propensity toward rumination is going to be some combination of nature and nurture one of the things that we do know is that people who have experienced a lot of stressful life events tend to ruminate more and perhaps connected to that people who have significant issues with depression anxiety ocd ptsd and so on tend to be more ruminatory and there is this interesting link between how much somebody ruminates and whether or not the stressful experiences that they've had end up having long-term consequences for them so this really just foregrounds the importance of working with rumination when it starts to appear in the mind and being able to move away from those ruminatory thought cycles clearly has a lot of very real long-term benefits for people i then talked for a little while about how rumination works in the brain and to summarize that summary here it's based largely on the default mode network and this is a network in the brain that's responsible for wakeful rest which is active when we're awake but we're not really thinking about anything in particular we're daydreaming or imagining or the world is just washing over us it's the the autopilot network of the brain so one of the things that we can do is we can look for practices that allow us to uh exert a little bit more top-down control over the default mode network to regulate our attention and gently incline it back toward what we want to be thinking about as opposed to what we clearly don't want to be thinking about a great way to do that is hey mindfulness practice there's a lot of research that shows that deliberate forms of mindfulness can deactivate the default mode network another way to control the focus of our attention is to use various forms of distraction to do something else some other attractor as rick was talking about that pulls our attention away from the subject of our rumination and towards something else and something that really supports distraction is novelty and one really interesting piece of research that i didn't have an opportunity to talk about during the episode looked at different kinds of what are known as thought control strategies that are exercised by people who experience ocd and it turns out that people who use strategies that are based on distraction tend to be a lot more successful than those who use strategies based on punishment where they really beat themselves up about whatever negative thought they're having or whatever rumination is going on inside of themselves and ocd patients in particular tend to be highly self-punishing so this suggests that one path forward when dealing with excessive rumination is to not beat yourself up about it so much be present with the thought acknowledge that it's there accept that it's going on inside of you and then start asking yourself some flexibility questions what's new and different in your world these days how have things changed since back that linked to that a really important point here is that thought suppression strategies when we have a thought that appears inside of the mind that we just try to push down into the murky depths to use rick's language that almost never works for people generally speaking the more you try to not think about something the more you end up thinking about it and this is quite similar to a common challenge many people have when they're starting meditative practice where they try to deliberately not think about anything and this is almost always a recipe for thinking about something pretty rapidly another important point about rumination is that it tends to be very static and view the world through very good bad paradigms that are very fixed and unchanging particularly this is the case when the thing that we're ruminating about is how we are a bad person on some level where we're not just a bad person now but we've always been a bad person we will always be a bad person our nature is itself a bad nature but all of us have experienced this not being true at some point and so one of the things that we can incline the mind toward are various forms of antidote memory can you deliberately activate times in the past when this thought stream was not true times when things really did work out for you or when you really were a good person or when other people really did support you almost all of us have examples in our lives of times when that really was true rick closed with a couple of wonderful reflections the first was about the linkage between rumination and the nature of the self how rumination can be a process that has a lot of selfing in it and for people who have a little bit more of a fragmented sense of self rumination can give a sense of something real and something coherent that really is there so it's another plausible explanation for why people ruminate and then he had this really lovely thought about accepting our own well the the difficult parts of us that live inside of every person i'm not perfect you're not perfect nobody's perfect we've all got our warts and becoming a mentally healthy person a psychologically developed person in the world is by and large not about cleaning up every word we have it's about cleaning up some of the bigger ones some of the more problematic ones and then coming to terms with the reality that we are whole people warts and all it's this push-pull that underlies so much of the work that we do that i think is maybe best summarized by a line from suzuki roshi each of you is perfect just the way you are and you could use a little improvement if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it through whatever you're listening to it on right now maybe even leave a rating and a positive review which really helps us out and hey you could always tell a friend about it it's one of the best ways we have to reach new people if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return things like transcripts of the episodes ad-free versions of the episodes and expanded show notes where i do a deep dive into the research that goes into everything we create until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 47,698

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Rumination, Default Mode Network, Task-positive behavior, Obsession, Anxiety, Thought Acceptance, Noting, Strange Attractors, Krishna and the Gopis

Id: U2tnf8q7GMk

Length: 62min 0sec (3720 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022