Hi, I’m Dr. Tracey Marks, and I make mental health education videos. Today’s video is based on a viewer question from S.S. Rose. S.S. ROSE: “Can you do a video on Ruminance? Not sure I spelled that correctly.” S.S. ROSE: “I’ve had times where my brain isn’t shutting off even in sleep. I can still hear my thoughts. Can you go into more detail about this?” Thanks for the question, S. S. The term “ruminate” means “to run a thought over and over in your mind”. This is the figurative definition. The literal definition refers to cows regurgitating their food to chew it over and over. Rumination is not a diagnosis all to itself. We see it in depression and anxiety. Rumination causes people to get stuck in their thoughts, and even feel stuck in the negativity of their condition. Typical negative, depressive ruminations may be things like “Why do I always get the short end of the stick?” or “Why can’t I be happy like everyone else?” Anxious ruminations tend to be worrying about things that happened in the past, like analyzing past situations and worrying about what kind of impression that you left, or what that person meant by that. At the time that she said what she did, you didn’t think much of it, but when you get to the end of the day and start ruminating over the interaction, what the person said takes on a completely different meaning (and it’s usually a negative meaning). In both scenarios, it’s repetitive, unhelpful, negative thinking, and this is different from deconstructing a past situation so that you can process it and problem-solve. In that case, analyzing the past is constructive, and you’re not stuck thinking only about the negative aspects of the situation. Why does this happen? It’s thought to be related to the over-activation of the Default Mode Network in your brain. I talk about this in a video I did on mindfulness and depression. The gist of it though is that the Default Mode Network is the area of the brain that controls stimulus-independent though. Said another way, is that it’s the area of your brain that controls what you’re thinking when you’re not actively focused on something. It’s like background thought. Studies have shown that people are more unhappy when they spend a lot of time with their minds wandering. Functional MRI scans looking at brain activity show that the Default Mode Network in your brain is more activated when you’re ruminating. What’s the difference between this and intrusive thoughts? Intrusive thoughts are thoughts that pop into your mind when you don’t want them to, and you’re usually trying not to think about them, but they intrude and interrupt what you’re thinking about. And this is different from rumination, where you tend to settle into the thoughts and brood over them. You may not like them, because they make you feel bad, but you’re not working that hard to avoid them, and in some cases, you may even welcome them, because some people feel like they need to think about these things. What do you do about this? Two things. One is to spend more time being mindful. Mindfulness is the practice of being fully present in your current circumstance, without judgment. If you bring your attention to what you’re currently doing and how it’s affecting all of your five senses, you now have dependent thought, because you’re actively paying attention to something. Your Default Mode Network, where you spend time ruminating, is turned off. For more information on mindfulness, check out this video that I did on mindfulness. I also have a body scan audio download that goes along with that video. The second thing you can do is develop an If/Then Action Plan. The first part is creating a list of outward signs that you’re ruminating. And this is what you’re FEELING at the time. Since you can get lost in your head, you may not always be aware of what you’re feeling. Some outward signs are things like rocking, fidgeting, feeling your heart race, you may even start to get a headache. Take note of your signs, so you can easily recognize when you’re in this state. Then you want to write a plan for what you’re gonna do when you notice that you’re ruminating. So you wanna turn to an activity that will distract you from the rumination. These activities can be relaxing, like listening to a guided meditation or doing a craft, or putting entries into your gratitude journal. It could be a task, like taking a walk, going grocery shopping, if you like to grocery shop. Or it could be problem-solving, like, for example, if you’re under a lot of stress, and you have a lot of things that you’re juggling – you may start ruminating about worst case scenarios. Instead, you can set aside time that you can use to brainstorm some solutions. Then you wanna form your If/Then statements with these two pieces of information. You wanna write this down to make it official. You don’t want to keep it all in your head – after all, you’re trying to get OUT of your head. So, you want to write “If I notice that I’m feeling tension in my neck, I’ll spend 10 minutes listening to a guided meditation.” There’s apps like Calm and Headspace where you can listen to meditations. But what do you know, I just happen to have a progressive muscle relaxation audio that you can download! I’ll put a link for that in the description. If you’re a part of my email community, you already have it in your inbox. Another If/Then scenario is “If I start to feel lightheaded and nauseous, I’ll go for a walk outside, or practice some yoga poses.” You wanna come up with as many of these as you can, cause you definitely wanna cover all of your rumination trigger signs, but for each sign you may wanna have two or three activities that you can engage in, so you can have some variety. Now, this is just a simple exercise that you can get started on to help distract yourself from the rumination, and this would be a behavioral approach to dealing with it. But there is a cognitive therapy called Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy to help you further with this problem, and one of the approaches of the therapy is to help you change the focus of your ruminations from abstract thinking to more concrete thinking. So, for example, suppose you’re having marital problems. You have an argument with your spouse, and you start thinking “Why can’t I ever get MY needs met?”, “Why can’t I be happy like my friends?” And these are broad, sweeping, abstract generalizations that can take on a self-loathing tone. And you can have an argument and start focusing on self-blame or self-pity. In this case, a therapist would help you focus on the details of the negative interaction that you had with your spouse, so you can examine the details of what actually happened and process it at that level. You may even find things that you could do differently next time. Yes, this requires a therapist skilled in cognitive behavior therapy, but even without formal therapy, you can give the behavioral approach a try, to see if it helps. Subscribe to my channel, to keep up with mental health topics. See you next time!
