Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 311. How to stop ruminating About this episode Does your brain seem to hit replay on that embarrassing memory, or go over the way that situationship ended in hopes you’ll find some kind of closure? From dissecting past conversations to catastrophising about what might happen, repetitive thinking can feel like a mental trap. In today's episode, we break down the psychology of rumination: why our minds get stuck in these unhelpful thought cycles, and how we can actively disengage to find mental clarity.
Things we discuss:
What rumination truly is and what it isn't The distinctions between everyday rumination and OCD Metacognition: thinking about our thinking Cognitive diffusion and detaching from thoughts Using mindfulness and grounding techniques to anchor yourself in the present Taking back your attention from thought spirals If you’re tired of your mind rerunning your “best and worst” moments, this episode is for you.
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3:07 Jemma Sbeg? Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.
3:26 Jemma Sbeg? Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. You guys know the deal, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our twenties. Have you ever found your mind constantly replaying the same thoughts over and over again? Perhaps it's dissecting a past conversation, reexamining a decision that you made, or just endlessly worrying about something that may or may not happen in the future. In those moments, I think it can truly feel like our mind is stuck.
4:11 Jemma Sbeg? It's cycling around the same things, the same loop with no exit. And this isn't just overthinking. It's a specific, often debilitating form of thinking known as rumination.
4:25 Jemma Sbeg? And that's what we're going to be dissecting on today's episode. It's actually fairly common for a lot of us to fall into these patterns. Often because we somehow think that by replaying certain uncomfortable thoughts or moments, we are somehow going to find a way out of it. Or we're going to solve the problem, gain some kind of clarity. Sometimes we even think of rumination as a sign of intelligence. Uh, that you're very introspective and reflective, which is probably true. But the rumination isn't what's helping prove that point.
5:03 Jemma Sbeg? It's actually doing the opposite. It's what is getting us stuck in thought loops that shrink our curiosity and shrink our perspective of the world. Rumination often really intensifies negative emotions. It fuels anxiety. I know it can leave us feeling mentally exhausted. But the very good news is that there is a way out of this cycle. There is a way to turn left, I guess, when you've always turned right. And that is precisely what I want to break down for you today. What is rumination? What is it actually? How is it connected to intrusive thoughts, things like OCD?
5:46 Jemma Sbeg? What is your brain actually trying to achieve? And why can't you stop it from doing so? And also, how do we disengage? How do we find the off switch for thoughts that are just like, not only frustrating, but genuinely very annoying when they won't stop running through our head? Stopping rumination, and I know this better than most people, it isn't about suppressing thoughts. It's not about trying to force yourself to be more positive. I've tried that. I had such a hard time last year with really depressing, awful rumination and trying to ignore it or suppress it or constantly distract yourself. Really gets you nowhere. It's actually, the way, the only way out is to really understand why it's happening.
6:32 Jemma Sbeg? And to kind of go further into the belly of the beast of rumination. And develop meta cognitive awareness, develop a better way of relating to your thoughts by staring them straight in the face. And if that sounds weird and complicated and counterintuitive, I felt the same way when I was introduced to this way of approaching them. But I can personally promise you that it has worked tremendously for me. And I want to share what I've learnt through that process and how you can kind of help yourself when rumination just will not turn itself off. So without further ado, let's get into it.
7:15 Jemma Sbeg? I want to start by firstly, just dissecting my own experience with rumination because me and rumination have been roommates for a while. We have been buddies for a long time. And my brain does not discriminate when it comes down to what we decide to ruminate about. It will do, it will take whatever comes through the front door. Um, it will include things like relationship, like my relationship and is something wrong here? Did I say the wrong thing? It includes things around my career, around the podcast, ruminating around whether I did the correct episode, something that I said on an episode, what people are going to think about this or that.
7:57 Jemma Sbeg? Whether I, you know, annoyed someone by cutting them off on the road, something I did when I was literally like six or seven years old. Rumination for me is just, the way I think about it is like a claw machine at like an arcade where as soon as I, as soon as like it turns on, it's just going to grab anything. Like it doesn't care what it picks up, it just wants to find a source for me to spiral upon and for me to feel anxious about. Like as an example, something that I've been ruminating about so much recently was like something that I did almost four years ago now. And I just said something super awkward in a conversation four years ago, and it wouldn't have lasted more than five seconds.
8:41 Jemma Sbeg? And right now, my brain is obsessing over it. I'm up at night thinking about it. I am having dreams about it. And the irony for me within this is that There is like, there is nothing I can do about that moment. I can't take that moment back. I don't even know some of the people who that moment was in front of. Nothing can change what happened. And yet, the amount that I feel myself thinking about it, you would think that I had a solution. You would think that I had a game plan or I could find one. And the answer is that I don't. And yet, this is a thought pattern I cannot seem to switch off.
9:25 Jemma Sbeg? I'm sure that you have experienced this. I'm sure that you are listening to me talk about this and be like, yeah, I could apply this as a blueprint to my own life and it would look exactly the same. Rumination is this very interesting thing whereby it's so internal and only we can really see it and hear it and experience it. And yet, there are so many people out there who are having a similar roller coaster spiral whirlpool going on in their head. And we never talk about it. The thing that has really helped me though is just having a word to explain what kind of thought this is.
10:06 Jemma Sbeg? Because a thought that is based in rumination, a ruminating thought is so much different to any other kind of thought that I have. Just knowing that there is a difference, knowing that these thoughts are special in a way has really, really helped me, knowing that they are a symptom of how my brain works. They're not anything more than that, has really allowed me to integrate them better into, I guess, my day to day routine. And I know that sounds weird, but it's allowed me to better look at a thought and say, this is challenging, this is frustrating, this is annoying, I can't stop thinking about it. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's significant.
10:47 Jemma Sbeg? And that doesn't necessarily mean that the only way through this thought pattern is by finding a solution. I think the thing I've really come to peace with is that ninety nine percent of the time, you are not going to solve. A rumination, you're not going to solve an obsessive thought by magically coming up with some way to fix it. It's about coming up with a different way to relate to that thought. Rumination is simply put, getting caught up in the why of a problem without moving towards the what now. Rumination wants you to believe that the more you think about something, the closer you'll get to figuring it out.
11:30 Jemma Sbeg? But almost everything we ruminate about, you know, almost everything, like I said, doesn't have a solution. And that's actually the very reason why we ruminate about it. That's why our brain is so obsessive about it. That's why it gets stuck because it is endlessly troubled and endlessly puzzled by this thing that we can't sort out. It's endlessly fascinated by that. A two thousand paper that I was reading on the role of rumination actually found that repetitive thinking very rarely results or improves problem solving. Instead, in almost every single individual they looked at, rumination hindered effective problem solving.
12:11 Jemma Sbeg? It actually gave individuals and participants the illusion of control over a situation. But that illusion actually turned into nothing. They didn't solve problems faster. They weren't more efficient. They didn't find different sides or perspectives on the problem. They often just got stuck in or on one path. This passive and cyclical focus, it really depletes your mental resources. It makes it harder for you to think clearly, to think creatively. It's like stirring muddy water. The more you stir, the less clear it becomes. And yet it convinces us time and time again that no, just one more second thinking about it.
12:52 Jemma Sbeg? Just one more day and the solution will become clear. It's honestly, it's like a scam. It's like a pyramid scheme where we're told like, the more you invest, the more you're going to get out. The more time you think about me, the closer you'll get to a solution. And every day you're waiting for like. You're waiting for the payout, you're waiting for like all the money to rain down on you and it never does. Ruminati is is like the most elite scam artist there is. So the question that is probably on your mind is, if it is so bad, why do I do it in the first place? Well, I don't think it will come as a surprise that this is often not a deliberate thing.
13:34 Jemma Sbeg? We often genuinely believe that what we are doing is productive. And that's because our brains are built to solve problems, they're built to learn from experience. This is one of the ways that it does it successfully and healthily is by looking at a moment, looking at an experience that was uncomfortable and and learning from it. But then moving past it, rumination occurs when we can't move past it essentially. And so the act becomes less about problem solving and more about problem dissecting. Without that actually leading to any kind of outcome. Another reason that we ruminate is that we're trying to cope with difficult emotions. When we're feeling sad, anxious, angry, whatever it is.
14:19 Jemma Sbeg? Our brains look for ways to manage that discomfort, obviously, they don't want to have the unpleasant feeling. Sometimes rumination becomes a default strategy, even if it's not effective, because at least it feels comfortable. And it's a way to stay internally focused rather than face the discomfort directly or by engaging with the outside world. It allows us to deal with the problem completely within us. And that means we don't have to face, you know, perhaps a feeling of embarrassment or shame with sharing our anxieties. We don't have to face, yeah, whatever the outside world has to say about our problem. Of course, another reason why we ruminate is that a lot of us really struggle with uncertainty.
15:02 Jemma Sbeg? I know I do, I think it's one of my biggest flaws, like genuinely, it's my biggest flaw, it's a huge reason why I think I'm so impatient. If something feels unresolved or ambiguous, our mind might ruminate in an endless loop. To try and find some kind of definitive answer or a feeling of closure that will give us. Something concrete to end with, something resolute to put a stop to the spiral. What we don't realise is that very rarely will that answer actually be satisfying once we get it. It's basically just a proxy. The pursuit of an answer is a lie, there normally isn't one. Consider the example of um someone being cheated on.
15:47 Jemma Sbeg? You might become, you might obsessively ruminate about why. You wanna know why, why did you do that to me? Why wasn't I enough? Why, why was this person better than me? Whatever answer your ex gives you for why they did it, why it happened, why it wasn't your fault. It's still going to hurt the same amount. Because the pain isn't in the reason, it's in the fact that it happened, right? But whilst there's still this possibility of an answer and of closure. We hold on to that idea, it's kind of like a life, a life boy, like a life vest. We hold on to the idea that all the pain we're going through could simply be explained away.
16:28 Jemma Sbeg? Because that seems like a much nicer idea than, you know, the real outcome. And the real thing that will happen, which is that we have to work through this on our own. And we have to work through this, through this, knowing that no answer is ever going to satisfy the fact that what happened to us was just painful. You know, an answer is always going to be futile, but we can't give up on the fantasy of an easy solution. You know, like any behaviour, the more we engage in something, the more we practise it. The better our brain really gets at it. You know, the more you practise pitching a ball, the more you practise painting, the more you practise solving a Rubik's Cube, these are all very weird examples, but you get what I mean.
17:13 Jemma Sbeg? The better our brain gets at doing it, same with rumination. The neural pathways associated with these repetitive thoughts just get stronger and stronger over time. It's a very famous saying, neurons that fire together, wire together, it's called long-term potentiation. This is what is happening when you can't stop ruminating, when it feels like that is the first line of defence against any problem that you do. You think about it enough until hopefully it doesn't hurt anymore. Over time, it can become an automatic response to stress, to a negative mood, to minute challenges. You don't even consciously choose to do it. It's just your brain going down the most well-worn path that it can
17:58 Jemma Sbeg? because that is the easiest way to move forward. So whilst rumination often starts with seemingly good intentions, to solve, to cope, to find closure, to understand, it quickly turns into a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps us really stuck. You've really got to recognise these underlying motivations that our brain is rolling out in order to be able to gently redirect your thoughts in the future. Something I haven't mentioned that I think is really crucial just to quickly add in here. Rumination and OCD are often very linked as well. Um, rumination can sometimes manifest in a particularly intense form under OCD.
18:41 Jemma Sbeg? In OCD, rumination isn't just, you're not just dwelling on everyday worries. The thoughts become intrusive, they become unwanted, and they're highly distressing. And these thoughts often clash with someone's deeply held values and their sense of self. For example, someone with OCD, you know, they might endlessly ruminate, obsessively ruminate over whether they've caused someone harm, if they've left the stove on, they might be plagued by really disturbing unwanted thoughts of a violent nature, of a sexual nature, despite having no desire to act on them. They just can't help themselves. A key distinction in OCD compared to just plain old rumination is this compulsive element.
19:26 Jemma Sbeg? An intrusive thought is often followed by an action that attempts to soothe, so seeking reassurance, double-checking every single switch in your house, washing your hands.
19:38 Jemma Sbeg? But rumination itself could actually become the mental compulsion, right? Rumination is both the beginning and the end of a mental, an unhealthy mental loop. So the only way that you find yourself being able to feel less distressed by the fact that you can't stop thinking about something is by thinking about it more. This is often known as pure O, purely obsessional OCD as well. The thought is both the obsession and ironically, it's also the compulsion. It's kind of like what we were talking about before, you know? Thinking about something constantly might actually be kind of soothing.
20:20 Jemma Sbeg? It kind of offers temporary relief, even if later down the line it becomes incredibly difficult to undo, even if later down the line it becomes incredibly painful. So rumination has a lot of ties to OCD. It also has a lot of ties to depression. There is a specific form of rumination known as depressive rumination. That is a core feature in the onset, maintenance and recurrence of a depressive episode. Basically depressive rumination really focuses on self blame. It focuses on perceived inadequacies, past failures, feelings of hopelessness. And unlike general rumination, which is often about a specific problem,
21:04 Jemma Sbeg? depressive rumination often has a very broad focus. It's dwelling on questions like, am I a bad person? What's wrong with me? Why don't things go right for me? My life is pointless, you know? This form of rumination often shifts attention inward, away from the external world. It's not about conversations, it's not about specific events. It's about who you are as an individual. So whilst in this episode, we really are focusing more on non-clinical forms of rumination, it is important to know that the underlying mechanisms of how we engage with our thoughts um do look differently when they are in the context of certain mental health problems like OCD, like depression, they take on a more severe element.
21:49 Jemma Sbeg? And so if that severe element of this is what you're experiencing, it's really important that you reach out, you get help. I want to be incredibly clear with you right now. People can actually help you with this. You might not think they can because you've dealt with it by yourself for so long. People, like, there are people out there who train many, many years just to help you not have obsessive ruminating thoughts. I promise you, you will see a difference. It will get better if you seek out professional help. Like, I can almost promise that for you. There is someone out there who can help you with this. Okay, we're gonna take a short break, but when we come back, I want to talk about how we can successfully
22:34 Jemma Sbeg? overcome chronic rumination using some really powerful psychological tools you may not have heard of. So stay with us. We're gonna return after this short break.
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26:14 Jemma Sbeg? Alright, here's the deal. Here's the dealio. If you want to gain mastery over your rumination, you firstly got to understand this thing called metacognition. Not meta as in Facebook or Instagram. Meta is in beyond, above, higher. So metacognition, this was a phrase coined by the psychologist called John Flavell back in the 1970s. And essentially what it means is our ability to think about our thinking. It's something that makes us uniquely human. It's something that I don't think any other species can do. Essentially, metacognition is your ability to be aware of and understand your own thought processes
26:58 Jemma Sbeg? in a way that is quite detached, in a way that is observing rather than engaging, in a way that lets you step back and kind of see your thoughts and see the thought patterns that you are having, almost as if they are an object that's moving on a screen or someone else acting something out. When you're ruminating, you are often incredibly deeply inside of your thoughts. This is a problem because they feel like they are everything and that they are the final truth about your life and that they dictate everything. When the truth is, if you can engage in metacognition,
27:38 Jemma Sbeg? you're able to step outside of that and see that you are not your thoughts. You just have thoughts. Those two things are separate. You are not your thoughts. You just have thoughts. This distinction is so vital. It's so vital in interrupting the cycle of rumination because it stops you from getting overly invested in something just because you think it. It's like, just because you feel like a failure doesn't mean that you are a failure. Just because you feel like something terrible is going to happen, doesn't mean that it does. Just because you think that someone else thinks something about you, doesn't make it true.
28:20 Jemma Sbeg? Your brain doesn't have that kind of power to control outcomes and to control other people's thoughts, to control the future. It's not a mind reader, it's not a future reader. That is the important thing that metacognition allows us to do. It allows us to break the loop between feeling like we are our thoughts and knowing that actually we aren't. This kind of cognitive distance, it really empowers us. It gives us the choice to respond to a thought differently rather than being controlled by it. A very prominent therapeutic approach that specifically uses metacognition, it's in the name, it's called meta cognitive therapy. It was developed by a professor known as Adrian Wells.
29:06 Jemma Sbeg? The aim of this therapy is basically to directly address rumination and worry by focusing on how we think or our meta cognitive beliefs rather than simply the content of our thoughts. So the perspective of this approach is that psychological distress isn't caused by negative thoughts themselves. You're not actually scared of the thought. It's how we react to those thoughts that is really what's concerning us. Particularly the fact that we feel we can't not think about something. Think about it, no matter how scary a thought is, if you could just decide not to think about it, it wouldn't be that scary to you. It's the fact that you don't feel like you can control how you feel and how you think about a thought
29:52 Jemma Sbeg? that turns it into a ruminating thought, that turns it into a repetitive thought. So what we have to practise is kind of moving from being a passenger on a train of thoughts to becoming the driver. A driver who is capable of applying the brakes, capable of changing tracks. And this ability to observe and detach unfortunately is not something we're born with, but it is a skill that we can develop through deliberate practice, interrupting yourself when you realise you're getting into that pattern. And importantly,
30:28 Jemma Sbeg? Not letting yourself fall into a negativity bias through rumination. So essentially, not always thinking that the worst case scenario is going to happen. Not always predicting that people are thinking the worst of you. This involves being able to say, okay, I'm ruminating and I'm obsessive about this thought and I'm worried about this thing. Because I think something bad has happened or will happen. Is that the only possible outcome here? What are the chances that the worst case scenario happens every single time to me? Historically, you know, if you look back at other times that you've ruminated and things have turned out positively. It's really helpful to remind yourself of those things.
31:12 Jemma Sbeg? It's also really helpful to say, this is one outcome. I'm going to give myself a list of 500 other outcomes that could be more positive. Another way that I really try and control my ruminating thoughts. Cause I get really bad rumination around death sometimes is that when I feel myself get into a spiral. I go into my notes app and I explain to myself why this is happening. I get super scientific about it. I write down, you know, this is not, this is just anxiety. This thought isn't more real than any other thought that I'm having. It's just my anxiety, just because I'm thinking it doesn't mean it's real. I know this is just how my brain works. I know that it just doesn't have all the information.
31:57 Jemma Sbeg? I know that I'm just dealing with uncertainty and that my brain's solution for dealing with uncertainty is just to make me so scared that I feel prepared. Having that like clinical precision and rationalism to why I am feeling fearful or why I can't stop ruminating is really important and as long as I'm getting worked up over a thought that I'm ruminating over. I will keep writing in my notes app, explaining to myself, like a teacher, like a parent. Why this is happening, that this thought doesn't have any more merit. Just because it feels big, bad and scary. It's just that my brain's giving it more attention and I'm not that thought. And it doesn't make that thought more real.
32:38 Jemma Sbeg? Building on metacognition, we also have to understand a concept called cognitive fusion. This is a key principle in acceptance and commitment therapy, which is a type of therapy that really helps people manage their thoughts and feelings, rather than trying to change them directly, again, trying to change how we feel about our thoughts, not the thoughts necessarily. Cognitive fusion basically describes a state where we become fused with our thoughts, meaning that we treat them as literal truths, as commands, as deeply embedded parts of who we are. When we are fused with a thought, we often lose sight of the fact that it's just a collection of words or images passing through our mind. We think that it's more important than that.
33:22 Jemma Sbeg? For example, if you have the thought, I'm an embarrassment, or I'm cringe, and you're fused with that thought because it's happened and run through your head so many times, you experience it almost as a reality about yourself. This often leads to the fact that we react directly to the thought by withdrawing, by giving up, rather than choosing to question it. Just because you have a bad thought about yourself or about a situation, doesn't mean you can't have a better thought about yourself or a situation. That initial negative thought has come from you. A better one can come from you as well. In the context of rumination, you know, cognitive fusion is really what is keeping us trapped.
34:05 Jemma Sbeg? When we are fused with repetitive, negative, or uncomfortable thoughts, like I'm unlovable, or I'm stupid, or whatever it is, these thoughts feel like reality. The opposite of cognitive fusion is cognitive diffusion. This is what we want to pursue instead, and it involves seeing thoughts for what they truly are. They're not facts. They're just your brain creating ideas and creating situations and creating thoughts that challenge you and that feel real to you, even though objectively they might not be.
34:46 Jemma Sbeg? In some ways, it's beneficial, it's our brain trying to prepare ourselves, it's whatever, for whatever reason it's happening, the easiest way to intercept it is to say, actually, what if I chose just to not believe this thing? What if I chose to just not agree? I'm allowed to disagree with my thoughts. They're mine, they're my fricking thoughts. I'm gonna disagree. I wanna talk about another exercise here that I do, that I do all the time, that helps me a lot with this, which is when I have a really bad rumination spiral and I can't stop thinking about something, I tell myself that that thought hasn't come from me, it's come from someone else, specifically this other person in my brain called Brian.
35:32 Jemma Sbeg? Brain Brian, it's a play on words. Brian, like my brain is like the rational, good part of me, who I love and who I enjoy and who is joyful and gives me the capacity to think and be open. Brian, on the other hand, is the parts of me that are cruel, that are obsessive, that are mean and nasty to myself. Brian is like the little devil on my shoulder. And anytime I really am getting like stuck in a thought, what I always say is like, oh my god, Brian is being such a dick right now. Brian is really like getting in the way. Brian is being a real nuisance. Brian is really letting the team down.
36:15 Jemma Sbeg? And it helps me create a cognitive distance between myself and a thought.
36:23 Jemma Sbeg? Stephen Hayes wrote this book called Get Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Life. And he talks about a similar exercise where you can also try and change a thoughts presentation. So you can imagine that your inner critic speaks in a really silly cartoon voice. Or you can like sing your negative thoughts as a little song. You can imagine, you know, that it's not Brian who's saying these negative things. It's your childhood bully or some person that you really don't respect. So if it's coming from someone you don't respect, you feel like you don't have to listen to it as much. You're just trying to change the presentation of this voice. So it's not godlike, doesn't feel like it's reality.
37:07 Jemma Sbeg? It's just, you know, some creepy little person in the corner. It's just some like weird little bully that lives in your brain. You can also try and visualize your thoughts as objects. So you could picture thoughts as things that are floating down a river, a cloud drifting across the sky, something that you can just observe, acknowledge, and then move on from. A 2017 meta-analysis actually found that this technique of observation, or observing your thoughts, of turning them into something physical, giving them a sense of distance, is actually incredibly powerful. The reason that they said it's powerful is because so many other ways of approaching rumination
37:50 Jemma Sbeg? tells you that you're not allowed or that you shouldn't have negative thoughts. These perspectives tell you that it's normal. You just need to make peace with them. Another thing that I imagine when I have a lot of ruminating thoughts or intrusive thought is, I think about um this thought being like someone who's in my home. Like my brain is like this big, beautiful, you know, four-story house. And it's got all this comfy furniture. And someone comes in and it's this thought. And I can like really freak out about this thought and be like, oh my god, what are you doing here? Like, what are you doing in my house? And like panic and lock all the doors and run around and that's gonna really like frustrate the thought and make it feel more emboldened to be in my house.
38:35 Jemma Sbeg? Or I can open the door to the thought and say, oh, hey, you're here, come have a cup of coffee, like, come sit down with me. And you can just potter around, like, I know you're in the house. I'm not gonna be like shocked when you show up. I'm just gonna keep living my life and I'm not gonna let you like ruin it. You're you're welcome to walk around and sometimes I'll probably even forget that you're there. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, basically, you wanna find a way that you're not like scared of the fact that you're ruminating. You're just able to detach from it. A closely related tool as well, if you haven't already guessed, is mindfulness. I feel like mindfulness is so often misunderstood. Um, people think that it's like meditation or just emptying your mind. People think that's boring.
39:21 Jemma Sbeg? However, mindfulness is really just the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose. And being in the present moment without applying judgment to the present moment. That is the definition that it was given by the Centre for Mindfulness and Medicine. Like, the preeminent centre for mindfulness. And I like that definition so much more. It's basically just the art of honing in on your senses and bringing awareness to what is happening right now. Whether it's in your body, the sounds around you, the simple act of breathing. Now, how does this help rumination?
40:03 Jemma Sbeg? Rumination by its very nature pulls you away from the present into like these really dark, scary caves in your mind.
40:13 Jemma Sbeg? It may also drag you into the past by asking you to replay events or things that embarrassed you, or it propels you into the future worrying about what might happen. Either way, it's not present based. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is this light attachment to the present moment. And when we kind of walk into that channel of light, we're able to come back. It's like your brain is a child who keeps running away and you're like, oh my God, like, ah, like my child is running away and you're like, you can freak out. You just have to keep bringing them
40:52 Jemma Sbeg? back until they stop, right? You just have to be like, all right, come on, come back now, come back now, back to the present moment, back to the present moment, back to the present moment. You can keep trying to run away, but like, I'm faster than you. I will get you. That's what you have to do with your brain. Mindfulness is actually more powerful than rumination because it's deliberate. Rumination isn't always intentional. Mindfulness always is. It's kind of like there's a hierarchy, right, in your brain of thoughts that take priority and a deliberate intentional thought is always going to come out on top. Mindfulness is like being the parent, the parent
41:34 Jemma Sbeg? to your brain, the parent who brings you back whenever you were running away, whenever you are getting lost. Trust me, as someone who used to think that mindfulness was too hard or was something that wouldn't work, it does, it makes you the boss of your thoughts. It's also super easy. It is something also that you build up, right? Starting with a minute, then going to a minute and one second, a minute and two seconds, three minutes, four minutes. It's a slow process. Mindfulness literally changes the structure of your brain. It changes how your brain
42:12 Jemma Sbeg? Is activated, what connections it seeks, how it thinks about problems. You know, that's incredibly powerful. That kind of ability to deliberately change, like the neural wiring of your brain is sensational. At its core, you know, rumination is really a problem of uncontrolled attention. So whether it's mindfulness, meditation, grounding. Essentially, we want to make sure that our attention isn't only fixated on internal distress and repetitive thoughts. It has somewhere else to go. That there is control over our attention, you know, that we are making choices around what we want to focus on.
42:56 Jemma Sbeg? And if we can do that, that's when we really are able to stop ruminating and just observe our thoughts, which I know I've said a million times, but also just like live with our thoughts. Let them be the little visitors in our head that we acknowledge, we say hi to, we don't panic about, we just let them exist without needing to read too much into them. Okay, we're gonna take a short break. I'm gonna let some of those tips and tricks sit with you for a little while. When we come back, we have a few listener questions, some really good ones actually, around heartbreak, around intrusive thoughts, around so much more. So stay with us.
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47:04 Jemma Sbeg? Okay, I'm back with some listener questions for this topic of rumination. For those of you who don't know, if you follow me on Instagram or follow the podcast on Instagram, I should say, at That Psychology Podcast, I often share the topics that we are going to be discussing in advance, so you can ask any specific questions or dilemmas you may have around that topic or idea for me to answer in the episode. So you don't have to wait till after it comes out for any further questions. So make sure that you are following me at That Psychology Podcast, so you can participate. But for this, today's episode's questions, let's start here.
47:46 Jemma Sbeg? "Hi Gemma, is it possible to positively ruminate or to make yourself only obsess over the good things in our life? I feel like if I could do that, I would be unstoppable." I love this question, and we haven't talked about it at all, which is my favourite kinds of questions when it's just like something completely different. So there is this book called, I think it's called The Upward Spiral, and I'll admit, I haven't finished it yet, but it focuses on exactly what you're talking about. The ability to, I guess, ruminate only about positive things. Now, it's not rumination, because rumination, the definition of it, requires that the thought that we're obsessively thinking about be distressing.
48:31 Jemma Sbeg? It's basically, I don't know what other name to give it, but essentially, yes, you can. You can combat downward spirals or rumination with upward thought spirals, positive thought spirals, upward actions. It is possible to train your brain to loop and focus on the good. The thing is, is that it doesn't come as naturally as negative rumination. Our brains obviously have a built-in negativity bias, meaning we're wired to dwell on what's wrong as a way to learn from those moments and protect ourselves. But just like rumination makes us spiral over perceived failures, fears, moments of embarrassment, we can cultivate a kind of positive rumination by intentionally revisiting our wins,
49:15 Jemma Sbeg? moments of joy, things we're proud of, having like five minutes in our day where we just think about all the good things that have happened in our life, where we just think about everything that we are grateful for, deciding that for every ruminating thought, we have to have a positive thought, we have to list something that has brought us joy, um, having things like vision boards, positive affirmations or mantras on the background of our phone, listening to really positive affirming music, listening to my other podcast mantra, if you would like, um, all of which can help us essentially have a more positive framework and way of relating to the world.
49:56 Jemma Sbeg? The thing is, is that it is something that will take time, it is a conscious practice, a deliberate practice, that you have to invest a lot of energy into, but you can be really successful with it, and the better you get at it, the more time you spend making this a conscious thing that you do, the more that these positive thoughts will start to feel as natural and self reinforcing as some of the negative ones. So, excellent question. Moving on to our second question slash dilemma of the day, this question slash dilemma comes from Caroline. My biggest problem with rumination has been that it's made it very hard for me to get over someone, specifically my ex, someone I know
50:39 Jemma Sbeg? wasn't right for me, but they keep popping into my head and I cannot stop myself going over and over mistakes, good moments, bad moments, even when it hurts. Firstly, why do I do that when I know the relationship was wrong? And how can I stop myself?
50:57 Jemma Sbeg? Oof Caroline, I know exactly what you are talking about and honestly, I've always found it so strange that our brain chooses to punish itself in this way, especially around breakups, especially around the end of romantic love. It's like there's this bruise and we can't stop pressing it, like we have to keep pressing it. Even when we know it hurts, almost to remind ourselves that it hurts. It's super weird. Let me explain why this happens first. We tend to ruminate over people who aren't right for us, not because we want them back necessarily, but because we are trying to find closure, specifically the closure our brains never got. Obviously, it relates back to that primary reason that we ruminate, to find a solution,
51:42 Jemma Sbeg? to find comfort in our emotions and to battle uncertainty. When a relationship ends, especially if it was a relationship that left you quite emotionally confused or left you with unmet needs or left you with resentment, your mind ends up kind of looping around and around and around. It ends up in looping mode. It searches for answers, it wants meaning, it wants a different ending, it wants closure. Because that packages up a thought that we have or an experience that we've had very neatly and allows it to kind of slot into place and make sense. So essentially, the reason that this is happening is that you are trying to solve a puzzle that doesn't have a solution. The reason that your ex keeps popping into your head as well is because of these things called memory pops
52:27 Jemma Sbeg? or memory flare ups. Sometimes we just have random thoughts that we don't want to have because energy is just shooting through our brain in weird ways. It's going down random pathways, it's, you know, we are rearranging neural circuits in the absence of this person and it means that all of these memories and feelings are gonna sometimes bubble to the surface. Sometimes as well, you can have these memory flare ups or memory pops around an anniversary, around a significant date, around a significant place or location or, you know, thing that you're visiting that reminds you of them. It's not in, it's not by any means indicative that you should get back together, that you made the wrong choice.
53:09 Jemma Sbeg? It is just your brain trying to find an easy way to make sense of what has gone on and what has happened. The easiest way to combat this is obviously to try some of the things we've already suggested, but also to start engaging with more interesting things in your life. Start giving your brain something else to entertain it and think about because chances are because of how emotionally salient and recent this experience was, it's probably the most interesting thing to your brain right now. Your brain is grasping on to the thing that's gonna keep it the most entertained. Change that. Give it something else that's entertaining. Keep busy, find new hobbies, set a big post-relationship goal. Uh, something that I do, my breakup routine, go and do every single doctor's appointment that you possibly can, that your insurance covers.
53:54 Jemma Sbeg? Go to every life appointment, health appointment, I don't know, beauty appointment, anything that you haven't done in a while and just fill your calendar with self-improvement, with recognizing your potential, with taking care of yourself. Also really worth having a powerful affirmation or a mantra that you can come back to that will soothe you. Um, something like, I know that true love went past me. I know that there is a lesson in this that I may have to learn. I know this is just expanding me as a person, just something, a touchstone, a phrase to come back to, to help keep you grounded. Also worthwhile to listen to a whole episode that I did on this titled,
54:34 Jemma Sbeg? How to Get Over Someone You Can't Stop Thinking About. It's basically an hour long answer to this question. So good luck. I hope you get through it. All right. I think we only have time for one more question today. Only three questions for this episode, but this one I really, really liked. How do you tell the difference between ruminating and just reflecting or trying to proactively problem solve? I feel like I think about things a lot, but it's not always necessarily bad. Sometimes it's very useful. This is a difficult distinction. You know, we talked about it before, how rumination has this tricky way of convincing you that it's actually problem solving when it's not. The way to really tell the difference between rumination and problem solving or reflection
55:16 Jemma Sbeg? comes down to, I think, the intention around it and the emotional impact. Rumination is repetitive, emotionally charged. It's also quite distressing. And there isn't really a resolution contained in it. There's often a real emotional impact that is rooted in fear, regret, self-blame, anxiety. And the more you ruminate, the worse you tend to feel. Whereas when you are trying to actively work through something and problem solve, the more you think about something, the more you work through something, the better it feels. There is progress there. Healthy reflection is more curious, it's more constructive. And there isn't as much pain.
56:02 Jemma Sbeg? When you reflect on something and go back to it, often the resolution is that you do feel better. You leave a moment of intense thinking with more clarity, with more peace, with some kind of insight or shift in perspective. So the way to really tell the difference is, are you leaving one of these moments and feeling better? Or are you feeling worse? Do you feel like you have somewhere or some kind of solution to do or to follow or to pursue? Or do you not? Um, do you feel like your thinking is action-oriented or is just looping? I think that's really the important distinction. Hopefully that answered your question.
56:47 Jemma Sbeg? I hope as well that this episode was useful to you. If you have made it this far, please leave an emoji that you think indicates overthinking, thought spiraling and rumination in general. Mine is definitely like the wave emoji, not like the hand wave, the ocean wave emoji, because I feel like that is exactly what rumination feels like. You like pop your head above the water and you're like, oh, I think I've figured this out. And then it's like smash, like you're back down. So hopefully you don't, you feel less like that because of this episode and that you've learnt something, you can apply something. Make sure to send this episode to someone who you think could benefit from it. A sibling, a colleague, a friend, a partner, someone in your life who might ruminate a
57:31 Jemma Sbeg? little bit too much. Leave a five star review wherever you are listening. It does really help others discover the podcast. Make sure that you are following along and that you're following me on Instagram as well at that psychology podcast again for like the 50th time in this episode. If you want to be able to submit listener questions or just see what's coming up, what's happening in the psychology of your twenties space. Until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself and remember you are not your thoughts. Talk soon.
58:07 Jemma Sbeg? I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year and something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress, and most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns. So I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop.
58:52 Jemma Sbeg? This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.
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