Anxiety and Rumination

Why can’t I stop thinking about this?

One of the common reasons people seek out therapy is rumination. Sometimes people struggle with managing thoughts about past traumatic events, not being able to stop worrying, and replaying events where they find themselves feeling critical of their own interactions.

Rumination is the pattern of thinking about the same thing, over and over again. 

Often these thoughts tend to be sad or critical. Rumination can become a cycle that creates increased stress and discomforting the longer the cycle continues, the harder it is to overcome. People who experience rumination may begin to believe that something’s wrong with them. They can’t move beyond these terrible thoughts and shame, guilt, and isolation creep in.

While rumination can be related to anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress syndromes, it’s historically been an adaptive mechanism for us. Paying attention to the negative and replaying past traumas can help us discern what to avoid in the future.

When thinking about rumination, I like to think about how our brains evolved. In order for our species to survive across thousands of years, we needed to pay attention to threat and danger. We learned which berries were poisonous and in which caves the scary predators lived. Our reptilian brains became wired to sense danger. As we evolved, our pre-frontal cortex evolved which is responsible for thinking about things, analyzing, problem-solving, and developing insight.

We learned to survive because we focused on the negative (the threat).

Remembering the danger and proactively seeking it out is related to what we know today as “confirmation bias.” Our brains are very powerful search engines that like to be correct and are prone to remembering negative experiences. So the brain searches for anything resembling a negative event or threat so it can prepare to protect us.

Confirmation bias also allows us to make decisions when there are an overwhelming number of options. Overwhelm usually triggers an anxiety response (reptilian brain and survival) so confirmation bias helps narrow things down and categorize them to keep us safe. However, when we only seek out information that supports one way of seeing the world, ie, what’s dangerous, we can get siloed in those thoughts. Then those thoughts become our reality. We get scared, we anticipate the worst, we believe we’re terrible people, etc.

The human brain has somewhere around 70,000 thoughts a day.

Not all of the thoughts are given the same weight. We tend to remember the negative ones over the positive which, again, is a survival mechanism. It is much easier to recall an insult or being terribly hurt or offended than recalling when we received compliments or validation. 

Rumination is the process of replaying over and over again these negative thoughts, events, or interactions. Yes, it’s helpful to be aware of what can cause us harm and rumination can be protective in some ways. (Hurt me once shame on you, hurt me twice shame on me). While rumination can help gather useful insight, once you have thoroughly looked at the thought, event, or interaction, replaying it over and over again it is not likely going to give you any new information. It will probably instead foster feelings of anxiety, shame and guilt. 

Ruminating is like opening the refrigerator door a hundred times, hoping to find something different, but you already know what’s in there!

Therapy can be a helpful step in finding tools that help manage anxiety and rumination. Reach out to learn more.