Rumination is a habit (and you can break it!)

Declan Molony

The voice in my head is an asshole. — Dan Harris

I've always assumed that habits were just physical things: the habit of washing your hands before eating; the habit of smoking cigarettes after sex; the habit of checking your phone first thing in the morning. Recently I learned that there are mental habits, that some of them are bad habits, and that those bad habits can be broken.

It's normal to reflect on your past to learn from your mistakes. This is a good mental habit. But when you're spending hours every day thinking about the same past event, that's a bad mental habit known as rumination.

Let’s say you had an argument with a friend at a party. The next day in the shower you think:

“If only I had said this, then he would’ve agreed with me!”

That's normal. You’re processing the event. But if you begin thinking about it all day long, and even the next day, then you're no longer reflecting and have veered into the territory of rumination. Clearly this event was important for you—that’s why your brain wants to review it repeatedly to make sure you didn’t miss any details. But eventually there's no more analysis that can be done and your brain can get stuck in review mode. When that happens, it can actually damage your health.

Why ruminating is bad for your health

Personally, the longer I allow myself to ruminate, the more aggressive my inner voice becomes:

“If only I had said this, then he would’ve agreed with me!
…
And if I wasn’t such an idiot then I would’ve thought of that.
…
God, why am I so fucking stupid??”

According to Dr. Ethan Kross in his book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, this type of self-shaming actually worsens our health:

When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term.
This happens because our cells interpret the experience of chronic psychological threat as a viscerally hostile situation akin to being physically attacked.

Unfortunately, you can’t change what happened in the past, and ruminating on it just makes things worse. But there is a way to break this mental habit!

How to stop ruminating

Recurring ruminative thoughts are like a toddler whining for candy. If you give in to her demands, it teaches her that whining works to get your attention, and so she’ll whine more.

Similarly, allowing yourself to endlessly engage in ruminative thoughts legitimizes them as normal, and consequently those thoughts increase in frequency because they know they can effectively grab your attention.

Good parents know that saying “no” to a child is important to their development because they learn that you're willing to set boundaries and will enforce them. But how you say “no” is equally important. Telling the child to “shut up”, or neglecting their request entirely, creates a poor relationship with your child.

Equivalently, you shouldn’t be mean to ruminative thoughts or neglect them, because that can cause them to fight back.^[1]

Instead, gently telling the toddler, “it's before dinner, candy would ruin your appetite,” lets her know that you acknowledge her request and that you see her, but you will not give in to her demands. She may whine at first, but if you maintain your resolve, then she’ll learn that whining doesn’t work.

In the same way, ruminative thoughts want to be acknowledged and know that you see them, but you don't have to engage with them.

My ruminations typically happen with respect to my dating life. When I go on a date and it doesn't work out (when I was hoping it would), my mind immediately goes into detective mode: what did I miss? did I make any mistakes? what could I do better next time?

These are all helpful questions, but only in moderation.

Even after I think deeply on the matter for 20-30 minutes, the rest of the day (and the next day, and the next…) my brain keeps returning to the date and wants to solve something that is unsolvable—which is to change the past.

I've learned to do two things to help stop ruminations:

I analyze the event in as much depth as possible by journaling about it.
After that, throughout my day when I start having thoughts like, “what if I had said this?”, I say to that thought, “thanks for showing up, but I’m ruminating. I've already journaled about this.”
1. And it works! The ruminative thought goes away…for about 30 seconds. Like the toddler, ruminative thoughts really want to make sure that you’re 100% resolved in your conviction.

When I first started doing this practice of labeling thoughts (which comes from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), I would have to stay vigilant all day long to ensure that I don't slip into ruminating, and thankfully by the next day my brain would quiet down. Nowadays after a date that doesn’t work out, and after I journal about it, I label any lingering negative thoughts as ruminations which quickly go away once I show them that I’m not going to engage with them.

Eventually my brain moves on and thinks about other stuff, just like how the toddler eventually gives up on her demands for candy when you keep gently telling her “no”.

^{^}
Metacognitively, the worst thing you can do is to actively suppress your thoughts. Saying, “I don't want to think that thought anymore!” doesn't work, and can paradoxically increase the frequency of that thought. It’s similar to if someone told you, “don’t picture a pink elephant for the next five minutes!” Well, you’re probably going to picture a pink elephant as soon as they say that.
I didn't know this when I was 19 years old. Back then I had an intrusive thought so disturbing, that I immediately tried to suppress it—to memory-wipe myself from ever having thought it. That really doesn't work. My brain tortured me by blasting that thought on repeat for a year straight. The more I tried to suppress it, the more frequently it would come up. It was only when I finally acknowledged the thought, discussed it with a trusted friend, and journaled about it, that the thought finally went away.

Recently I learned that there are mental habits, that some of them are bad habits, and that those bad habits can be broken.

You mention Cognitive Behavioral Therapy later on, but maybe it's worth pointing out here that many mental habits are cognitive behaviors. Cognitive behaviors are a proper subset of behaviors; so anything that is true of behaviors generally (e.g. "behaviors can be changed") is true of cognitive behaviors.

Thank you, I know a few people who could use this article, I guess I will send them a link so that they can ruminate on this instead. :D

I guess there are different ways how people perceive their own thoughts. Going from worst to best, it's

something you are
something that happens to you
something you do

The first option is worst, because the people who are stuck here will actively resist changing their destructive thought patterns, because changing their thought patterns would feel to them kinda like dying. With the second option, at least the person can wish that their thought patterns change, even if they believe that such change is beyond their control. The third perspective makes it seem obvious: if it's something you do, well, then it's something you can stop doing, right? Of course, that is easier said than done, so without proper strategy this can lead to the mistake of underestimating the problem.

I like how you provide both the biological and the cognitive perspectives. Let me add a third, (armchair) psychoanalytical perspective: it seems that as you ruminate, the focus shifts from criticizing what you did, to criticizing what you are. (I mean, it is right there in your example.) That doesn't seem like an accident, but more like the thing that makes rumination so persistent.

Mistakes happen; character flaws are (assumed to be, especially by hostile voices) permanent. The fact that you happened to make a mistake once is usually unimportant in long term. So why would you waste so much time contemplating it? I think it is the idea that the fact that you made a mistake is evidence of some deeper character flaw that makes the thoughts so difficult to stop. I mean, if making mistakes is a pattern that will follow you through your entire life, then it would be rational to spend a lot of time fixing the pattern. (The only problem is that the rumination actually fixes nothing; it just keeps criticizing.)

I am just guessing here, but I would propose a threefold defense against the dark thoughts:

The mistake probably wasn't as serious as you imagine it. In most situations, a week later the only person who remembers it will be you.
A mistake could be a part of a pattern, but is the pattern really as strong as it seems to you now? Do you really make the same mistake in 100% of situations? Or maybe only in 50%? Are you sure the number is fixed? Maybe it keeps getting smaller, but occasionally the dice fall the wrong way.
The worst case is, maybe you actually are imperfect. So what? No one is perfect. (Not even the person your hostile voice is based on.) We all sometimes try, and sometimes fail. That's life.

We could go deeper and realize that the true purpose of criticizing yourself is not fixing yourself (which should be obvious from the fact that it has never worked in the past, and yet you keep doing it), but appeasing the hostile voice, by admitting your lower status. You are fighting ghosts.

I thought about your comment for a few days, especially the line "You are fighting ghosts."

That's probably more true for prisoners than most. To be locked in a cell for the rest of your life, wondering, ruminating, if things could have been different...

How lucky the rest of us are to merely ruminate over a lost love, or from upsetting a friend.

For prisoners, their mistake was serious. It's not just in their heads. They're haunted.

I think this is exactly the right message. It's a habit and we don't have to keep doing it.

Also, reading this, I realized that my web app BetterQualities (which provides guidance for letting go of various unskillful qualities as they arise) actually doesn't offer any guidance for stopping rumination. That's quite an omission on my part! (It's funny that this didn't occur to me even when I alluded to rumination in the Heedfulness Workouts post...) And since I typically encounter maybe one rumination-causing event per year, I don't know when I'll be able to develop and test a method of my own for countering it.

Would you perhaps be open to providing a short, actionable guidance text that would help the app's users let go of rumination when they experience it? This could be in exchange for, e.g., linking to one or more of your articles from the app and my Substack. If that sounds like something you might consider doing, we can hash out the details over DM.

My mind's default state is to ruminate all day long if I let it. For most people, short-term rumination (even if it's all day long) isn't all that bad. But if you're beating yourself up for days, weeks, or years, then it certainly qualifies as a problem worth addressing.

I'll DM you on the side.