Stop overthinking: getting out of rumination

This guide is psychoeducational content. It does not replace a consultation. If your thoughts revolve around the idea that you are a burden to others, or that everything would be simpler without you, do not wait: talk to your doctor the same day, and in immediate danger call the emergency services. If sadness, loss of interest and tiredness have lasted more than two weeks, it may be depression, which can be treated. Never stop a prescribed treatment on your own. Allow fifty minutes to read.

1. Before you begin

It is twenty to eleven at night. You finished the washing-up an hour ago, and since then you have been going back over Tuesday's meeting. Not the content: the sentence you said, the silence that followed, the look on your colleague's face. You are trying to work out what it meant. Then you move on to the broader question: why do you always react like that? Why do other people seem to find it so easy? What is wrong with you?

By midnight you have answered none of these questions. You are only more tired, and in a fairly bad mood.

Three things, straight away.

You are not thinking. Thinking leads to a conclusion, a decision or an action. What you have been doing for the past hour leads to nothing, and doing it a fourth time will not change that. The distinction between the two is the heart of this guide.

Rumination is not a moral failing or a lack of willpower. It is a mental habit, extremely widespread, which takes hold because it gives the impression of being useful. It is changed by training, not by a decision.

It has a measurable cost. The work on the subject has been consistent for thirty years: the tendency to ruminate prolongs low moods, increases the risk of a depressive episode, keeps anxiety going, degrades sleep and damages problem solving — at the very moment when you thought you were solving something.

Who this guide is for

For you if you replay conversations, mistakes, embarrassing scenes, sometimes years afterwards.

For you if you analyse your emotions and the way you work without it getting you anywhere.

For you if you cannot get to sleep because your head will not stop.

For you if those close to you tell you to "stop thinking about it" and you do not know how.

2. What rumination is

A working definition

To ruminate is to think repeatedly, at length and passively about your problems, your emotions, their causes and their consequences, without it leading to an action or a conclusion.

The word comes from the image of an animal chewing the cud. It is rather apt: the same material comes back again and again, a little finer, and nothing new goes in.

Its three marks

Repetition. The same content, again and again, often in the same words.

Being turned towards yourself. The questions are about you: what I said, what I feel, what I am, why I am like this.

The absence of any way out. The sequence does not end with a decision. It ends with exhaustion, with an interruption from outside, or with sleep.

The characteristic "why"

The questions of rumination almost always begin with "why":

• Why did I say that?
• Why does this always happen to me?
• Why can I not manage it like everybody else?
• Why did he answer me like that?
• Why do I feel like this?

These questions have two remarkable properties: they are insoluble, and they seem profound. That is exactly why people spend hours on them.

What it produces

Sadness that lasts longer. Tiredness. Decisions put off. Attention that is unavailable for everything else. A memory that becomes selective — while we ruminate, we remember failures far better than successes, which feeds the loop. And a feeling of being cut off from what is happening around us.

The difference from worry

Worry looks ahead: "what if". Rumination looks behind: "why". They are two versions of the same mechanism — a repetitive, verbal, abstract thought, hard to interrupt — and they coexist in most people. If anticipation dominates in you, see Constant worry: generalised anxiety disorder.

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