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Break the Rumination Cycle

Do you ever find yourself stewing over work, past events, or worries when you'd like to be relaxing, paying attention to your partner or child, or sleeping? This repetitive return to unhappy or disturbing thoughts without productive resolution is called rumination, and it can be damaging to your health, your relationships, and your ability to move forward in life.

You might ruminate over

• A frustrating or worrisome situation at work
• A conflict with your partner, a friend, your boss, or a coworker
• Criticism you've received
• Financial pressure

Why Rumination Is a Problem

If rumination led to solutions and improvements in your life, it might be a good thing. Too often, however, rumination simply adds to your stress and undermines your wellbeing:

• Rumination revives the negative emotions that are associated with an unhappy or disturbing event. Instead of processing those emotions and moving on, rumination causes your brain to stir them up over and over again.
• A habit of rumination prevents you from relaxing, restoring your mental energy, and enjoying the moment you are in. It can muddle your thinking and damage relationships, fueling a destructive cycle that can intensify self-critical thoughts and feelings of isolation.
• Rumination can interfere with your sleep, and poor sleep quality can negatively affect your thinking, your ability to manage your moods, and your health.
• Rumination is associated with depression. A habit of rumination can prolong an episode of depression, while interfering with efforts to get needed social support.

How to Break the Rumination Cycle

When you get stuck in a cycle of rumination, it can be hard to get out of it. The recurring thoughts can harden into a habit with similarities to unhealthy lifestyle habits like smoking or drinking (but fortunately without the addictive biochemistry). To avoid this, it's best to address rumination quickly, before it becomes an established thought pattern.

Here are some tips for when you find yourself ruminating:

• Make productive efforts to find a solution. Instead of simply reliving your unhappy experience, look for a solution. Think about what you can do to improve the situation, keep it from happening again, or move on from it on a positive forward path. Break down the steps you need to take to move forward, and plan in your mind how you'll take them. Become a problem solver.
• If you are ruminating about work when you are home, build a real or symbolic transition into the shift from work to home life. A commute can do this. So can a walk around the block, a change of clothes, turning on some relaxing music, or anticipating a happy conversation unrelated to work.
• Distract yourself from the ruminating thoughts. Do something that makes it difficult or impossible to think your repetitive thoughts:
  • Call a friend or family member (and don't even think about mentioning your ruminating worry).
  • Read a book or listen to an audiobook.
  • Play a game or do a challenging puzzle.
  • Watch a movie.
  • Listen to music that absorbs your attention.
  • Exercise.
  • Go for a walk around your neighborhood or in nature.
  • Engage in a hobby or passion (drawing, woodworking, music, knitting, etc.).
• Challenge your thinking. Is this a real problem, or could you be blowing it out of proportion? Might there be another explanation for what you think happened? Might someone else see the situation differently? If you're imagining worst-case outcomes, ask yourself how realistic those are? What's a more likely outcome? Talking to a friend might help you put things in perspective and get a more realistic assessment. (Beware of using a friend to help fan the flames of your rumination.)
• Avoid overthinking mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It's how people learn and grow. Making a mistake does not make you a less worthy person. If you've made a mistake, think about what you can learn from it and do differently next time. Forgive and be kind to yourself.
• Try mindfulness and meditation. In the practice of mindfulness, you focus on the present moment, your experience right now. What happened yesterday or earlier today is not relevant. When engaging in mindfulness you also accept and embrace your current experience, including its joy and pain. You let go of judgment. Clearing your mind in meditation can have a similar effect in breaking the cycle of ruminating thoughts. Both practices shift your attention, make you aware of your thoughts and feelings, and help you move toward acceptance—all while helping you calm your body and your mind.

When You're Stuck in Rumination

When you're stuck in an enduring cycle of rumination and one-time measures aren't enough, it can help to deal with the problem as an unhealthy habit. Habits are triggered by cues in your environment, emotions, or thinking. When you experience a trigger, your habitual behavior or thinking follows a set pattern.

Here are some tips to break a rumination habit:

• Identify the cues that trigger your ruminating thoughts. When do you tend to ruminate? In the evening? At night when you're trying to sleep? After a particular type of event? When you're alone? When you're sad? In certain places? You might keep a log for a week or so to note the patterns of your ruminating thoughts. Recognizing the situations in which you have ruminating thoughts can help you identify the cues that trigger them.
• Where you can, avoid or change the cues that trigger your rumination. You might do this by changing your routine. If you tend to ruminate when you first get home from work and try to relax, do something else when you first get home. Call someone. Go for a walk. Read a chapter of a book. If watching or listening to the news lowers your mood and invites rumination, watch or listen to something else. Shaking up your routine can help you disrupt your ruminating habit.
• Find alternative responses to your rumination cues, and practice them. Once you've identified the cues that trigger your rumination, come up with alternative responses to them. Take a different action when you experience those cues. If feeling sad is your trigger, pay attention to your emotions, and immediately do something different when you start to feel sad. Find a distracting activity that keeps your mind off your rumination. Over time, and with lots of practice, this new response will start to override your old ruminating habit.

How Therapy Can Help

Rumination habits can become so deeply ingrained that you may have trouble breaking the cycle by yourself:

• The practice of mindfulness can be helpful for many people and can be more helpful under the guidance of an expert.
• Working with a professional therapist, especially one with expertise in cognitive-behavioral therapy, can help you change unproductive thought patterns, including persistent rumination. There's even a specialty for helping people with rumination habits: rumination-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy.
• Because rumination can be associated with depression and other mental health problems, if your rumination problem is persistent and keeping you from living to your full potential, and especially if you have symptoms of another mental health problem, you should make an appointment with a mental health therapist.

For More Information

"Four Tips from Habit Research to Reduce Worry and Rumination," Psychology Today (By E.R. Watkins, July 28, 2013). https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mood-thought/201307/four-tips-habit-research-reduce-worry-and-rumination

"How to stop ruminating thoughts," Medical News Today (Last medically reviewed November 8, 2019). https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326944

"How to turn off work thoughts during your free time," Ted Talks (By G. Winch, November 2019). https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_how_to_turn_off_work_thoughts_during_your_free_time. (A transcript is available in 25 languages)

"The Seven Hidden Dangers of Brooding and Ruminating," Psychology Today (By G. Winch, June 13, 2013). https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201306/the-seven-hidden-dangers-brooding-and-ruminating