Here are two things that are true:
- If you don’t give something the attention it deserves, it may start to take more attention that it deserves.
- There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.
Rumination is a failure to have an unpleasant thought just once, driven by a sense that it has not been given the attention it deserves.
So, to stop ruminating, we must first give the object of rumination the attention it deserves, and then choke it of further mental resources.
These are two separate skills. We will label them “Answer the Rumination” and “Hang up the phone”.
What counts as rumination?
Is the inciting event older than two weeks? Have you already processed it by talking to 1-3 friends about it? Do you find yourself thinking about it compulsively even though the thinking is unpleasant? If yes, it’s probably rumination.
Rumination includes:
- Classics: reviewing an angering event, resentment over neglect
- Mentally reviewing an event to determine the severity of an event and self-reassure (note: the more we replay an event, the less certain we become about it!)
- Mentally reviewing a memory to make sure it is accurate
- Reviewing contingency plans for unwanted outcomes
- Thinking about something that has been resolved to make sure it has been resolved
Give the object the attention it deserves
Find 20 minutes when you are feeling level-headed, and not at any of the extremes of emotion you normally have about the object. Put a block on your calendar and move it until it approaches at a time your activation is under 3. Then ask yourself what the question is. What is it that feels unresolved?
You’ll have to use your judgment to break up a family of topics. So if you have a difficult relationship you tend to ruminate over often, you might need to separate:
- What kind of person, overall, am I in this relationship – how should I see myself?
- What are the likeliest 3 outcomes that I’m really scared of, and how will I deal with them?
- What is the exact way in which my trust was betrayed?
- How reasonable is it of me to still be mad about –
- I want to improve, but I do not know how much improvement I can expect.
Usually, if this is something you ruminate about, you will already have answers to these – answers as good as you’re going to get, anyway. Your job, if you cannot find new good answers, is to write down your unsatisfactory current answers and accept that those are your answers for now.
What’s an answer? The answer to a “what kind of narrative am I in / how should I see myself” question is a narrative. The answer to a “what do I do if” question is a plan. The answer to “what is going to happen?” is a prediction. You’ll have to figure out shape of answer your brain is looking for, and provide one that’s good enough, so that when the concern comes up again, you have something ready to hand.
If thinking about it just once and trying to not think about it again is not doable for you (perhaps because it’s related to an ongoing situation in your life, or because it simply does not seem realistic), make a calendar event to review it at the cadence you think is necessary. This event is the only time you can review it.
As you fill this out, remember that this isn’t the main exercise. To not ruminate, you actually have to practice not thinking thoughts about your object of rumination. You’re filling this out so that your future self will be able to drop the thought more easily, knowing that you’ve set aside time to thoughtfully answer and solve these questions.
The following is from https://drmichaeljgreenberg.com/how-to-stop-ruminating/
Remember that ruminating is doing something, and not ruminating is not doing it. If someone says they’re not ruminating but it requires effort, that tells us that they are doing something, which indicates a flaw in their approach. Not ruminating needs to feel like getting off of a treadmill, not getting onto one. The experience of not ruminating should feel as effortless as lying on your sofa.
But please note that when I say that not ruminating should feel easy and not require effort, I only mean that the experience of not ruminating should feel effortless. I don’t mean that, for example, making the decision to stop ruminating is always easy, or that figuring out what’s wrong with your approach is always easy. There are many parts of this process that do require effort. All I mean is that when you’re not ruminating, it shouldn’t feel like you’re making an effort.
How to stop
The simplest and best way to stop is to just “stop feeding it”. You “neither pull nor push”. You don’t need to do anything to stop ruminating – you just “get off the treadmill”.
If the resistance to getting off the treadmill is small you can just do it without fanfare, but if there’s emotional resistance to letting go, you can think “I already have an answer to this, it’s [cached answer]. I don’t need more right now.”
If the resistance is inchoate and unresponsive to reason, and you need to “trick” yourself, I recommend this exercise:
In rapid succession, answer six questions, ending with a question of what you will do nex. The first five questions are “imagine a sense” questions.
- What’s a thing one can see? (Don’t pick something you can see – imagine something. You want your brain active, ‘paging out’ its previous contents.
- What’s a thing one can hear?
- What’s a thing one can taste?
- What’s a thing one can smell?
- What’s a thing one can touch? (What is its temperature, texture?)
- What’s a thing I should be doing right now?
And then immediately pivot to doing that last thing.
Actionables, summarized
1/ Recognize rumination when it happens. Is this something that you already have a good cached answer to? If yes, skip to 4.
2/ Okay, so you don’t have a good cached answer. Are you in the right state (well slept, not very emotional) to generate an answer? If no, schedule it for a day you expect to be well sleep and not super emotional. If yes, Answer The Rumination.
3/ Stop ruminating. If the ruminating part is ‘verbal’, you can talk to it, give it the cached answer and switch your attention away. If it is not verbal, does not ‘seem like a person who can be swayed by argument’ (i.e. the reflex model is a better fit for reasoning what to do with an impulse), then push the rumination out of your working memory with six new mental objects, as described above.