Ruminating
Being conscious, aware beings its only natural to find ourselves filled with thoughts. Specific thoughts, random thoughts, thought with loose associations to one another and so on. Often individuals find themselves focus or fixated on a particular thought or theme for one or many reasons. It can happen at all hours of the day and even at night for those that have difficulty sleeping. Finding ourselves circumventing theme can last a few minutes for some or even hours believe it not. If this is something you experience daily or sporadically throughout the week or months, its fairly common and its called rumination.
In order to provide better understand what rumination is, lets assign it a working definition we can all use as a baseline. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology (2020) rumination is: “obsessional thinking involving excessive, repetitive thoughts or themes that interfere with other forms of mental activity. It is a common feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder”. As you can see from our working definition there is an obsessive component that is great emphasis to ruminating. There seems to be a hyper-focus of attention on thoughts or themes for a specific purpose. Sometimes these “purposes” aren’t conscious enough for us to understand the reason for the amount of focus we are giving something and sometimes we know exactly the reason for excessively thinking about things.
Have you ever found yourself ruminating about anything in specific? If yes, what was it about?
There are many reasons as to what leads to ruminative thinking. I have met a variety of individuals that don’t necessarily have specific reasons for their ruminations, and I have also encountered individuals whom have given me specific reasons or causes for their ruminations. Sometimes it comes across as a generalized worry about something such as a decision that needs to be made and being unsure as to what is the best decision to make. Such an example can lead to ruminating as the “goal” of ruminating is to arrive at the best possible outcome. Another example is about someone whom feels guilty about a situation that occurred in which they believe to be responsible for. They might ruminate over the moment as a means of “validating” their guilt and responsibility in the matter. Or they may be ruminating about the situation to attempt to understand how it even all happened. As you can see there is rumination taking place in both these examples however the “goal” or outcome of both is vastly different.
The reason for bringing up the idea of a “goal” with rumination that there is usually something we are trying to accomplish by doing it either consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, in my opinion is important to ask ourselves “what am I trying to accomplish with ruminating over …?”, “what is supposed to be the result of all of this thinking”. Asking yourself either of these two questions will begin to put into context all that mental and emotional energy that being put into those thoughts. We need to know what our plan is with these thoughts other it ends up being a “round” discussion in our minds with essentially no end. For example, if you have been thinking about how financially strapped you are and how disaster is close by and asking ourselves “what am I trying to accomplish by constantly thinking about my financial ruin?” It may bring us to the underlying idea about needing to create or increase my sense of security which in my opinion is not about finances but about my ability to navigate uncertainty, need and self-doubt. Let us see these are our actual worries in the matter then a follow up to what we have just brought to greater awareness about ourselves would be “what do I need to do in order to increase my sense of security, resourcefulness and confidence?” We can even ask ourselves, “what options exist for me to increase my sense of security, resourcefulness and confidence?” This kind of questioning now gives our ruminating a new path to follow which is a path towards resolution in the matter. Ruminating causes a hyper focusing of an issue(s) it does not necessarily let us know what to do with it and that is where we know come in to command our thoughts in a more useful and beneficial manner.
Now that we have established how important it is to know what we are attempting to accomplish with so much thinking we need to work on giving the “amount” of thinking boundaries so that it does not occur our whole waking day. One way of giving our thoughts order is to establish 1-3 periods of time throughout the day where you think all you want about whatever it was that was in your mind, but you put a boundary of time on it. For example, in the morning I can choose to think from 8:30-9:00am all I want about … and as soon as 9am hits we are done providing these thoughts attention. We can close the thought expression by saying something to ourselves along the lines of “I gave myself permission to give … attention for the past 30 minutes which has been sufficient for my purpose of … I choose now to return to my waking day and immerse myself in the daily responsibilities, tasks and activities in a focused and concentrated manner”. Implementing this boundary and assertiveness over the ongoing ruminating will work towards organizing it in a manner that is more useful rather than allowing it to occur throughout the whole day even during unfavorable times. Allow yourself time to implement this mechanism, give it a consistent 2-3 weeks to notice the benefit in ordering your thoughts in a controlled manner. The key to having it work in your advantage in the consistency, the more you do it the more you will be re-programming your mind to function as you want it to rather than feeling out of control or helpless in the matter.
