Tactics to prevent rumination becoming your ruination

“Rumination is ruination” is a phrase I repeat to myself every now and then.

Rumination means brooding over and over on negative events in the past, present or future.

Some people can keep it up for hours, some for decades.

What’s wrong with rumination? First, it is linked to depression and it may be especially harmful to people who have suffered a number of bouts of depression.

Rumination can also multiply your levels of stress. If you ruminate about stressful events in the past, this in itself can cause the release of stress hormones in your body.

And rumination pumps up your anger. Very often, when people lash out in anger in a way that gets them into trouble or that they regret later, they have been ruminating on their grievance beforehand. For instance, people involved in road rage incidents have often been thinking angry thoughts since they left home.

So we know rumination is bad for us. Unfortunately, the evolution of human beings to survive in a hostile world has involved paying more attention to what goes wrong than to what goes right. In other words, we have a negative bias. That negative bias often leads us straight into rumination.

That’s why we need to have tactics to help us to step out of rumination when we notice it’s going on – hence my “rumination is ruination” reminder to myself. Here are some more tactics I like:

1. Return to the present moment when you find yourself lost in rumination. It’s impossible for us to stay in the present moment all the time – we’re just not made that way. But you can practise bringing yourself back every time you notice you’ve wandered off, and you’ll be amazed at how often that happens. You can bring yourself back by:

• Making yourself aware of your breathing. Your breathing is always in the here and now, so when you’re aware of your breathing you’re in the here and now also. For instance you could become aware of the feeling of your breath at the entrance to your nostrils.
• Noticing the feeling of your feet against the floor. If you’re walking, you could notice your feet against the ground.
• Noticing what’s going on around you. One way to do this is to notice and list to yourself five things that you can see or hear in your environment.
• Sometimes it can help if, when you find yourself lost in rumination, you silently say the word “thinking” to yourself and then return to the present moment.
• Try 7/11 breathing. To do this, pause and for a minute or so make each in-breath last for a count of seven and each out-breath for a count of 11 (reduce this to five in and seven out if it works better for you).

2. Practise accepting what you cannot change. Rumination is often about something that happened that we can’t actually change. If you can’t change it, you can at least change your reaction by dropping the rumination. And how do you drop it? Again, by stepping out of that cycle of thinking and into the moment every time you notice it’s going on.

This can often mean accepting that life is full of injustices that will never be resolved.

But it doesn’t mean that you turn into a doormat. People who are good at acceptance also tend to be very good at moving forward with their lives. I suspect this is because they apply their energy to what they can change instead of brooding on what they can’t change.

You could also bear in mind an old Buddhist metaphor, the two arrows.   It goes like this: if you were going about your lawful business and you were struck by an arrow, that would hurt very badly. But if, after the wound heals, you keep going over and over what happened, that’s like taking a second arrow and sticking it into yourself.

What the Buddhists are saying with this metaphor is that life is full of “first arrows.” These are the arrows that are going to hit you anyway no matter how careful you are. What you need to do is to avoid sticking that second arrow into yourself again and again. And do you avoid that?

Well, the second arrow is almost always fuelled by rumination. So once again, learn to step out of the rumination, using the methods mentioned above or other methods. For instance, when you realise you are ruminating you could ask yourself, “What is it costing me to keep thinking these thoughts?” That, in itself, can help you to cut down on rumination.

Actually, if taking a shower, turning cartwheels or going to the gym helps you to stop rumination, that’s fine too: anything that’s healthy will do.

But above all remember: rumination is ruination. If you take that on board, you will be well on the way to cutting down on the amount of time and energy you give to this very unhelpful habit.

Feel free to join Padraig’s mindfulness courses online or in Dublin and throughout Ireland. For more information and some excellent free resources, check out his website padraigomorain.com