When your thoughts go in circles

On rumination, and why thinking more doesn't help

Rumination feels like work. It feels as if you are about to figure something out, as if one more pass through it will make the pieces fall into place. But if you have ever lain awake at three in the morning running the same thought round and round, you also know that you usually get up no clearer than you lay down. You have not solved anything. You have just been round again.

There is a reason for that, and it is worth understanding, because it tells you why the solution that feels most right, thinking even more, is exactly the one that keeps you stuck.

Rumination trains rumination

Every time a thought takes its lap in you, it lays down a small trace. The route for thinking that particular thought in that particular way gets a touch wider and a touch faster to drop into next time. It is the same mechanism as in any other habit: the route that gets used gets stronger.

That means rumination is not neutral. When you take the lap, you do not solve the problem, you practise taking the lap. What you get out of ruminating is more rumination. The thought comes more easily next time, turns into a spiral faster, and takes hold in more situations. You are not working your way through something. You are wearing the path deeper.

Ruminating is not thinking

This is the most important distinction, and it is easy to lose. It is not that you should avoid thinking about what is hard. You should. But there is a difference between thinking your way forward and ruminating.

When you think your way forward, it moves. You get somewhere, a knot loosens, afterwards you know something you did not know before, or you decide something. When you ruminate, it goes in circles. You take the same laps around the same things, hit the same dead ends, and end up where you started, only more tired. The outward form looks alike, it all happens inside your head, but one of them moves you and the other digs.

So the question is not whether you think a lot or a little. It is whether the thinking moves. When it stops moving and just runs round, that is not a sign you should think longer or harder. It is a sign the race has stopped leading anywhere.

You can't think your way out of a thought spiral

It follows that the usual strategy does not work. When the rumination is running and you try to think your way free of it, you only feed it. Another lap, another trace, the route gets wider. Scolding yourself for ruminating, "why can I not just stop", is no way out either, because that is just another lap, and one with self-blame in it.

A thought spiral does not get stopped from the inside by thinking more. It gets stopped by stopping the feeding, and by doing something else with that energy.

Break it, and dilute it

The first tool is the simplest and the hardest: stop feeding the race. When you notice you have gone into the lap, the answer is to break it and set something else going, and not to think your way out. Get up, do something with your body, call someone, change rooms. The point is not to crush the thought by force, but to give another route something to win with, so the rumination does not have an empty room to itself. An empty, unstructured moment is where rumination has its best conditions, because there is no competitor. Give it one.

The second tool is being able to see it while it happens. To notice "I am in the lap now" without immediately doing what the lap says, which is to take another turn. It sounds small, but it is the whole difference, because it is in that little gap, where you see the thought instead of being inside it, that you can choose to do something else.

Describe how you feel, and find out what is actually pressing

Here is a tool that does something rumination never does: it moves you.

Rumination usually runs on top of a problem you cannot get a grip on. But if, instead of circling the problem itself, you stop and describe, as concretely as you can, how you actually feel, you can often put a finger on what is really at stake. Is it unease, a sense that something could go wrong? Is it meaninglessness, a direction that has fallen away? Is it that you do not feel up to something? Is it simply too much at once?

The feeling is not noise. It is a reading of what is missing underneath. And once you can name what is actually pressing, you have moved from circling to knowing something, and that is something you can act on. A problem you can name, you can do something about, or accept, or ask for help with. A problem you only circle, you can only dig deeper.

Lower the baseline pressure

Rumination thrives when the pressure is high. Poor sleep, stress, loneliness, hunger: everything that raises the overall pressure makes the spiral easier to fall into and harder to climb out of. It is no accident that the worst rumination happens at night, when you are tired and alone and everything feels bigger. A large part of getting on top of rumination is not about the thoughts at all, but about lowering the floor they grow in. Sleep, if you can. And if the floor stays high for no clear reason, it is worth getting the physical side checked by your doctor.

You are not the only one, and it is not a fault in you

It helps to know that this is not something wrong with you in particular. Brains do it. The person who lies down to sleep and ends up running the day's most embarrassing moment through for the twentieth time is not weak or self-absorbed. It is a system that has dropped into a route that feeds itself. When you stop believing the rumination is a sign that you are wrong, some of the pressure that keeps the spiral running falls away.

It is a loop, not a character flaw

You do not stop a thought spiral by trying harder. You stop it by seeing it, refusing to feed it, and doing something else, and by lowering the pressure it lives on. Most of it feels as though it is about you and your willpower, but it is about a route that has grown too wide, and that route can grow narrow again once it no longer gets to win every time.