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 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. Psychologists have studied rumination for decades, especially Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, and what they found is exactly this: running the thought in circles again and again does not solve the problem, it trains the rumination.

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. The same underlying pattern, that repetition lowers the threshold for how little it takes next time, is described broadly in depression research by Scott Monroe and Kate Harkness among others under the name kindling: the first episode needs a large occasion, the later ones come from less and less.

Ruminating is not thinking

This is the most important thing to tell apart, and it is easy to lose sight of. 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. From the outside they look 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

So 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. It is the core of what Adrian Wells calls metacognitive therapy: training the ability to see your own thoughts from the outside and choose whether to take another lap.

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 reads 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.

Some laps are waiting for a closure that never comes

Some kinds of rumination have a particular shape. They do not just circle a problem, they are waiting for something. An acknowledgement. An apology. Someone admitting they wronged you, the thing that happened being made right, the past somehow being corrected. The lap keeps going because it is keyed to a signal that says now it is finished, and that signal has to come from one particular person.

The trouble is that when the closure has to come from someone who does not send it, the waiting cannot end on its own. It is not because your pain is invalid, or because you do not deserve the acknowledgement. Maybe you do. But the lap is set up to close only when the other person does something, and if the other person never does, you wait for a structurally endless time. It can run the rest of your life without ever arriving, not because you are not thinking clearly enough, but because the closure sits somewhere you cannot reach yourself.

Grief is the closure you can give yourself

Here is the way out, and it is not the one you would expect. It is not to demand the apology, or to convince the other person, or to wait a little longer. The way out is to grieve. To grieve that the acknowledgement never comes.

It sounds like defeat, but it is actually the opposite. As long as you wait, you hold the lap open, you keep hold of the idea that it can still be closed from the outside. When you grieve, you do something else: you close it yourself. Grieving is not the same as demanding that the past be made good again. It is acknowledging that it will not be, and feeling the loss in that. And that, feeling the loss, is exactly what lets the lap end. You move the closure from something the other person has to do, to something you can do yourself. It does not hurt less straight away, but it makes the waiting stop being endless.

If you are the one listening

If it is someone else stuck in the lap, and you want to help, there is a trap worth knowing. The immediate loving response is to give more: more sympathy, hearing the story again, getting as angry on their behalf as they are. But all of that is inside the lap. When you retell the wrong along with them, you feed the same race, you widen the trace a little.

The more loving version is harder. It is to name the loop. To say something along the lines of "it sounds like you are waiting for an apology from someone who is not going to give it to you". But the order is everything. Say it too early, before the pain has been met, and it is heard as a dismissal, as if you are telling them to just move on. So first the pain has to be validated, it has to be seen properly and taken seriously. And only then, once the person knows you are on their side, can you gently point to the loop itself. Not to close the conversation, but to open the way out that does not exist inside the lap.

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 free 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 something wrong with you

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.