transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:07] Hello, and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. Today, we're talking about overthinking and a particular form of it called rumination. Overthinking can be really difficult for people to deal with, in part because knowing that you overthink doesn't seem to help that much. If anything, ruminating about your rumination is its own special kind of problem. So we're going to be talking about why that is. What is rumination? Why does it tend to make us feel worse? And why does developing insight about it not seem to actually solve the problem very much? Then we'll talk about what we can actually do to break the cycle of rumination. And to help me do that, I'm joined by today's guest, as usual, clinical psychologist, Dr. Rick Hanson. So Dad, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2:
[00:55] I'm good and I'm already experiencing anticipatory delight at this topic.

Speaker 1:
[01:00] I think it's a great one. I learned a lot doing the prep for today's episode. And before we get into it, I want to give you a quick reminder that Rick actually has a course coming up that's focused on rumination. It is a five-week online course that's focused on practical tools for letting go of negative thought loops. You can learn more about it at rickhanson.com/ruminating and use coupon code BEINGWELL25 to receive a 25% off discount. So I'm going to start with a deceptively simple question here, Dad. What's rumination?

Speaker 2:
[01:32] An official definition of rumination that comes from response styles theory, drum roll and name check, is that when we're ruminating, we are repetitively and passively. Two key words, thinking about our problems, their causes, and their consequences. We are, in other words, doing laps around the rumination track. And because neurons that fire together wire together, we are reinforcing our ruminative tendencies every time we go around the track. So to kind of highlight some of the characteristics, as you know, Forrest, rumination typically is really saturated with self. It's self-referential. It's about oneself as a character and what happened in the past and also in the future. I will say as well that people do often ruminate about others, not in self-referential ways, but out of sort of concern or a sense of defeat, let's say as aging parents might about their adult children. Second, rumination tends to be quite abstract. In other words, it's sort of conceptual. It's running the story. We're just going through the movie over and over again, rather than concretely problem-solving, we're getting into the particular details. Obviously, it's repetitive and it's kind of passive. We're carried along by it. I think one of the interesting things to pay attention to is what are the somatic markers for you in ruminating? There's a weird kind of comfort. It's like sinking into a bath, you know? A friend of mine was talking to another friend one time and my friend was saying, man, I've had my head up my ass lately. And his friend replied, yeah, but it's great to be home again.

Speaker 1:
[03:24] I think we've all been there. I've definitely been there. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2:
[03:28] And I would say last, people feel afflicted by ruminating. Yeah. You know, if you summarize a lot of the psychological factors, not external factors, which are obviously really significant too, but internal factors of so much of our distress, dysfunction, suffering and psychopathology. Researchers have found that a lot of those factors boil down to two mega factors. Number one, poor distress tolerance, in other words, limited capacity to actually just feel your feelings and let them flow. And second, negative rumination. So it's quite afflictive. And in all this, people feel, you know, I wish I weren't ruminating so much, but I can't stop it. It just keeps going.

Speaker 1:
[04:12] And I was talking with some friends about this topic before it. I'm fortunate to live with three therapists at this point, which is pretty wild stuff, and my partner and then our friends that we essentially share a house with. It's basically a duplex. And I was talking with them about rumination, how I was planning for this episode, and I gave kind of like a technical definition of it. And they were basically like, that's nice. Could you explain what that actually means? And the simple Forrest definition that I came up with is, it's when we chew our thoughts, but we don't swallow them.

Speaker 2:
[04:44] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[04:44] You know, we're just chewing and chewing and chewing, but we cannot digest them. They are stuck. Sometimes it's because we're trying to chew on a marble, and what we really gotta do is spit it out. And sometimes it's because we have chewed this thing to powder, and yet we will not swallow it for some reason.

Speaker 2:
[05:00] So given how much it's not good for us to ruminate, my kind of short version of it is that it's unproductive. In other words, there's such a difference between really thinking about something and grinding away at it and moving forward with it, and it's productive. You get somewhere, and then when you're done, you're done. And it reminds me of one of the most important lines of programmer code. It's the instruction to end the program. If there's no instruction to end the program, you get stuck in an infinite loop. And so that's the problem with unproductive rumination. It's that it's an infinite circle. We just keep doing lapser on the track. So why do we do this, Forrest?

Speaker 1:
[05:42] Well, there are a lot of different theories about it. As you already mentioned one of them, it's called response styles theory. And this was created in the early 90s, and it comes out of work on depression. A lot of the time, if you read about rumination, it's going to be even the language that they used to use is thinks about their sadness or thinks about like why they are the kind of person that they are and how that leads to their depression. So there are a lot of overt references to depression. As time has gone on, as you were saying earlier, Dad, we've realized that rumination is a key feature of all of these different problems that people have. It's actually a huge risk factor for a wide variety of mental health related issues. So this is a very common problem and it exists across a wide variety of issues. It's not just about depression. But the basic idea of response styles theory is that when people are bummed, for lack of a better way of putting it, they tend to fall into one of two camps. They either distract themselves by doing stuff or moving their attention somewhere else, or they think about why it is that they're suffering. That second pattern is basically rumination. The theory is that rumination is a relatively stable trait-like tendency. In other words, some people are just rumination-prone. There's another popular theory that I thought was really interesting. It's called the control theory of rumination, also sometimes called goal progress theory. The idea is that rumination is a functional response to a problem. When we see a gap between where we are and where we want to be, we think about that gap a lot. You can see how there's an initial purpose to these thoughts. The goal of these thoughts is to close the distance between where we are and where we want to go. The problem is that rumination often does not actually lead to that for a bunch of reasons that we'll talk about probably during this episode. I think there are a whole bunch of other reasons that you could come up with here, dad, that are less linked to a specific theory and are more just kind of vibing about psychology. Do you want to offer some here, that just reasons people might ruminate?

Speaker 2:
[07:46] First of all, with regard to that original theory of control theory of rumination, sorry, the other one, response to the other one. I actually learned to make the point that rumination is mood congruent in a reinforcing cycle. So let's say we're anxious about something. I'll take it out of depression just for fun. Let's say underneath it all, there's an underlying trait of anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, we might even say, which is quite somatic, that sense of dread or uneasiness.

Speaker 1:
[08:22] You're just an anxiety-prone person. I would describe myself as a little anxiety-prone.

Speaker 2:
[08:26] Emotion generates thought, mood generates thought. There are a lot of people who tend to be cognitive in the academic world of psychology really emphasize how thoughts create feelings. Well, that's true. But I think at least as much our affective basement bubbles up all kinds of cognitions and certainly biases them in various directions. Anyway, so here you are, you're anxious as like you start there, let's say in your mood, somatically and affectively anxious. Understandably, you start generating a lot of cognitions about catastrophes that might come, things you forgot to do, oh dear, how will they react? You're having all those thoughts. Those thoughts then reinforce the underlying mood of anxiety, which generates even more ruminative cognitions. And round and round it goes in a vicious cycle. I thought that was really insightful. I learned something there.

Speaker 1:
[09:23] Yeah, I'm glad you pulled that out here, dad.

Speaker 2:
[09:25] Oh yeah, well, I pulled it out because you pulled it out in our show notes, so.

Speaker 1:
[09:28] It's true. It's true, I did. Anyways, go ahead. Just graduate student thing over here. My impromptu seven year graduate student experience running this podcast. But anyways, that comes with zero piece of paper or any.

Speaker 2:
[09:42] It's as close as you'll come to graduate school your whole life.

Speaker 1:
[09:45] At this point, absolutely. Yes. Anyways, go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[09:49] You might get an honorary degree. You know what PhD stands for? Piled higher and deeper.

Speaker 1:
[09:56] Yeah, probably.

Speaker 2:
[09:57] Piled higher in debt. That's it. Okay. So the other thing is that, as you've noted, ruminating can be a form of avoidance coping. In other words, the function I've seen very often of people popping up into their heads, metaphorically, to ruminate is that it's a defense against what they would feel otherwise, if they just drop down into what they're feeling. If they gave up the fantasy embedded in rumination, sometimes a kind of grandiosity, that they can actually change the past.

Speaker 1:
[10:29] I think you see this a lot in people who go through a breakup, and they're ruminating about the breakup or ruminating about the relationship. Some of it is a kind of avoidance of acceptance that this thing is over, it's not coming back, here we are. How do we want to be about it? So yeah, anyways, go ahead, Dad.

Speaker 2:
[10:46] Oh, yeah, it also in that particular case, as you know, could give us a sense of somehow connection with the one we lost, right? But also it could be very much a way to defend against underlying feelings, which goes to something we can do about rumination, which we'll be getting to soon, which is to open up to what's underneath it all, you know, the younger material, the softer material, what you would actually feel, you know, facing what I call radical helplessness about so much in this life and just accepting it, moving into acceptance as a result. So that would be another function of rumination. I would just call out here.

Speaker 1:
[11:27] I think those are great examples, yeah. And to layer one more maybe on top of them, there's this really interesting study that I ran into, which was on depressive disorder, major depressive disorder. And in the study, it found that the participants, the people in it had a mix of positive and negative beliefs about rumination. So the negative beliefs are some of the ones that we've maybe we've talked about a little bit, like the problems it causes, this is a painful experience, it's not really helping me, it's not really going anywhere. But those same people also had some positive beliefs, and those positive beliefs might be something like, I need to ruminate about my problems in order to find answers to them or ruminating about the past helps me prevent future mistakes. And this gets to a kind of interesting general point about rumination specifically, but also worry and anxiety in general. People tend to think that their anxiety is kind of protective, like they're anxious and therefore they don't get into trouble. It's really easy to see why that might be. I become a careful driver on the freeway because I'm anxious about my driving. Most of the research on this that I'm aware of, and I'm just kind of like painting with a broad brush here, but this is just my recollection, is that it actually doesn't really serve that function hardly at all. When people are anxious about something, they actually make worse choices, not better ones. The anxious driver is no less likely to get into a car accident than the not anxious driver is. So if this isn't actually helping us, what's it doing? Well, it's just making us experience a lot of anxiety along the way. That also speaks to maybe the one place where insight can be helpful about rumination. You can help yourself kind of work on those positive beliefs that we have about rumination and maybe change them or adjust them, make them a little bit more realistic.

Speaker 2:
[13:10] That's actually really kind of cool for us. You're suggesting a kind of Aikido move with one's own rumination to kind of along the lines of Dick Schwartz and No Bad Parts, No Bad Rumination. In other words, to turn toward rumination and to ask yourself and to thank it. Thank you, ruminator. Thank you. And to really burrow into, okay, what is useful so far from my ruminating? What have I gotten from it so far? And book the wins. Name to yourself what you've realized through ruminating, what the benefits have been, and then by naming them, realize that you've achieved that goal. The thing about ruminating is kind of like the proverbial donkey chasing a carrot. It keeps moving around. And yet if the donkey ever arrived at the carrot, it would stop walking. It would stop ruminating. So in other words, let yourself arrive at the carrots that are being produced by the ruminating you had. And then set them aside. You don't need to keep mouthing them. To use your metaphor of mouthing but not swallowing, right?

Speaker 1:
[14:16] To make it kind of concrete here. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but this is just coming to me now. The person who's anxious about driving. It's good to have an appreciation that a car is a big object that's moving real fast. And you don't want to get hit by one. Yes. Great to have that as a baseline belief, a baseline thought or like some genuine concern about people driving in a safe manner, being thoughtful about it. That's a great belief to have. I love that for people. I want everybody on the road to feel that way when I'm driving. Once we've gotten there though, what are we getting from this? Like once we've installed that, how is it actually changing our behavior? And once we've got the benefits of the behavior change, do we still really need to have these kind of pervasive anxiety inducing thoughts that are bouncing around in our head?

Speaker 2:
[15:03] Kind of the last thing to toss in is to realize that, as best we can tell, no other animal species on the planet ruminates. It's vaguely possible that the cetaceans of various kinds, those whales singing their songs, I'm tripping there, right? Who knows? But as best we can tell, certainly primates and other, you know, land vertebrates do not have the neurological capacity in the build out of the midline layers of the cortex to do any kind of mental time travel. They can't spin out about the past, nor can they obsess about the future. They have the blessing and the curse of being dropped into the present more or less continuously. And as humans, you know, as the brain tripled in volume over the last 3 million years, humans developed this midline cortical system whose rearward portions, as you know, enabled the default mode network where we spend a lot of time when we ruminate. And they also developed the more task-oriented forward regions, all of which, the whole line of midline cortical activity and substrates, enabled mental time travel. So another way to think about it, when you think, why do we ruminate? Well, because we're human. And this extraordinary build-out of supercomputer capacity does also have some side effects in that it enables us to spin out in rumination. And I would really wonder if the reinforcing of activity in those substrates in modern life, and especially in the modern media culture that your generation, Forrest, has just seen an historically unprecedented explosion of, I wonder if that kind of fantasy life people are having or, including playing games of various kinds, consuming all kinds of media is building out the circuitry that can be readily applied to rumination and therefore is making people more capable and more prone to rumination than even just a few hundred years ago, let alone tens of thousands of years ago in the Stone Age. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1:
[17:19] Yeah, I think we have a preoccupied culture. We have a chronically preoccupied culture.

Speaker 2:
[17:25] That's a great word. In the sense also that you're being occupied. I mean, to me again, as we get to what to do about rumination, to consider it as an invader, in a sense that is occupying us. So I'll just leave that alone for a second. Okay, back to you, preoccupied.

Speaker 1:
[17:42] Yeah, there are huge companies that are immensely rewarded for making you think about the ways that you aren't the way that you want to be. So let's go back to goal progress theory. When we perceive this gap between where we are and where we think we want to go, we start ruminating about it. The brain naturally launches into, what can I do about that? As a survival strategy, bottom line. We want to improve our standing in the group, we want to be more desirable to other people, we want to be able to produce offspring, whatever it is that we're being triggered into anxious self-preoccupation about. And then these companies make an enormous amount of money trying to sell you the products that they are claiming are going to help you close that gap. But there's no closing the gap. The goal posts are constantly pushed downfield, and we're just living with the consequences of that. So yeah, I think that this is maybe not purely a modern problem. You can go back and read literature from the 1000, you could read Beowulf, and in that there's a certain amount of rumination. You could argue a certain amount of thinking about the self, or thinking about the mythic progress of this figure, or whatever it is, relationships. I mean, Romeo and Juliet, how much ruminating are they doing in Romeo and Juliet? The answer is a lot. So this is not a purely modern problem, but I think that we have found a way to supercharge it. Essentially, the benefit our capitalist overlords, but that's an episode for another day.

Speaker 2:
[19:10] I always just used kicked off a fantasy inside me about TV shows. I was trying to imagine in Hollywood, I grew up in LA, some pitch for already content, some new TV show in which all the characters are already content. It'd be so boring. It'd be unbelievably boring.

Speaker 1:
[19:31] There's no conflict, man. There's no story. There's no, yeah. I think it's the closest in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, maybe.

Speaker 2:
[19:38] But that was wonderful stuff. People really liked it.

Speaker 1:
[19:41] Yeah. That's my point is that that's the reading rainbow. If we think about that kind of content, that's maybe as close as we're going to get.

Speaker 2:
[19:49] I would love to see some fiction for a scenario in which the people living on, let's say an island or because I'm a sci-fi guy on a spaceship, they really are already content while being goal-directed in aspirational and self-actualizing and benevolent ways.

Speaker 1:
[20:08] I think they already made the TV show, Dad. It's called Star Trek or at least the original one.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] Already content? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[20:15] Well, if you think about it, what's the nature of that society? It's a futuristic society where everybody's needs are just met.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[20:21] They've got replicators, they're not fighting over the replicators. If you go back to the OG Star Trek, it's this enlightened society. Anyways, I think that the characters themselves have a lot of that in it. Now, is it also a Monster of the Week show where Captain Kirk hangs out with various space babes? Yes, that too. It's very much a product of its time. But I think that ethos runs underneath it at least a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[20:47] Hey, I was a teenage boy when I started watching that show.

Speaker 1:
[20:50] Yeah, you were the prime audience, buddy. Anyway, okay, I've got to get back to rumination. I've got to pull us back on track a little bit. Okay, so really important question here. If this ruminating is not helping us, like that's our principle, is that ruminating, not really solving a problem, feels bad while we're doing it, all that good stuff. Why not? Wouldn't chewing on the past help us come to terms with it, plan for the future, all of that good reflective stuff? There's this really cool insight in goal progress theory, that one of the ones also called the control theory of rumination, I mentioned a little bit before, that gap between where you are now and where you want to go. The key idea in it is that mental chewing isn't necessarily bad. If you think about an athlete who needs to shoot a free throw, they're thinking a lot about how to shoot a free throw right. They're mentally rehearsing this technique to some extent. Here's the difference. The difference fundamentally is between Concrete and Abstract Thinking. That's the difference between useful mental rehearsal and problematic rumination. So Concrete Thinking is what happened, what could change it, okay, here's what I'm going to do about it. Abstract Thinking is why does this keep on happening, what does it mean, what does it say about who I am? And these modes of thinking have another key difference. Concrete Thinking is usually focused on the future. It's prospective in nature. Takes the past and then tries to say, okay, now what? Abstract Thinking is often retrospective. We're thinking about the way we were, what that meant, what's the meaning of it, that kind of chewing. And this abstract thinking that's looking toward the past doesn't usually have an endpoint associated with it. You can think about why am I the way that I am, literally forever? I mean, some philosophers literally spent their whole life doing that without arriving at anything that resembles a satisfying conclusion. If you're having a fun time with those thoughts, great, knock yourself out. That can be a fun like philosophical exploration. But if it's causing you a lot of pain and suffering, maybe not so much, right? And I think that this gets to another key distinction that people have made in rumination between what's called brooding and reflection. So reflection is internal problem solving. You know, the person is imagining specific steps towards some kind of goal. Here's an example. Let's think about what happened. Okay, when I did X, Y happened. Next time, I'm gonna try Z. It's really high agency, right? I'm doing stuff. Now let's think about what brooding looks like. Why does this keep happening to me? I tried X and it went wrong. This doesn't seem to happen to other people. I should be able to do this. I'm such a bad person. I'm stuck with the same problems that I had five years ago. Reflection can be really helpful, but brooding very rarely is. I think that that distinction is just really helpful in terms of how we think about our mental content in general and how we approach problem-solving.

Speaker 2:
[23:51] I love the word brooding and I can't help it. As you know, the word ruminating comes from cows chewing their cud. There are multiple stomachs processing grass and producing gas along the way. Then we have brooding coming from the bird metaphor, like a chicken brooding on top of its eggs. There's a place for working on something, and maybe sometimes it's a personal issue. You keep revisiting, let's say, your relationship with your mom or your dad growing up, and the emotional somatic residues still within you. And you work it through, you get some kind of release, and then maybe something else comes up that you start chewing on. You start ruminating in the sense of chewing on your cud, and you kind of brood on it in terms of creating some warmth so that eventually the eggs of fertile insight will crack open and new beings will come out. That's productive, right? And so to me, the pragmatic question, I think, is what does it feel like while you're doing it, and what are the results? Typically, rumination, as we mean this, is affectively negative while we're doing it. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel good. We don't, you know, it's not emotionally positive to ruminate, and it's not productive either.

Speaker 1:
[25:14] Do you think there are things that help people go from brooding to reflecting?

Speaker 2:
[25:19] Breaking A for us, what a question.

Speaker 1:
[25:21] Because we're going to do a whole what to do about it in the future, but we're right here, so I'm curious just your thoughts on it in general.

Speaker 2:
[25:27] Okay, what a question. So we can talk here about two kinds of factors in the moment factors, and then more like foundational, resetting the baseline factors. Baseline, are you a trait ruminator or a trait reflector? You know, moving from trait rumination to trait reflection, yeah. So let's see in the moment, one, first off, in brooding, negative rumination, there's not much sense of agency internally. We feel carried along almost hypnotically. It has a kind of, there's a word that'll come to me pretty soon about sort of hypnagogic quality. You're a little dulled, you're a little hypn...

Speaker 1:
[26:09] That's an SIT word right there.

Speaker 2:
[26:11] Yeah, hypnagogic, there you go. You just kind of sucked into the stream of the fantasy, and you don't have agency. So one way to shift in the moment from ruminating or brooding to reflecting is to just kind of take more charge of the process itself. You know, keep asking yourself, what's my purpose while I'm engaging in this kind of thought? Right? What... Yeah, agency. And then the other thing is that I think when we're reflecting, along with that sense of inner freedom, because when you're reflecting, you have an inner freedom. You're the driver of the spotlight. You're moving the light of attention. It's internal, typically, but you're moving the light of attention where you want it to go when you're reflecting. So you're in control of that process. In ruminating, you're just swept along. And the spotlight of attention is just moving from this or that willy-nilly outside your control, often repetitively and automatically. And also, alongside that quality of freedom and agency is an openness to your experiencing, right? When you're reflecting, you're allowing the feelings to flow. You're feeling them. Maybe you're reflecting because if something's painful in a relationship, but there's a fluidity to it. I guess I would describe it like that. I don't know. How about you?

Speaker 1:
[27:33] I think that everything that you highlighted is really important. I would really pull out the agency piece, which gets complicated. People who ruminate are typically low agency as a baseline. What this means is that they've spent a lot of time thinking about their individual shortcomings, or how the world is unfair and unresponsive to their effort, or just in general, how their action doesn't seem to produce positive outcomes for them. As we learn that, we develop essentially learned helplessness. We believe that action is low value. And this is why therapeutic interventions like telling somebody to move into concrete planning, going from abstraction to being work and create in the future, can kind of run into a wall because that's just not going to work if the person's belief is that concrete planning doesn't get them anywhere, right? So normally what the person has to do is they have to attack that low agency aspect of it, the low self-efficacy aspect of it first, develop some belief that action gets to a result, and then they can start trying to shift out of abstraction, past focused to concrete future focused. But it's only when you have more actual experiences in real life of action doing something for you. So this is why behavioral activation is such a big part of the treatment for depression because you're trying to give the person direct experiences of how me doing something matters. And you want to set the bar with this often very, very low, kind of like too low to fail. Even then, it can be difficult for people to access. So that's a piece of this that I wonder about in terms of that, like going from rumination to reflection or brooding to reflection. As we were talking about, dad, how do we develop more agency in general? How do we develop more self-efficacy in general? And could developing that then help us have a more reflective stance? Because we feel like we can actually do something about our problems. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. If you're interested in a spring reset for your bedroom, I'd really recommend our sponsor, Quince. We've been using Quince bedding every night for a while now, and Elizabeth is especially attached to their Egyptian cotton sheets. They're impossibly soft and they've held up through countless washes. Quince has everything you need for a spring bedding refresh. They've got luxe sheets, lofty down comforters, and duvet covers in seasonal colors and timeless patterns. Their 100 percent European linen gets softer with every wash, and their mulberry silk pillowcases keep your hair smooth and your skin hydrated overnight. Getting into this bedding really feels like you're staying at a luxury hotel, but it costs 50 to 60 percent less than comparable brands. Quince partners directly with ethical manufacturers and skips paying the middleman passing the savings on to you. Upgrade your bedding with Quince. Go to quince.com/being Well for free shipping and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada too. Go to quince.com/being Well for free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com/being Well. Starting something new can be incredibly scary. When I started doing Being Well, I really had truly no idea what I was doing, and I definitely didn't think that it would become a business the way that it has. When you're trying to deal with the anxiety that comes from starting something new, it can help to have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. You can build your brand's online store with Shopify and get everything you need in one place. Launch fast with beautiful, ready-to-use templates, then save time with built-in tools that help write product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even improve product photos. Shopify also makes it easy to reach new customers with simple email and social campaigns while handling the heavy lifting behind the scenes, from inventory and payments to shipping, returns, and analytics. It's time to turn those what-ifs into With Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/being Well. That's shopify.com/being Well. Go to shopify.com/being Well.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 1:
[32:41] Now, back to the show.

Speaker 2:
[32:43] I was really struck for us by material you identified about the ways in which rumination is, I'll use a word that you didn't use, is toxic on cognition.

Speaker 1:
[32:57] Sure, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[32:58] Ruminating by its very nature undermines productive cognition and it undermines cognitive control. There's a famous paper on attention. We had a cool title, The Control of Control, Metacognition. Paying attention to where you're paying attention, for example, and ruminating, including the ways it becomes habitual and since neurons fire together, wire together, you know, self-reinforcing in these circuit or negative cycles, it is toxic on cognition. So then to call people to think their way out of rumination is particularly challenging because ruminating has undermined their capacity to think while they're ruminating.

Speaker 1:
[33:43] Totally. Oh, you're leading me into this, dad. I think that this is such an interesting part of the whole thing. Do you mind if I talk about this a little bit? Because I was just learning about it.

Speaker 2:
[33:50] Please, because yeah, I got it from you.

Speaker 1:
[33:52] It's so cool digging into the actual research literature on this sometimes, because you just bump into stuff and you go like, why don't people talk about this? This is such a cool idea.

Speaker 2:
[34:01] Eighth grade, or certainly by high school.

Speaker 1:
[34:02] Yeah, sure, sure, absolutely. Why don't people just like, you know, anyways, that's a different podcast episode. Okay, so the one sentence answer to why does knowing you ruminate not stop you from ruminating is because rumination becomes a habit. So rumination normally starts for people as this kind of attempt to understand some painful event and work through it in an effective way. But it tends not to result in that and over time, the ruminating becomes a kind of habitual response that we develop, often to certain kinds of circumstances. So if we zoom out, we've got these two big theories of rumination. First is response styles theory, second is control theory. Response styles theory, as we were talking about, talks about rumination as a trait. Control theory talks about rumination as a state that's triggered by this feeling of goal discrepancy, right? But this leaves a really big question that you might be thinking about here, dad, because you're a states to traits guy. And so this is the kind of inverse of that. How do we go from that trait rumination to the state of rumination? What's happening there? And then why is it so hard for us to get out of a rumination state once we're in it? And this is where this really cool model called the habit goal framework comes into the whole thing. And one of the people who did the habit goal framework was the same person who did response styles theory of rumination.

Speaker 2:
[35:30] Nolan Hexma. She's a really productive academic, big bows in her direction.

Speaker 1:
[35:35] Totally. And so this is somebody coming back to this material after 25 years of other people like thinking about it and chewing on it and proposing this really cool framework. And this model frames rumination as a kind of mental habit, right? What habits form? What's a habit? It's when a behavior is performed repeatedly in the same context, which creates an automatic association between the context and the response. So the situation or what's going on around us makes us do things in a certain kind of way. So a problematic habit somebody might have could be drinking in response to a low mood state. That's a really classic one, right? The low mood state comes in, the response of drinking gets activated. The person is not thinking about it, they just do it. That's a habit. Habits are really powerful. So let's think about this in the context of the goal discrepancies that I was talking about earlier, right? We experience this goal discrepancy and we can interpret that super broadly. We see somebody else who has something that we want. We're reminded of a personal shortcoming that we have. We walk by the place that we used to go with our ex and now we're thinking about how we're never going to get married and have children and we're going to die alone and etc. Let's say we've got a little bit of a ruminating tendency. That's response styles, theories, traits. And this goal discrepancy then activates that rumination a little bit. Passive, abstract, negative thinking. And at the same time, seeing that gap, and going through that rumination itself, produces negative affect, we feel bad. So we have these two things that are co-occurring, right? We've got repetitive thinking, and we've got negative mood. Uh-oh, what happens? With enough repetition, the negative mood state becomes a direct cue for the rumination. And that starts to become decoupled, just totally independent, from whether or not we're perceiving that goal discrepancy. So, all of a sudden, our brain has tied two things together. We ruminate because we feel bad. So what happens whenever we feel bad? We start ruminating. This is why knowing that you ruminate or knowing that you overthink does not really help you to do much about it. Because habits are really freaking powerful, man. And this is even complicated by what you were saying about earlier, dad, that rumination seems to mess with our executive function. And particularly, our ability to suppress habit responses. Guess what? We've created a habit, and now we've got this thing happening in our brain that's eating up so much brain bandwidth that we can't shift out of that habit. The things that we would normally do to get out of this are now no longer accessible to us. Wow, what a double whammy. We need to apply executive control to change a habit. The rumination attacks our ability to apply executive control. And when I was learning about this, I was like, this is the most neatly tied together little package that certainly seems true to me based on my own experience of rumination. And I really kind of blew my mind.

Speaker 2:
[38:51] I thought it was brilliant. And I also thought, as I usually do, that you're just super, you know, how you pull this together. It's just great.

Speaker 1:
[38:59] Appreciate that.

Speaker 2:
[39:00] It reminds me a little bit of some of the lessons from trauma work in that when someone is flooded, trying to appeal to reason is not the way to go. What's much better is to ride out the storm, ride the wave, and especially emphasize qualities that are when we're with someone who's flooded that are very simple, non-threatening. They don't require a lot of cognitive effort on the part of the other person, like getting them a glass of water, just sitting with them, bringing a sweater if they're chilled, just very simple stuff, behavioral stuff. Similarly, when people are caught up in ruminating, arguing with them about what they're ruminating about, just feeds more rumination. It reminds me of people who are ruminating in a paranoid kind of way. It just makes me really highlight the notion of a circuit breaker, that it's really important to help people, if only for a few seconds in a row, maybe a minute in a row, step out of the ruminative cycle. Behavior really helps in that regard. Literally moving your body, standing up, jumping up and down, doing something that is vigorous, is a quick snap out, doing anything that is challenging, not actually, but perceptively, perceptually in a survival way, like jumping off a diving board into a pool, just ba-bum, it breaks you out of it. And then when you're out of it, then you can step back and reflect about it.

Speaker 1:
[40:30] This is a great point, dad. And it's so true for essentially all habit processes. It's not just rumination. It absolutely is the case when we're emotionally activated or emotionally triggered by something, but essentially any habit cycle, one of the biggest findings about habits is that once you are in the habit cycle, you're kind of on the ride. You are on the roller coaster, and it is real hard to get off the roller coaster when you are currently on it. So most of the work that we do is off the field. We're trying to either lower the chances of getting activated in the way that you're describing, maybe by being conscious about the kinds of situations that we put ourselves into, that kind of thing, or we're trying to create plans. These are sometimes called implementation intentions for exactly what we're going to do when we start feeling the ride takeoff. So we can intervene early on in the process before we built up too much momentum.

Speaker 2:
[41:32] Yeah. We just did a recent episode on existentialism because I love existentialism.

Speaker 1:
[41:44] I like this late career move for you, dad. I love existentialism. Fantastic.

Speaker 2:
[41:49] Yeah. And claiming existential responsibility with regard to our own mental processes. So you asked me a moment ago what I thought or felt when you were giving that really wonderful description of how negative mood states generate negative cognitive ruminative processes that reinforce negative mood states, while along the way undermining executive control and thus autonomy and so forth.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] Nice summary. That was good.

Speaker 2:
[42:17] What I felt when you were saying that, I hate being trapped. You're describing being automatons. You're describing being occupied, inhabited by some desperate inside. I'm using language that's very real for me because I hate that.

Speaker 1:
[42:39] Well, you are a deeply high agency person as a baseline, dad. So you hate the idea that somebody else could control your behavior. Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[42:48] I do not like that experience of helpless entrapment. The problem with rumination is that it occupies your mind. The inner desperate is controlling you and eating away at your capacity for agency inside your own being.

Speaker 1:
[43:07] Don't like that. Big unsubscribe from me.

Speaker 2:
[43:11] And that distaste can motivate a person when they're not trapped in the moment of rumination to fuel the causes and conditions that will help them shift increasingly away from trait rumination and more toward trait reflection and trait resourcefulness.

Speaker 1:
[43:29] Yeah. And so you're speaking to a kind of, this is an insight level. I would describe this as kind of an insight level. It's a feeling level, but it's a thinking level.

Speaker 2:
[43:38] That moves to motivation.

Speaker 1:
[43:39] Yeah. And that helps us link up with motivation. We feel more motivated to solve this as a kind of problem for a person. And there are actually things, even though I've said throughout the episode, that like knowing that you overthink or knowing that you ruminate doesn't always help you, there are some things at the inside level that can help for people. Like we were talking about earlier, recognizing that rumination doesn't tend to really produce anything for you, recognizing that you can have the thought once, get the value from it, and then move on. Like you're saying, dad, recognizing that this is kind of like an invader inside of the mind, and maybe you really hate that as a model, so it motivates you to do something about it. All of that good stuff. From there, essentially all of the interventions are behavioral on some level, as dear as I can tell in terms of what actually helps people. The first big one that I want to point to here, and this can be a tough one to talk about, but I also think it's really important, is addressing your goals directly. So if we go back to control theory, what are the goals that you're closing the gap on? You see this gap, here's where I am, here's where I want to go. What are the goals that you're getting closer to? And what are the goals that you're letting go of? A lot of chronic rumination is focused on these unresolved or unresolvable goals. And that second category, I think, is really important for people to think about a little bit. What are the things that we're holding as a goal for us that just ain't going to happen for whatever reason? I think about myself. Like I have dance goals. I am also a 38-year-old guy who has had a significant hip surgery. There are things I'm not going to do. It's okay. It's okay. But if I held that as a tight goal, I want to become a fill-in-the-blank level dancer, like professional dancer or whatever it is. That was really important to me and it was really bonded to my identity. I would experience a ton of suffering related to that. We can think about these categories in different ways in our lives. But appreciating that going all the way back to the beginning, sometimes we're trying to chew on a marble, and that marble just isn't going to chew. And the only thing we can do is kind of spit it out. And what are the things in our lives that are these kinds of marbles that we're just trying to chew on over and over again.

Speaker 2:
[46:00] If it's okay, I want to drop in a little couple of thingies here.

Speaker 1:
[46:06] It's always okay. Yeah, go to town. Worst case scenario, out of the doubt.

Speaker 2:
[46:11] Now, see, it's so interesting. As someone who, as you know, is very oriented towards his autonomy, I'm completely accepting of you having that kind of control. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[46:21] Well, I think some of it is trust.

Speaker 2:
[46:23] Yeah, that's right. You are a benevolent tyrant and I like that. Let's see here. Number one, I've been reflecting lately, Forrest, about professionals tending to sort into two categories. Now, like any kind of categorical thinking, it's once said that there are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't. In other words, there is a tendency toward overdoing it. That said, I think there are knowers and learners among people in general. And you can discern this very quickly in conversation with people. Do they keep reinforcing their point? When you say things, are they not very curious? They keep going back to what they know. You know, they're locked into their frame of reference. It's interesting that when we're ruminating, we're stuck in knowing. It's repetitive, all the givens are just presumed, the conditions are presumed.

Speaker 1:
[47:16] It's so interesting, Dad, because I think that most people ruminate, they feel like they're trying to learn. You know, oh, if I could just see it differently, if I could just understand why this thing happened, then I'd be able to get off. Like, that's the mental story that that person is telling themselves.

Speaker 2:
[47:32] I'm trying to figure something out.

Speaker 1:
[47:33] I'm trying to figure something out, like that kind of thing. So it's really interesting that you're drawing this distinction here.

Speaker 2:
[47:39] Yeah, I think that's right. I think the motivation is some kind of, you know, I want to develop in some way. I want something to change for the better. But the actual process of ruminating undermines the learning of it. Whereas when you're reflecting, it's very much a learning mode. Point two, I was reflecting on the sweet spot that I think is helpful with ruminating. Of the combination of radical helplessness and radical resourcefulness. Helplessness accepts radical helplessness, faces the fact that there's so much in this life that we do not have influence over, or we have extremely little influence, and recognizes that so much that happens to other people that we care about and maybe are ruminating about, or led them to do this or that mistreatment of us that we're now ruminating about, is way beyond our control and even kind of beyond their control. It was just all these causes upstream that led them to be a problematic boss for us, and we're still wounded as a result. So there's radical helplessness and the acceptance of it. And I think we'll undermine a lot of ruminating. And then there's radical resourcefulness for what's left. Even if you're trapped in a box, and the lights are flashing and everyone's yelling at you. Well, what can you be resourceful about? Where do you have agency? Where could you influence things? What do you think about that combination? Including the felt sense in the body of radical helplessness and radical resourcefulness.

Speaker 1:
[49:18] I think that's 99% of what we talk about on the podcast in a sentence. Back to the show after a quick break.

Speaker 4:
[49:27] Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink?

Speaker 3:
[49:31] Or a sweet vanilla?

Speaker 4:
[49:33] Smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha?

Speaker 2:
[49:36] Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 1:
[50:13] Now, back to the show. I think the whole act got it right, essentially, and the whole game, psychologically, is what are we accepting, and then where are we claiming agency? And this funny dance where it's the accepting that actually lets you do the agency.

Speaker 2:
[50:31] Very nice.

Speaker 1:
[50:32] And that's the insight that I think a lot of people don't get intuitively, because they think of acceptance and change as being opposites, essentially. If I accept this thing, I will not endeavor to change it. You see that a lot as a part of political movements as well, where there's kind of this resistance to acceptance because we want to be in change. Including accepting that there are aspects of life that are much better than they were 100 years ago, let alone 1000 years ago, let alone 100,000 years ago. Because there's kind of this feeling that if we accept that, it will stop us from trying to continue to change things in positive ways. But it's just not true. It's just true that being clear about the way reality actually is only ever helps people do stuff about reality. That's where we have to start, just kind of inherently, right? If we just pretend that the billiard balls are in different places on the table than they actually are, we're not gonna be very good at playing pool. So we need to be able to see the playing field in order to do something about it. So yeah, I think you kind of summarized the podcast in a sentence there, Dad, and I love that for us.

Speaker 2:
[51:41] Well, I'm jumping up and down in happiness about the billiard ball metaphor already, you know.

Speaker 1:
[51:47] You do look like a good pool metaphor, actually. That's true. You use them sometimes. That's fun. Are you the cue ball or the eight ball is a phrase I remember you telling me as early as 13 or something.

Speaker 2:
[51:57] Oh, yeah, that's exactly right, baby. Are you the hammer or the nail? And other people, I think I got these metaphors, of course, from other people. You're making me also think about just as a little minor digression, the ways in which unfortunately, I've seen our politics polarize around this point a little bit. In other words, you can be somebody who emphasizes the point of resourcefulness, who also has great compassion for an understanding of helplessness.

Speaker 1:
[52:27] Sure, yeah, totally.

Speaker 2:
[52:29] It's both and. It's okay. So just because somebody is banging the drum of resourcefulness, does not mean that they also understand helplessness, including forms of systemic injustice, oppression, structural issues, and so forth. Flip the other way, someone who's really banging the drum around so-called helplessness, the ways in which we are oppressed by various forces, and we're swimming upstream and the deck is stacked against us, and it's generationally harder today to buy a house, let's say. You can definitely acknowledge those things, right, while also recognizing, in effect, because of those things, it's actually really important to be as resourceful as you can where you can be. The wise path, of course, is to recognize both of these. The extent of helplessness, I'm using a loaded word deliberately, and the extent of opportunities for resourcefulness.

Speaker 1:
[53:22] Yeah, we're a both-and, middle path kind of podcast, and some of that is from your Buddhism background, dad, but also it's just from I think this is kind of what's true most of the time, is most of the time when people get into trouble, it's because they've fallen a little bit too far into one of these things.

Speaker 2:
[53:40] That's well said.

Speaker 1:
[53:41] Are you a little too acceptance or are you a little too agency? And guess what? I've been both. I've been too acceptance and too agency at various points in my life, and they both caused problems for me. I've been too helplessness and too change. Anyways, I just think that this is a huge issue that people fall into over and over again, and that's the kind of extremity that you're talking about, Dad. And it's been a real theme in my life in terms of like when things were good, it was when I was kind of sitting in the sweet spot.

Speaker 2:
[54:10] And in this podcast, if we have a guest or get into a topic that's really about opportunities for personal resourcefulness, that does not mean that we fail to recognize the systems of oppression that are baked into late stage capitalism. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[54:32] Yes and, do what we can. The pool table is set up with the balls it's set up with. Now what, man?

Speaker 2:
[54:40] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[54:40] And I'm a now what man kind of guy, and I have increasingly become one as I've aged, I think. I don't know if that's just like the natural generational movement into crankiness, but maybe that's what I'm, maybe that's the line I'm riding here. Okay, anyways, all right, we got way out there for a second. I got to bring it back to rumination just a little bit here, dad. Let's do another 10, 15 minutes on what to do for people here. So okay, so another thing that we could think of as a kind of like middle pathy issue maybe, is this movement we've been talking about from abstract thoughts to concrete thoughts. So moving from thinking about something to doing about something, how are we going to use the past to inform the future? And this really gets to the whole agency thing that we were talking about and what I was mentioning before about how when people try to jump to this step, particularly inside of, I'm not a therapist, but I would imagine that this is particularly true inside of a therapeutic context where I'll often talk to friends and they'll talk about an experience that they had with a therapist. And when something doesn't fit or doesn't land, it is often, and I'd be very curious to your take on this dad as an actual therapist because the therapist has kind of jumped to a moment or jumped to a stage that they're just not at yet. You're trying to move the client into concrete planning about the future when the client hasn't developed the belief that concrete planning about the future is going to do anything for them in a positive or meaningful way.

Speaker 2:
[56:11] Thousand percent. And without sounding elitist about it, it's understandable. Let's say you're a very skillful skier. So you're a teacher. You're teaching skiing, right? And it's understandable that you can see what the person is doing and you can see what would be a little more skillful for them. And then you can see beyond that, if they could do, you know, they're at, let's say in the alphabet, they're at C. They've, you know, they've already got A, they've already got B, they're in C.

Speaker 1:
[56:36] Yeah. You see the path to the future letters.

Speaker 2:
[56:39] Totally. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so there you are in the cusp of C and D. You're moving from C to D and it actually disrupts the movement from C to D to be jumping to E, F and G. And yet you yourself are very comfortable with E, F and G and you're already X, Y, Z, you know? So there's a tendency to just kind of, well, come on, you can do this. But no patience.

Speaker 1:
[57:03] In my coaching practice, I have fallen into this hole many times. And I would imagine that people who practice therapy have to learn that this is an easy hole to fall into over and over again. But let's say that the person has developed that kind of agency or belief in their effectiveness, that if they do stuff, it matters. That would allow them to do this. So like, okay, how do we move from abstract thoughts to more concrete thoughts? Well, thinking concretely is actually a habit. And it's a habit that, for example, I developed at a very young age, not because I'm magical, but because you were really good at training the sentome.

Speaker 2:
[57:40] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 1:
[57:42] I distinctly remembered that. I distinctly remember being like 11 years old or something and bringing something to the dinner table. And without trying to therapize me, you guys would be like, wow, yeah, hmm, sucks, essentially start by meeting the emotion, right? Good parenting. And I'd be like, yeah, it really sucks. And then like pretty quickly, we'd be in the world of, okay, what you want to do about that? And so this shift from abstract to concrete was essentially trained into me. You know, I was reflecting about the thoughts and feelings, and then pretty briskly, it's like, oh, yes, we reflect for a little while. And then we go, oh, what do you want to do about that? So just in the same way that rumination can be habitually queued, concrete thinking can also be habitually queued, but we need to practice this kind of a shift over and over again. And I think that that's such like an interesting idea. What's the habit of concrete thinking look like?

Speaker 2:
[58:39] Well, first, the foundation of compassion is so important.

Speaker 1:
[58:45] Yeah, totally. Start with joining.

Speaker 2:
[58:47] Yeah, start by joining. I recently shared in this online meditation thing I do that I learned a lot from this teacher of mine, I respect a lot, Gil Fronstel, who I asked one time, what do you do in your personal practice, Gil, these days? Which is a great question to ask someone, what are you focusing on? Especially if they're a skier who can do X, Y, and Z, what are you working on? And he smiled and looked away and said, I stop for suffering. What a profound practice to stop for suffering, his own and for others. So it's really important that we give suffering its due, we slow it down. And then we take a breath, there we are lying down in the street, life has knocked us down. All right, it's terrible, horrible. And then at a certain point, you say, well, do I like being here? No, you get on your own side. And then you pick yourself up and then you figure out what to do. But that's exactly what we're talking about. So here's a question for you related to that. Building on the ways in which rumination, negative mood fosters rumination, which then fosters negative mood while undermining executive control and agency along the way, like a pernicious horde of termites inside your innermost being, chewing away at the sacred core of self-directedness. Anyway, what is the version of that when you are thinking concretely about problem solving? In other words, what are the mood states that foster concrete problem solving and reflecting? And what are the ways in which concrete reflecting problem solving fosters positive mood states, which then in turn in an upward spiral foster more concrete problem solving and reflecting?

Speaker 1:
[60:39] This is good, dad. You're making me think about it. The idea of like what kind of an upward spiral can we build?

Speaker 2:
[60:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:46] And this gets to something that I think is really important. Another, what can we do about this, is like appreciating the cues. You know, if we're going to approach rumination as a habit, the way that we change habits fundamentally is by changing the cues that get us into that process. When we want to build a new habit, we try to establish new cues that get us into a process. A really simple example of this could be like putting your gym shoes out, putting your gym clothes out for the next day, the night before. They're right there. They're easy to get to. You don't have to spend any kind of mental effort pulling all your gym bag together. It's just there. Make it easy, like lower the friction, right? We can think about the kind of cues that we have for rumination. This could be context cues, time of day, going to different kinds of places, unstructured time, or particular moods a person might have. Like you were saying that, what are the mood states that tend to move you into rumination? Are there things that tend to have a positive impact on those general mood states? It can be this rising tide that lifts all the boats for somebody. It's very easy to say, find things that improve your mood. It can often be a lot harder to do it in practice. But it could be as simple as going and reading a book. It could be as simple as taking a walk in nature, thinking about what tends to just make you more irritable. How can we move away from some of those things? So we're kind of attacking the rumination from the sides rather than attacking it directly.

Speaker 2:
[62:14] Playing with this, when we're in the middle of ruminating, I love this research finding that technically activity in the insula, which are two of them on both sides of the brain, on the inside of the temporal lobes, activity in the insula down regulates default mode activity, which is a way of saying that when we do things like getting a sense of the internal sensations of breathing or a sense of our own depths, thus engaging the insula, that acts like a circuit breaker, cutting through activity in the default mode network that is the basis for rumination. So that's something people can do in the moment. Another thing that I think is really effective in the moment is to go wide. As soon as we get a sense of anything as a whole, that pulls us out of midline cortical activity and engages networks on the sides of the brain, especially the right side of the brain for right-handed people, which involves non-verbal visual spatial processing, which also down regulates rumination because a lot of rumination is quite verbal, a lot of internal speech with oneself. So in the moment, we can go wide, and typically when people go wide, and when they tune into themselves, a negative mood moves more to the background, and there's more of a neutrality. So people can do that in the moment. Then more generally, in terms of what primes positive, helpful, productive, concrete, reflecting and problem-solving, I think priming your pump, just like you were saying, do something that activates you a little bit. Being energized. There's a lot about rumination that you feel trapped and helpless and weighed down. You know, it's, you know, burdensome. So doing things that are physically activating, sitting up straighter, standing up, energizing, moving outside, getting a two-for-one in which you go wide by lifting your gaze to the horizon, while stepping outdoors for a moment and feeling the fresh air.

Speaker 1:
[64:15] Which might activate different regions of the brain, pull you out of that default mode network that we were talking about for a second, totally.

Speaker 2:
[64:21] Yeah. So now you're lifting your mood a little bit, and if you start getting into the slump, maybe the thing to do is to step out of the rumination that's dragging you into the slump, reset. Take a moment to reset. In other words, establish the intermediate step. To go from negative ruminating to positive problem-solving directly is really hard. But maybe what you can do is you can step out of that negative ruminating into an intermediate place. Let's say of going wide, raising your gaze, looking out through the window, resetting, moving around, re-establishing a neutral place. Then from that neutral place, you can move them into positive, productive, concrete problem-solving.

Speaker 1:
[65:09] Totally. I think that this gets to a good point about distraction. So, way back when, when rumination was first being modeled and thought about, the number one intervention that people came up with is the simplest one you could possibly imagine, which is distract yourself. Just think about something else. Now, unfortunately, turns out, this is not a very effective treatment for rumination. A, it's really hard to distract yourself in this way. B, trying to move your obsessive thoughts to other thoughts just keeps them in the same domain. You're not actually doing any set shifting or any of the other stuff that we've learned tends to help with these kinds of habitual behaviors. You're trying to solve thinking by thinking about something different and it just doesn't go very well. It also doesn't deal with what we were talking about earlier about the executive dysfunction issues that tend to come along with rumination. When you're thinking about something in a ruminating way, very, very difficult to just go and think about something else. Okay, what can we do? We can do things that don't rely as much on the cognitive machinery that has been compromised by rumination. In other words, you can go for a walk. Direct physical engagement with the world, particularly stuff that requires engaging attention. So this could mean walking somewhere that you haven't walked in the past. This could be a walk that has a little bit of uneven terrain. You're capable to handle it, but you got to pay a little bit of attention to your circumstances. I'll write sometimes. I'll try to do creative writing exercises. There's a kind of engagement with the process that pulls my brain out of the mode that it's been in and tries to move it to this new kind of mode. So it's taking that advice on distraction from 30 years ago and trying to update it with what we've learned since then. And you're trying to force the cognitive juice that your brain's spending on ruminating in some other kind of direction.

Speaker 2:
[67:02] That's really cool. And to go back to this different kind of loop where we're trying to create a positive loop between concrete, productive problem-solving, reflecting, and positive mood, which then fosters concrete, productive problem-solving. I think it's really important when you're shifted into productive, reflecting, problem-solving, to take in the rewards of the experience. Really enjoy it. It helps to create more of a habit association, a habit linkage between productive reflecting and positive emotion so that you'll be more inclined in the future to lean into productive problem-solving rather than unproductive negative affect saturated rumination down the road. So, you know, can you enjoy being a badass inside your own brain? Can you enjoy, you know, thinking your way through to a solution? Can you experience the pleasure? You know, like I was saying about programming, you need to have the stop function, end program, function. Can you enjoy a sense of completion when you've actually reflected on something? Okay, now I know what I'm going to do about that. Including, I haven't solved this problem completely, but I know what I'm, I've completed this step, you know? I've moved from A to B to C and now D. Good. Pause, take in the book, the wind, as you put it. I think that's really good for people.

Speaker 1:
[68:28] Totally. So as we get to the end here, dad, I'm going to give you a little, I'm going to open the door to a Rick take on ruminating using one of your favorite tools, which is various forms of mindfulness-based practice.

Speaker 2:
[68:42] Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:
[68:43] There's a lot of stuff in mindfulness that is theoretically a really good tool for rumination, particularly the aspects of mindfulness practice that are more about attentional control. There's some really interesting research on this. There are two branches of mindfulness practice to vastly oversimplify here. One is what's more called an open awareness style of practice, and another which is sometimes called more of a focused attention practice. That second category tends to help with rumination a little bit more. I just want to open the door here, dad, to anything that you want to say about that. Particularly, we were talking a little bit earlier about the default mode network. I don't know if you want to talk about that or not. You can just kind of take this wherever you want to go here.

Speaker 2:
[69:27] Wow, briefly. Very cool.

Speaker 1:
[69:30] Rick was not prepared for this, by the way. I just sprung this on him, so.

Speaker 2:
[69:33] That's right. Well, first of all, to your point that I used the metaphor that attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner. It illuminates what it rests upon and then sucks it into our brain. So in effect, rumination is that we've lost control of the spotlight, vacuum cleaner, and what it's sucking into our brain is crap, in a nutshell. So that speaks to what we want to do. We want to be able to regulate our attention so that we can put the spotlight on that which is productive. We want to be able to pull it away from what's unproductive and rest it on what is wholesome, beneficial, happy, helpful for ourselves and for other people. Well, the preeminent training in regulatory control of attention is some form of contemplative practice, one kind or another. There are other forms of training of focused attention that you get in school type environments where you got to keep paying attention to your long division problem or whatever. But sure, meditation is particularly good, partly because it emphasizes as well meta-awareness, awareness of what your awareness is doing. It emphasizes the control of control. To go back to, I think it was Braverman paper a while ago, people can look it up. Okay, so yes, to the ways in which meditative training is really helpful. Second, there's something that can happen when you're meditating, in which your mind is wandering somewhat. You've kind of lost control of where it's going, and yet in the quiet of your meditative practice, especially when things settle down a little bit, stuff bubbles up from underneath that needs to bubble up. And now it has this opportunity to kind of bubble up into conscious awareness. There's a little bit of reflecting on it. Maybe there's some practice with it a little bit inside yourself, helping yourself move into releasing, opening into broader understandings, bringing to bear wisdom you accumulate also in your wisdom tradition that includes contemplative practice, whatever it might be. That's okay. To me, that's not ruminating, because it, number one, it's productive and it feels good, which is kind of the opposite of ruminating in general. And that's all right. And then you come back to yourself and you're kind of re-stabilized. Okay, now I'm back on focused attention. So I want to kind of say that part. And then the last thing about, let's say, contemplative practice is that it really disrupts the underlying premise in ruminating, which it's basically a view of the world as constructed of independent bricks. The self is a brick, you're a brick, the other person's a brick, events are bricks, you know, they just... they're things. The thingification, you know, of reality. And when you do contemplative practice for a while, you start realizing, oh, everything's processes. How can I put it? You lose interest in the script. Ruminating becomes less interesting, in a way, as you deepen in your own meditative practice. Because you just don't, you know, look at things like that. You know, so much in ruminating, it's often interpersonal, interpersonal. You know, me, a situation, so the me is a brick, the situation is a brick, the other person's a brick, you know? And you're just banging bricks together, looping around the rumination track. And you start having this growing sense of things as empty processes. They're occurring kind of emptily and dynamically, extending into vast networks of causes and conditions. It really disrupts the delusion that's embedded in rumination.

Speaker 1:
[73:26] Really cool stuff. And if you want to learn more about that, we have a ton of content related to it, including earlier episodes that we've done on overthinking and ruminating a couple years back. I'll try to link some of those in the description of today's podcast. If you want to go back through and check out some of the earlier content that we've done on rumination. We were trying to approach this episode a little bit differently because, hey, we've already got that content out there. And so we wanted to take more of like a behavioral tack to it. But there are a lot of different ways to approach this problem. It's a very common problem for people. And it's a really painful one. Overthinking is really hard, in part because we try to think our way out of our overthinking and we're just banging our heads against the wall. And that's part of why we took sort of a different perspective on it today. So I really enjoy doing this, dad. Thanks so much for doing it with me. Really love talking with you about this stuff. I feel like I learn a lot through recording these episodes and definitely through doing the prep for them. And it's just really great to have you along for the ride here.

Speaker 2:
[74:23] Oh, same. This was one of my favorites.

Speaker 1:
[74:32] I really enjoyed today's conversation with Rick, which was focused on overthinking and rumination. If these are major issues for you, a quick reminder that Rick has an online course coming up that is focused on rumination. It's called Breaking Out of Rumination. It is a five-week course, and you can learn more about it at rickhanson.com/ruminating, and use coupon code BEINGWELL25 to receive a 25% off discount. So let's go back to the beginning of the episode and talk about what we talked about today. So what is rumination? Rumination is repetitively and passively thinking about one's problems, their causes, and their consequences. If that definition is a little bit too technical for you, rumination is when we chew our thoughts, but we don't swallow them. Rumination has some common characteristics. It's very self-referential. There's a lot of me, myself, and I in it. It's abstract. It operates at the level of why and what does this mean, rather than giving you concrete specifics that we're going to kind of move toward. Along the same lines, it's passive. It's about observing and evaluating, more than about taking concrete action. And then it's repetitive. The same content tends to cycle through without really changing, and we have limited control over it. We experience it as intrusive and difficult to stop. Rumination comes with a lot of problems for people. It exacerbates and prolongs negative mood states like sadness, anger, and anxiety. And it is a major risk factor in almost every mental health issue. I mean, that's a pretty broad brush, but it's a lot of them. Depression, anxiety, substance abuse, issues around PTSD, and PTSD symptoms following trauma, which we didn't talk about during this conversation, but I'd like to do a little bit on it here at the end because I find this very interesting. One of the big open questions in psychology is, why can two people go through similar experiences and be affected by them in dramatically different ways? Why do, for example, two service members, which is where a lot of the research on PTSD and complex PTSD was done, why can two people go through similar experiences in the field? One of them comes back and develops PTSD, the other one comes back and doesn't. What's going on there? Answering this question is actually not just a psychology issue, it is a major cultural and political issue in part because assumptions about are the root of a lot of moralizing bulls**t. You know, I had it so much harder than you and I'm just fine, you know, why can't you keep it together? Your life's not really that difficult, just have a stiff upper lip, you're such a whiny snowflake, you know, whatever's going on there. And the best working answer that people have is that every individual person has a blend of what are called protective factors and then vulnerability factors. Protective factors could be things like certain kinds of socioeconomic status, developed internal skills, they could be relationships, family of origin stuff. A famous example of a protective factor comes from the Kauai Longitudinal Study, which is this very famous study of at-risk youths, like it says in Kauai and Hawaii. And what it found, and this is just based on my memory here, is that having one really meaningful positive relationship in a kid's life had a huge impact on their long-term outcomes in life. It just took one, but that was a real protective factor for them. And then we have vulnerability factors. These are the things that make the person more likely to develop PTSD. And it turns out that rumination is one of the most important vulnerability factors. So if rumination has all of these problems, why do we ruminate? Well, your brain is trying to solve its own kind of problem. It's perceiving a gap between where we are and where we want to go. And it thinks that if we chew on that gap enough, we'll be able to close it. And this is a theory of rumination called the control theory of rumination or the goal progress theory. There's another theory of rumination called the response styles theory that, to oversimplify, is basically that there are some people who are just rumination prone. And when these rumination prone people start to ruminate, they fall into this vicious cycle where rumination keeps your attention focused on negative thoughts and feelings, negative content. And that makes negative memories and interpretations more accessible to the person. They're really remembering all of that stuff. This then deepens their bad mood, which then generates more rumination, which then creates more negative feelings, and so on and so on. Rumination can also function as a kind of avoidance coping. When we're chewing on something, it feels like we're doing something about it, even if we're not actually. And rumination therefore is a kind of passive form of coping, which can reduce the likelihood that we're going to engage with more useful forms of coping, which we talked about during the episode. An example of that might be trying to actually close that gap between where you are and where you want to go. On the other side, rumination could help us avoid the pain of acceptance. Sometimes we're not going to close that gap. Sometimes closing that gap isn't realistic, and what we got to do is we got to spit the marble out that we're trying to chew on. But acceptance also comes with pain. You're recognizing that something just might not happen for you in life. That's tough. And so you could understand why somebody might want to just fall into the habit of rumination as opposed to really come into terms with reality. And a big reason why people ruminate is that it becomes a habit that gets behaviorally triggered. We talked about that a little bit during the episode. And this habit of rumination is one of the reasons that it is so hard to stop ruminating. Rumination also attacks executive control, which means that the things that we would normally do to break a habit become harder to do for rumination than for many other habits. And this is why it's so hard to just think your way out of rumination. Rumination is a thought pattern, yeah, but it's a very habitual one. We get triggered into it. And it then attacks our ability to exercise what's called executive control, which is essentially taking control over like what we're thinking about or what we're focused on. And particularly rumination makes it really hard to do something called set shifting, which is our ability to disengage from one mental set and move to another. And this is a technical way of talking about essentially recognizing that the way you're thinking about something isn't working for you, and you need to shift to a different mode. For example, moving from abstract thinking to more concrete thinking. So rumination is hurting your brain's ability to do exactly the thing that you need to do in order to stop yourself from ruminating. And that's why we get kind of caught in that rumination cycle. So what can we actually do about it? To summarize what we talked about throughout the episode, we can work at the insight level by changing our beliefs about rumination. And these are some of the beliefs I talked about at the very beginning of the episode, how somebody might think that ruminating about the past helps them prevent future mistakes. We can also try to address our goals more directly. What are we closing the gap on and what are we letting go of? And that took us to a whole conversation about acceptance and agency and how the best forms of agency often begin with a lot of acceptance. We can then try to move from abstract thoughts, like what does this say about me, to more concrete thoughts? What am I going to do about this? And particularly, we can move away from more self-preoccupied thoughts through things like meditative practice. Also you can do this by moving into what are called self-transcendent states, like we talked about during the episode on transpersonal psychology. The simplest version of this is feelings of awe and wonder. One of the best ways into that is by going out into nature. Another great way for a lot of people is by engaging with art. Particularly music can really do this for people. We can also try to do good forms of distraction and particularly forms of distraction that don't rely on the cognitive machinery that's being compromised by rumination. That's a fancy way of saying that using thoughts to fix our thoughts here is going to be really tough. One of the best things to do is to find different ways to move into action. And that might be a little bit more accessible for people when you're interacting with your physical body, you're doing something that's going to make you sweat a little bit. Rick also talked at the end of the episode about various forms of meditative and contemplative practice and how that might help us with rumination, particularly the aspects of it that are about controlling our attention. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I got a lot out of doing the prep for this episode personally. I learned a ton here. I always learn preparing to do the podcast, but I felt like this one really caused me to look at something that I felt like I knew about. I kind of felt like I knew about rumination and overthinking and just view it in a very different light. So it was really instructive for me. I hope you got a lot out of it too. If you made it this far and you'd like to support the podcast, the best way you can do that is by subscribing to the show. That really helps us out. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/being well podcast. Just a couple of dollars a month, you can get a bunch of bonuses like transcripts of the episode and ad free versions of the episodes. You can also watch us on YouTube. You can find us on Spotify. You can leave a rating and a positive review. You can leave a comment on YouTube. These are all things that really help us out. Until next time, thanks again for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.