And while it’s easy for us to slip into rumination, the negative effects can be serious: depression, low self-esteem, anger issues, insomnia, and substance abuse to name just a few. But fundamentally rumination is a habit. This means that with a little bit of insight and some practice, you can learn to stop ruminating, let go of the past, and free yourself to live your life moving forward.
1. Distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy rumination
The first thing to understand about rumination is that it’s almost identical to healthy reflection. One of the best ways we have to improve ourselves and avoid future mistakes is to take an honest look at our mistakes, shortcomings, and flaws.
For example:
The key ingredient in healthy reflection is that it’s productive. The goal is true understanding and growth. In other words, reflection leads to new information and/or helps you do something better. Rumination is very similar to reflection in that it involves a kind of analytical thinking about negatives in the past. But with rumination, it doesn’t lead to anything helpful or useful.
For example:
Healthy reflection is productive thinking about negatives in the past. Rumination is unproductive thinking about negatives in the past.
A few more ways to distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy rumination:
It’s important to clearly distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy rumination because it’s very easy to start with the desire to genuinely reflect but then unintentionally slip into unhealthy rumination. If you want to stop ruminating so much, learn to be extra sensitive to when you cross the line between reflection and rumination.
2. Understand the real need your rumination fills
Many people feel as though rumination is something that happens to them—like an illness they catch. In reality, rumination is much more like a mental behavior—something you do and, to a large degree, have control over. This is important because the reason a habit of rumination sticks around despite all its negative side effects is that it’s filling some kind of psychological need. In other words, rumination is doing something for you, even if you’re not aware of it.
Here are a few examples of subtle psychological needs that rumination fills:
Of course, there are many other psychological needs that rumination could fill. But these are some of the most common and serve to illustrate the idea that rumination might stick around as a habit because it’s “doing work.” If you’ve struggled with rumination for a long time and can’t seem to get a handle on it or let it go, it’s important to seriously ask yourself this question:
What am I getting out of my habit of rumination?
Because if you want to truly be free from rumination, you’ll have to understand what that psychological need it fills really is and figure out a healthier way to address it.
3. Make time to be sad on purpose
One of the most common things people get stuck ruminating on is loss: Death of a loved one, loss of a job or identity, divorce or end of a relationship, etc. Put another way, we often have a hard time “letting go” of someone or something we loved or values. And of course, this kind of grief is completely understandable! But here’s the thing: Ruminating about a loss can actually interfere with a healthy grieving process and the ability to accept the loss and move forward. Now, this might sound a little counterintuitive… After all, the common wisdom is that what gets in the way of healthy grief is avoiding processing the loss and our grief. So wouldn’t thinking about it be good?
Not quite. The key distinction here is that a major component of healthy grief is to process not only the loss but also our feelings about the loss—sadness, anger, guilt, etc. The problem with rumination is that we often end up ruminating about the loss as a way of distracting ourselves from the feelings associated with the loss. This means that it will look and seem like you’re trying to deal with and manage the loss and grief, but really you’re avoiding the hardest part—the emotions. In order to let go of the habit of rumination and actually process your feelings after a loss, it helps to make a time to do this formally. And one way of doing this is with an exercise I call scheduled sadness.
Scheduled sadness simply means making a regular time to be sad on purpose. This is helpful because it teaches your mind that, while painful, sadness and grief aren’t and or things to be feared and avoided. By confronting your sadness head-on, you actually rob it of much of its excessive pain and intensity—a key step in the healthy grieving process So, commit to making a little time to be with your sadness and processor wholeheartedly and you’ll find that your impulse to ruminate on your loss will fade.
4. Change your relationship with anger
Angry rumination is a particular type of rumination where, instead of ruminating on your own mistakes or flaws, you ruminate on those of others.
For example:
Obviously, there are many downsides to angry rumination, including chronic stress, relationship difficulties, lost productivity, workplace issues, etc. So why do we do it? Why do we sit and stew over the mistakes and flaws of others? Because it makes us angry. Wait a second… Anger’s a negative emotion, so why would I try and make myself angry by ruminating? It’s a common misconception that anger is a “negative” emotion. People assume that because anger often leads to bad decisions and regrettable actions that it must be negative. But, as most emotion researchers will tell you, anger is actually a “positive” emotion because the feeling itself is pleasurable. See, anger is an ego-inflating emotion. It makes us feel good about ourselves and boosts our sense of power and superiority.
Think about it: When you criticize someone else for being an idiot, you’re implying that you’re smart. Or when you judge someone else for being immoral or unethical, you’re implying how right and good you are. While anger has its uses, we very often end up using it like a drug—to temporarily make ourselves feel better. And the way we do that is to ruminate on how wrong or bad other people are! This means that if you want to stop ruminating so much, you need to develop enough self-awareness to realize that you’re doing this and cultivate a healthier way to feel good about yourself. There are plenty of ways to improve your self-esteem without putting other people down in the process.
5. Build up your tolerance for helplessness
Often our need to ruminate is motivated by a fear of helplessness. When something bad has happened to us in the past that we can’t fix or address, it makes us feel helpless. And we hate feeling helpless! So we end up getting ourselves into all sorts of unhealthy habits because they temporarily help us avoid that feeling. Here’s an example:
Suppose you recently lost your job. You know that the most important thing for you to be doing right now is to look for another job, but you seem to spend a lot of time stuck in the past—ruminating on all the things that could have led to you being let go, analyzing potential mistakes you made, and generally trying to understand what happened. You feel weak and powerless every time you think about “being let go.” And because you haven’t found another job yet, you find yourself ruminating and stewing and generally overthinking about your past job and why they fired you. The trouble is there’s probably no way to know for sure why it happened. And it’s unlikely that you’d find an answer if they didn’t tell you immediately. In fact, it’s very possible there simply was no “good reason” or that reason had nothing to do with your or your performance—the company was just trying to save money and you were unlucky enough to be in the batch of people they let go.
See how helplessness pervades all of this? And do you see how ruminating and thinking about what happened gives you something to do? See how it temporarily makes you feel like you have a job again and can be productive and solve problems? In other words, do you see how rumination is a kind of substitute for work? It feels like you’re being productive and doing something useful. Of course, by definition, rumination isn’t useful—it just feels that way. And it comes with all sorts of negative side effects that easily outweigh the short-lived hit of distraction from helplessness. All of which means, if you want to stop using rumination as a way to cope with your feelings of helplessness, you need a better alternative.
Now, you could substitute some other habit to help distract you from the helplessness: video games, drugs, social media, etc. But the real solution here is to face up to your helplessness and meet it square in the face—to acknowledge that helplessness feels bad but isn’t actually dangerous. Which means you can build up a tolerance to it. This is crucial because if you spend all your time and energy running away from the feeling of helplessness, you’ll have little time or energy left to run toward the things you want—a new job, a better relationship with your partner, etc. Helplessness feels bad but that doesn’t mean it is bad. Slowly and steadily build up a tolerance to helplessness and eventually you’ll be able to get on with life despite it.
6. Learn the true meaning of forgiveness
Many people get stuck in the habit of rumination because they can’t forgive someone who’s wronged them. Years or even decades could have gone by, and yet, they still can seem to “let go” and “move on.” One of the big problems I see people running into with letting go of rumination and embracing forgiveness is that people misunderstand what forgiveness is, actually, and how to go about doing it. Here are a few thoughts on forgiveness and how to think differently about it so that you can let go of rumination and finally be free to move on.
Forgiveness is a complex topic, especially since it’s so often intertwined with religious, moral, or cultural practices and beliefs. But from a psychological perspective, if you want to “let go” of past wrongs done to you, the key is to understand the psychology of forgiveness and how it actually works.
7. Face up to the costs of your rumination
As we’ve discussed in the points above, there are many subtle but powerful reasons why we continue ruminating. Despite its costs, rumination fills a variety of psychological needs, and so, can become a powerful and difficult-to-shake habit. One way to make this process a little bit easier is to really clarify the true costs of your rumination habit. Because when you can really see the extent to which you’re suffering from your rumination habit and all the good things you’re giving up as a result of it, letting go can be significantly easier.
Here are some of the more common costs people incur as a result of being stuck in a habit of ruminating:
It’s painful, but one of the most effective strategies to help you stop ruminating and move on is to take an honest inventory of all the costs and downsides that come from your rumination habit.
8. Clarify your values
While not coming to terms with all the costs of your rumination habit can be a problem, so too can the opposite… It’s easy to stay stuck in rumination if you’re not clear on what you really want, on your values. Rumination is like being chained to the past. Your mental habit of overthinking previous mistakes and negatives in your life means that you are effectively living in the past, and therefore, not living in the present. One of the best ways to break this cycle and really free yourself from rumination is to get much more clear about your values—the things that matter most to you in life that you want to pursue and move toward. Put another way…It’s hard to move away from what you don’t want when you don’t really know what you do want.
Values clarification means taking some time to genuinely reflect on and think about what you really want:
Now, answering these questions can be surprisingly difficult—in large part because they’re kind of intimidating! But like anything else, the trick is to start small and specific. One simple way to begin clarifying your values and goals is to actually write down your bucket list. Most people know what a bucket list is but few people actually take the time to create their own—to write down the list of things they want to achieve or experience before they die. This is unfortunate because it’s a relatively easy exercise that can have tremendous positive effects. Not only will the list serve as a reminder of your values and the things you aspire to, but perhaps more importantly, the very act of generating a bucket list will help you discover what your values actually are.
So, schedule 20-30 minutes one day to sit down with pen and paper and start brainstorming ideas for things you would love to do or experiences you would love to have someday. Be as ambitious and optimistic as you can. I think you’ll find that this simple little exercise will have a big impact on your ability to pull your attention out of the past and refocus it onto your present and future.
9. Practice being more assertive
Here’s one way to look at why you ruminate so much and why it’s so hard to stop: Retreating into your mind and “solving problems” there feels a lot less scary than trying to solve problems in the world. In other words, rumination can be a form of procrastination from life. Much like the student who spends hours doing the pseudo-work of cleaning their room as a way to avoid writing a paper, similarly, we do the pseudo-work of ruminating on the past as a way to avoiding dealing with real problems in our life.
For example: Suppose you are unhappy in your marriage. Communication is strained, there’s little to no intimacy left, and you feel more like roommates than partners (much less lovers). That can be a pretty daunting challenge. And if you feel daunted by it and insecure in your chances to actually improve things, then it’s not hard to see how you could end up procrastinating on the hard work of addressing major issues in your marriage by ruminating in your mind about how bad things have gotten and why. The solution to this dilemma is assertiveness.
In a broad sense, assertiveness is the willingness to go after what you want despite feeling afraid, uncertain, or confused:
In short…Assertiveness is the opposite of procrastination. It means doing what needs to be done despite feeling pulled to run the other way. And once you see that rumination is one of your default strategies for avoidance and running the other way, it should be clear that the way out is to get better at being assertive—at pursuing the things you want despite feeling afraid or uncomfortable. Like anything, becoming more assertive takes time and practice. It won’t happen overnight. But if you slowly practice being more assertive in small ways, you’ll find it easier to be assertive in bigger ways. And once that happens, I think you’ll discover that your need for rumination diminishes significantly.
10. Short-circuit rumination with the 3Ms
So far, all the strategies we’ve discussed for how to stop ruminating are long-term ones—they address the underlying causes of rumination and work on those. And while these approaches are powerful and offer the most effective way to end the habit of rumination long-term, they’re also slow. They don’t “work” immediately. But sometimes, when we find ourselves caught in a spiral of rumination, we just need something to quickly kick us out of that negative spiral so we can get back to what we were doing—work, a conversation, playing with our kids, etc. My favorite little strategy for kicking yourself out of any negative thought pattern or bad mood is what I call the 3Ms. The basic idea is that three of the best ways to change your thoughts and break free of difficult emotions in the short term are to move your body physically, make or fix something, and meet or interact with someone else socially.
Key Points
Rumination is the mental habit of overthinking about the past. It includes things like dwelling on past mistakes or losses and habitually revisiting old slights and offenses against you even though doing so isn’t helpful or productive. While there’s no one way to stop ruminating so much, take together these ideas should help:
