How To Decrease Rumination And Limiting Concern

Rumination syndrome is a disease in which people repeatedly regurgitate food from the stomach to chew, swallow, or spit it out. Something similar happens with thoughts, which is why we dedicate this article to examining different strategies to reduce their rumination.

In psychological rumination, the person goes round and round thoughts that are not good for him. They regurgitate them over and over again without a “nutritional”, guidance or educational function.

Thus, a certain thought can capture the entire focus of attention, blocking it and often influencing the mood in a negative way.

Glucose, the gasoline of our brain, is consumed for nothing. There is no port to reach, the hours pass in our head and not in our lives. A thought remains locked in, as if our mind were a dead-end room for him.

If you know that feeling, in this article we propose a series of techniques and approaches to shape that invisible door. The rumination circle can only cause depression or anxiety, so it is best to break it as soon as possible.

Decrease rumination: deferral of concern

This is a classic strategy of cognitive-behavioral treatments. However, it is a temporary strategy, which is used until relaxation and restructuring skills are learned to manage worry.

The procedure would be as follows:

• Identify worries and other thoughts that are unnecessary or unpleasant that are interfering with your current performance or enjoyment.

• Choose a 15-30 minute worry period where you don’t have to do any activities. It is not convenient that this moment is just before sleeping.
• When you notice that you are worried, defer the worry to the period that you have allocated for it.
• Use the worry period to develop strategies to cope with it.

This exercise will help you realize that many of the concerns that threaten you are far from urgent. It will encourage you to realize how they interfere in your present moment, generating in turn more worries because they are an obstacle to finishing the task you are in at that moment. A common, and often disastrous, way out is acting on impulse guidance.

Decrease rumination: check the usefulness of worrying

This exercise allows you to verify that only a fraction of the negative results that we anticipate occur. Most of the worries and problems in the end are not generated, they resolve themselves or we find a solution when they appear.

To check the uselessness we are talking about, you can take the following steps:

• Write down the concerns you had last week.
• Relate the concerns and time spent to the end result. Write down the catastrophic forecasts that were met and those that were not.
• Evaluate if the thinking was directed to the solution or to the fear about your inability to face it.
• Finally, specify if the problems encountered were more related to the tension associated with the problem or concern (insomnia, headaches, muscle tension, etc.) than to finding real impediments in their achievement (inability to take public transport, last minute breakdowns, robberies, etc.).

In many of the results of your objective evaluation, you will see that what is really exhausting and limiting is anticipating its occurrence and your supposed inability to act. Worry is a dysfunctional way of dealing with problems, believing that if you are worried, you are busy solving them.

Decrease rumination: decatastrophization

De-catastrophizing is not about viewing a negative event as unimportant or neutral. For example, it could be very upsetting to be out of work. It is about critically evaluating its real impact and possible solutions.

The procedure is the next:

• Write down your concerns and the dreaded results should they occur.
• Write down the actual results that have happened to you. Write down if they have been better or worse than expected (worse, so bad, somewhat better, much better, much better) and how well you have managed to face the negative results.

• Then, to make it easier for you to remember this information, review it every afternoon and relive it through your imagination. This seems much more effective than considering it just verbally.

Instead of “fixating” or “feeding” thoughts about the negative consequences of certain events (eg, heart attack), try to find a point where you can achieve a balanced view of the event.

You may no longer have a job, but you can spend a little more time with your family, train, or find a better one. If evil cannot be used, let us use the good it leaves us.

Exposure and response prevention

In order to get used to certain sensations, we can begin with an exposure to concerns using the imagination . We recommend that you implement this strategy in the company of a trained therapist. This is so because it is not an advisable technique for adapted emotional concerns or shocks, such as the grieving process after a loss.

The objective of this exercise is to try to get used to the anxious images, managing to tolerate the emotion until we manage not to associate it with a certain safety behavior (call a family member before making any decision, check the e-mail many times to see if have obtained a response or take an anxiolytic at the slightest sense of alarm or distress).

• Create a detailed image that includes situations starting with the least disturbing or anxious.
• It vividly conjures up the first troubling image with the most disastrous consequence to flow from it.
• Once the previous step is completed, re-conjure the image in your head for at least 25-30 minutes. Describe out loud what you are imagining and how you feel.
• During the exhibition, you should not apply coping strategies such as cognitive restructuring, relaxation, or try to distract yourself or run away from the image. Of course, you cannot apply safety behaviors like the ones we have pointed out before.

• Towards the end of the exhibition, imagine how things will be a while later (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months 1-2 years) to thus favor a decatastrophization process.
• After the exposure time has elapsed and assuming that there has been a habituation of anxiety, generate as many alternatives as you can to the worst anticipated consequence.
• When the exposure generates no more than a slight level of anxiety despite several attempts to vividly imagine the concern, move on to the next area of ​​concern in the hierarchy.

Positive rumination

It is about carrying out a rumination exercise, but with thoughts of positive content. With this, we will be able to put some curious effects in our favor, such as that of self-fulfilling prophecy. We will also prevent negative thoughts from entering our focus of consciousness. The idea is to begin to ruminate on positive thoughts in the same way that you do with negative ones.

• The same kinds of unrealistic predictions are generated as when it happens with negative thoughts.
• At the same time, if automatic thoughts or negative feelings interfere, the therapist is told to “take care of them” for a time, until the exercise and positive rumination have stabilized.
• It focuses on images, sensations and very positive events that are not entirely realistic in relation to, for example, their performance (triumph, recognition, etc.).
• When a rumination has been established in the intensity similar to the concern, the exercise is finished. This is the time for the person to focus on the emotions experienced.

The person will understand that, like positive rumination, constant worries are unrealistic and are not a good way to solve problems, since there are ideas that remain fixed based on our beliefs or expectations without being an obstacle to attend to others thoughts.