Day 270: Rumination

I was not in a good way yesterday. Not at all. But I spent today before work researching and reading, and I've got a better handle on an aspect of my suffering that has until now eluded me.

That aspect is something called rumination. It's something that I knew bits about already, but I had never looked into it in detail, and now I see that it has affected my life for such a long time.

Rumination is when you continuously and obsessively think about the same upsetting or negative thoughts, swirling on in your head, spiralling down, unable to stop, but also unable to reach any useful conclusions. It is a key component of depression. A bout of rumination is a good predictor of the onset of a depressive episode.

People tend to ruminate, according to Healthline, if they have a history of emotional or physical trauma, or if they’re facing ongoing stressors that can’t be controlled. And people with certain personality traits are more at risk of rumination - traits including “perfectionism, neuroticism, and an excessive focus on one’s relationships with others.”

Which, like, Hello.

So rumination is obsessing over something, usually something negative. But then that thought pulls in a whole bunch of other thoughts, because of the way memory and association works, the neural networks we create, once you’re trapped in negative thinking you find yourself remembering all the other times in your life that corresponded to this negativity, and it becomes all the harder to pull yourself out.

Ung, I’m struggling writing this, you know. A bout of rumination, which is what I was going through yesterday - it’s what I always go through in my depressive episodes - makes me feel so wiped out the day after. It’s like all the synapses of your brain squeezing tight, it’s like your face being pressed against some horrific cosmic grindstone, and it goes on and on and nothing gets solved.

Well it really fucked me up yesterday. And today I couldn’t get up. I’ve had so many mornings like this, the feeling of being run over by a tank, of having a brain totally wrung dry and twisted in knots and just utterly fatigued - looking back it’s always after periods of rumination - which before I just thought of as “being depressed”, it wasn’t something I’d separated out as distinct from the rest of the symptoms.

But while it is inextricably linked to depression, is a key pillar of depression, it isn’t the same as the anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - or the grief, or the psychomotor retardation - the slowing down of all your muscles.

Rumination is its own thing, that nevertheless goes with those other things to make up the vague larger thing we call depression.

So, what is it? It’s the pathological dysfunction of the problem solving mechanisms of the brain. It is going over a thought without completing the thought, without solving it, without finding closure and solace.

If you have a lot of trauma and stress in your life then you will think about these things, how to solve them. But thinking about trauma and stress makes you traumatised and stressed. It engages your stress response system, floods you with cortisol, tightens muscles, increases heart rate. You get anxious. Thinking becomes narrow, as happens in stress response, to focus you on fleeing danger.

And all of this makes it harder to solve whatever problem you are thinking about. It’s like PTSD - you don’t process thoughts, they stay in your brain, stay current, continue making you traumatised and stressed. And that interferes even more with your problem solving ability, and that makes you more stressed, and on.

It’s self-perpetuating, because when you think about trauma and stress your thinking becomes more inflexible, and when your thinking is inflexible you can’t see a way out of your trauma and stress, and that makes you more traumatised and stressed, and that makes your thinking more inflexible…

……

I can’t write this now. My brain fucking hurts. I can actually feel it trying to start up into a ruminative state, I can feel the gears grinding, feel it searching for all the instances that correspond with the negativity (“this writing is crap. All your writing is crap. Remember the other day when your writing was crap. And a few days before that. And BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

And it really hurts. My poor brain is exhausted - stress is exhausting, the release of cortisol, the high alert, the jangling nerves.

But it’s so important to do what I’m doing now. Because here’s how you combat rumination, according to everything I’ve read:

1) You disrupt the negative thinking. Focus on anything else. Get out of the loop. Play a nice game. Read a passage from a favourite book. Colour something in. Watch a TV show. Do a crossword. Something you personally find enjoyable, and something that takes your full attention, because otherwise your thoughts will wander back.

2) Go back when you’re calmer and write out the problems you were ruminating about, be specific, break the problems into all their component pieces, look at which parts you can do something about, and make realistic plans to tackle them, and for the things you can’t change downgrade them from problems to worries, set a date in the future to check in on them and see if anything has changed and if you now have the ability to affect them, and until then, forget about worrying.

So right now, in the danger zone for rumination, it’s imperative that I disrupt those negative thoughts every chance I get.

So I’m sorry, this blog post is loose as all hell, and probably makes no sense, but it is me fighting back. I can’t stop and plan it out and rewrite it, because it’s taking all my focus to simply pull myself away from the whole sticky addictive pathways of negative thought that are trying to swirl up and overwhelm me.

But it’s real progress. My brain feels like mashed potato, but it's good understanding why it feels this way, and that there are very real and practical steps I can take to work on making this better in the future.

Just got to go gently, avoid the swamps of rumination, and make gradual plans face all the problems in my life. Easy.