You think too much.
Problems with the ruminating brain…
You are lying in bed awake. Staring at the ceiling. The alarm clock will go off in 20 minutes. Thoughts spin through your mind in a whirl of dust and smoke. The hamster is on the wheel spinning away. Your mind is at it again, trying to solve problems that can’t be solved. Trying to put structure to things that are by nature chaotic. Trying very hard to make you crazy, and it is exhausting.
The ongoing crisis at work is reviewed and renewed. Why can’t you find a solution? Are you not capable? Are you not smart enough? Are you not working hard enough? It must be someone else’s doing? Maybe an outside influence from the competition or the government or the economy?
And this person laying here next to me softly snoring. What the hell is going on there? Is it too late for me to fix this relationship? Why do they expect things from me that I can’t do? Am I incapable of holding up my end of the relationship? Should I try harder? Am I too Needy?
And those windows that are rotting out on the house? When can I find the time to fix them? Where am I going to get the money? I’m not taking out a loan. What about my finances…
And then you roll over and feel that sharp pain in that joint or muscle and wonder if you can run that race. Have you done too much? What kind of cross training can you work into your schedule to build that muscle back up? What kind of stretching? What if you can’t run that race? Can you even do this anymore? Maybe you’re just too old. Maybe it’s time to get real with yourself and move that energy out of training and into something useful that benefits your career and your family?
And on and on and on it spins.
Until you get up and take a shower. But your ruminating brain chases you around all day like an open loop in a computer program. Like an unsolvable puzzle always at the edge of your consciousness, waiting to spin your mind into endless gyrations of stress.
And like a rogue computer program it chews up CPU cycles and IO and memory that you could be using for something else. It takes capacity away from your ability to execute. It drains your mental and emotional energy. It’s an investment. An unconscious investment. And unconscious investment in nothing.
It causes stress and triggers all the anti-health reactions that come with stress. Tiredness, crankiness, lack of sleep, stress hormones, poor decisions and all that other stress baggage. Ironically by letting our ruminating brain spin on and on we curtail our ability to execute well to solve the problems.
We think too much.
It is what has made us successful as a species. It is an evolutionary adaptation. If you can think your way around threats, you may survive. Figuring out how to get that next meal and how to avoid the lion’s jaws and how to get that next mating opportunity by thinking it through and coming up with a plan gave us better odds of survival.
But now, in todays world, too much rumination doesn’t help your odds of survival. It just makes you unhappy. It can become a downward spiraling trigger to mental illness. It can cause you to make abrupt and poor decisions that negatively effect your life and the lives of those around you. It can cause you to give up when you should keep trying. It can make you assume things that just aren’t true – so that you are playing along to a mental script that is mostly fiction.
How do we get out of this trap? How do we quiet the ruminating brain?
I suspect you already know what I’m going to say.
- The first step is to recognize what is going on. It is to notice those first signs of the ruminating brain turning on. Recognize it for what it is. Move it out of your dinosaur brain and into your thinking brain.
- These open loops are patterns. Refuse to let it start down that well-worn track of thought. The one that starts with someone cutting you off in traffic and ends in you hating life. As soon as you recognize the thought pattern of the ruminating brain, break the pattern with something else. Create your own positive pattern or different pattern or absurd pattern – what ever it is, practice breaking the pattern.
- Summarize and cut to the chase. Yeah, your work is difficult, relationships are hard, training is hard – that’s the way life is Bubbah. Stop ruminating. There is no tidy package of a solution to these human situations. Accept it for what it is and move on.
- Ask the really good question, “What’s the worst that can happen?” What you’ll find is the worst thing that can happen isn’t that bad. Then you can move on to the empowering statement, “What ever happens I can handle it.” Now you’re back in control. Back in the driver’s seat.
- Is what you’re ruminating on even your problem? Or are you letting other people dump their shit on you? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. That shitty work situation is a choice you made, if you don’t want to go, don’t. At the end of the day it is pretty much under your control and you can do things differently if you want to.
- Empty out your brain. Open your journal and write all that crap down and you will take the power out of it. You’ll give it a place to live. A safe place. You can stop thinking about it.
- Calm your mind. And you knew I was going to go there eventually too, didn’t you? Yep, get yourself some silent time and calm your thoughts. Whether it’s meditation or prayer or any of those mind calming practices just work it into your day. Practice being in the now.
- Stop worrying, start doing. One of the best cures for the ruminating mind is to start doing something. And, as it turns out, one of the best ways to solve all those intractable problems is to stop thinking about them and start doing something about them. Get up in the morning and do the best job you can, with what you have and things will look different tomorrow. Focus on the job, the process not on the unknowable future outcome.
That’s all I have for you. It’s hard to carry around open loop problems with no clear solution. That’s not how our brains work. We want answers and when things are cloudy we start to ruminate.
Here’s your homework for the week. Break that rumination pattern and get on with living. We don’t have that much time to screw around with stupid stuff.