Episode 18: Rumination

I've always kind of enjoyed doing the dishes.
I'm a big believer in a few things there.
One, I shouldn't say I'm a big believer.
It makes it sound like I believe this is some kind of transcendent experience.
But there's a few things that I think it does.
One, it's an isolated, contained activity that when you're finished with it, you have
accomplished something.
It's something small.
It's just that you've cleaned some things up, but it gives you a nicer living space.
It's a thing that if you put it off for too long, it becomes kind of an insurmountable
task.
I should mention also that I'm kind of speaking specifically about washing by hand.
Currently, a few times in my life, often actually, I haven't had a dishwasher at my disposal.
The current house I live in is from the 60s and the kitchen was never updated and we haven't
gotten around to doing it yet.
So no dishwasher, washing by hand.
If you let that go too long, then it becomes a two-day task, right?
Because you're going to do one big load of dishes and put them in the drying rack and
wait for them to dry off.
And by the time all that's done, you've eaten our meal.
So I've always thought that was an important piece of the activity is just looking and seeing
a small improvement that you have just made.
Another thing that I always liked about it was that it's a mundane activity and there's
quite a bit of research out there and also just in my own personal experience, I've noticed
that if you're really heads down in something and thinking through it and working hard on
it and all that, it's good to take a break and do something mundane, particularly if you
get to a point where you're either stuck or you're getting kind of tired and just having
a hard time focusing, you know, that sort of thing.
So often for me, you know, working your way through something, you kind of come to a stopping
point or a point where you're kind of stuck.
That's often a good time to take a minute and take care of the dishes.
It also often was a time for my mind to just kind of wander.
Again, mundane task, good opportunity to just kind of think through whatever.
So I never minded doing this across various relationships that I've had with partners.
I never had an issue with being the one to, you know, handle the dishes by and large, like
maybe not every single time because, you know, sometimes there's just a lot going on or
whatever.
But generally speaking, that was always a thing that I kind of felt good about doing and felt
also was useful in my mindset for the day.
Then an unfortunate thing started happening.
Without getting into all the gory details, there were certain things that happened throughout
the course of my life, as with most people or many people, I assume, where my mindset started
getting a bit negative.
Not about washing dishes, but just in general.
I wasn't necessarily in a great place mentally, emotionally, spiritually, however you want to
look at it.
I just hit some patches where I wasn't in a great headspace.
And then an odd thing started happening.
While doing dishes, instead of being sort of this nice activity that was a way to clear
the mind and think about some things and just zone out if I have to or whatever, I started
really cycling through the things that were bothering me, the things that were making me angry or sad or
anxious or any combination of these things, the things that had me in a bad place.
And I would think about them while washing dishes.
And I don't know how this started exactly, but it kind of became a problem because I would start
to wash the dishes.
And at first, I was in a bad headspace overall.
So I was just kind of in a bad mood, generally speaking.
But then once I kind of got over that general, I'm always in a bad mood thing, what would happen
would be that after a while of pursuit of doing this, I would be okay.
And then I would start washing the dishes.
And then the association of all that time of kind of thinking negatively, a lot of negative
thought during that time began to then, it would trigger my brain to begin thinking negatively
because I'm washing dishes.
I didn't say that all that very well.
It's a, it's kind of a classic, you know, classical conditioning kind of thing.
At first, washing the dishes gave me the opportunity to sit around and think negatively.
After a while, washing the dishes became a trigger for me to begin thinking negatively
because I had done it so many times.
And a lot of this negative thought came down to a couple of patterns and terms that despite
my, you know, background in psychology and interest in psychology, I really wasn't familiar
with these concepts for whatever reason.
I don't know if I just missed them along the way, but the patterns that I would follow
often when, when being in this headspace is one, I would just sort of keep cycling around
and thinking about the same couple of topics over and over and over again.
I later came to understand that this was called rumination, which again, was a term that I don't
know exactly how I missed this because as soon as I started looking into it, the, the content
on rumination is abundant.
It must be a big thing, but I just missed it along the way somehow.
But, uh, ruminating is this idea of just kind of this vicious cycle where you, you think
about something, um, that upsets you and then you think why it upsets you.
And then, uh, that brings you back to thinking about it again and how much it upsets you.
And it's just kind of this circle where you just keep thinking about the same couple of
things over and over and over again.
The other thing that often goes hand in hand with rumination, frankly, is a lot of counterfactuals.
This is another term that I've really only recently become aware of again, don't know if
you know how I missed it, but whatever, you know, live and learn the idea of counterfactuals
is that you start playing over in your head.
What if you would made this different choice and that different choice?
And you just start thinking about all of these things that didn't happen in reality and where
they could have gone.
And I found that these were really the two things that I was doing to myself over and
over again when doing this mundane task of washing the dishes.
So I would sit there for 10, 50 or stand there for 10, 15 minutes, wash these dishes up.
And by the time I was done with it, I was in a terrible headspace reliably.
So the, the reason I bring all this up is really to talk about the rumination piece of things.
Cause the more I've looked into it, the more I, I, I realize that just how dangerous it is,
just how bad it is for one's mental state.
And you may be doing this in certain areas or at certain times in your life and maybe not even
realize that you are, or maybe not have the terminology for it, or maybe you do when you're
just wondering maybe how to break out of it.
So rumination again is just sort of this, this cyclical thing where you're, you're thinking
negatively repeatedly over and over and over again over time about the exact same bunch of stuff.
And it becomes completely unproductive.
Initially examining negative things is there's nothing wrong with that.
It's a good thing to do.
If something bad has happened or you have been involved in something bad, or you think you
made a mistake or whatever, those are good things to examine in a productive way.
And that's the key.
That's the difference.
It's not about just never thinking anything negative ever or reflecting anything negative
ever.
However, the key difference is, are you reflecting on it and then coming up with some sort of
conclusion, solution, path forward, or are you thinking about it and then just thinking
about it again and thinking about it again and thinking about it again and, oh, it's so
terrible and, oh, I'm such an idiot and, oh, and, and, and over and over and over again.
And it's that over and over and over again, where this whole pattern gets you.
And this is the part that I think is dangerous and also potential for, for some optimistic
outcomes.
Your brain, as you do and think things, molds itself over time.
It develops what are called pathways.
And the general idea goes like this, and let's equate it to something else.
Or let's use something else as an example.
If you begin to learn to play an instrument, the first few times you sit down to play, it's
awkward.
It doesn't flow naturally.
You have a lot to learn.
Even if you know how to do some things on that instrument, it won't feel natural.
The more you practice, the more natural that process becomes of, of playing, whatever it
is you're playing, you get a little better.
You can think about it, you get a little better each day, but in fact, it's not just that you're
getting better.
It's that it's feeling more natural.
It comes more naturally because your brain at first doesn't know how to connect all the
appropriate neurons and paths and how to think about and conceptualize these things because
it hasn't done it before.
But the more times you do it, your brain actually builds physically new pathways to think about
and perform these operations efficiently.
One of the big problems with rumination is that your brain is going to do just that.
The more times you do it, the more efficiently your brain is going to learn to get into a
bad headspace.
It's going to figure out how to get there really, really fast because you do it so much.
And so what will happen over time is that at first, maybe it's just that you think about
this once in a while.
And then later, maybe it's just that you think about it while you're washing the dishes.
But then if you do it enough, your brain has learned to get into a negative headspace
so quickly that almost anything will put you put it there.
And that's when things have gotten really bad.
And that's how you find yourself sinking into a type of depression and anxiety that alienates
the people around you.
Because no matter what is said, done, experienced, you can find a way to connect that to something
terrible or whatever this bad thing is that you've been ruminating on for so long.
So this idea of pathways in the brain, I think, is really, really powerful and really, really
interesting.
And I think therein lies some hope.
Now, I'm not here to say that I'm 100%, you know, recovered from rumination or I'm not
a recovering ruminator or whatever, or maybe I'm still a recovering ruminator.
I'm not saying that I have completely solved this problem.
And I don't necessarily even have steps that I can offer as to how to begin to turn that
around.
I have some ideas around that.
I think I've made, I think I have done some things that helped almost reset a lot of that.
But the piece that I wanted to express was that that same set of things that can send
you down a bad road into this set of brain pathways that can really just ruin you.
That same idea, I think, in theory, can be turned on its head.
Did you ever meet somebody and you're just like, wow, you're so positive.
You're so full of this like positive, wonderful energy.
The absolute extreme to this, the annoying extreme would be like Alec Baldwin's character
when he showed up on Friends once.
I'll see if I can link to it.
But that, to a lesser degree, is sort of what I'm talking about here.
If your brain can be developed to create these negative pathways, it stands to reason that
it could just as easily be developed or be tuned to develop positive pathways.
And I think that the light at the end of the tunnel here or the optimistic spin on it or
however you want to think about it is that if you can find things or activities that help
you ruminate positively, and maybe ruminate is the wrong word because ruminate is kind of
this cyclical thing.
But if you can find things that put you into a positive headspace and have you walk away
from them feeling energized and charged up, you know that feeling, right?
There are activities that I'm sure you have where you walk away from them and feel charged.
The more of those things you do, the more your brain should develop mechanisms to get you
into a positive headspace.
The more activities you can do, not just to feel charged, but to be thinking positively
and thinking about things in positive cycles and how to be productive and how to enjoy your
life.
And the more you're thinking about all the activities that will bring you happiness, as
opposed to all the past choices that you're unhappy about, the more you will tune
your brain to get you there.
So that maybe your end state can be whenever you're around people and when they say things
and instead of your brain snapping to all this negativity, it can snap to positivity instead.
Again, it's more of an end goal.
I don't necessarily have a bunch of steps that someone can take.
I can say personally, I feel like I'm making a lot of good progress on this track.
Having learned about a lot of this stuff and trying to implement it in my own ways, but
I think that the same things, it's ironic in some ways, the same things that are dangerous
and should be avoided about negative thought are the same mechanisms that can also make you
a more positive and optimistic and productive and forward-looking person.