Toxic Habits: Overthinking

This week, we’ll wrap up our three-part series on toxic habits. Our third toxic habit? Call it overthinking, obsessing, brooding, or wallowing, or, call it the official term: rumination. In this episode of the Savvy Psychologist, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen offers 4 tips to stop the mental hamster wheel

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Scientific AmericanQuick & Dirty TipsScientific American 

Rumination is thinking (and thinking and thinking) about something upsetting, but in a passive way, without actually taking action.

Now, I bet you never thought you’d learn about taxonomy in a psychology podcast, but I promise I’ll connect the dots: animals like cows, deer, goats, and sheep belong to the suborder Ruminantia. These multi-stomached ruminants regurgitate their partially digested food and chew it again.  

Likewise, ruminators chew on their thoughts, as it were, over and over and over again. Very different, but essentially the same concept. How’s that for a mental image?

What’s So Bad About Rumination?

Not only that, but rumination has been found to impair problem solving skills, which makes ruminators less likely to take action on a possible solution, makes them more pessimistic about the future, and pretty much guarantees a bad mood. In fact, those who ruminate develop  at four times the rate of those who don’t ruminate. It’s like a hamster running frantically on a wheel, exhausting itself without actually going anywhere.  

 

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