Understanding Rumination

Have you experienced a negative thought, feeling, or situation that keeps playing in your mind until it affects your well-being? That is rumination.

Rumination is a repetitive and prolonged experience of negative feelings, thoughts, or an upsetting circumstance. It is a response to low or depressed moods brought by past actions, regrets, causes and symptoms of depression, or consequences of decisions.

Repeating a thought, feeling, or experience to solve a concern or gain mastery over a situation can be helpful. However, continuous rumination becomes maladaptive, causing a disturbance in individuals’ emotions, interpersonal relationships, and functioning.

Negative consequences of rumination

• Prolongs and exacerbates existing emotional states or emotional disorders
• Increases negative thought or feelings about the past, present, and future
• Slows emotional recovery from a previous adverse experience
• Increases emotional reactivity to succeeding stressful situation
• Impairs problem-solving skills
• Increases uncertainty and avoidance behaviour
• Reduces confidence in plans
• Becomes less sensitive and responsive to positive situations
• Impairs concentration and executive functioning
• Contributes to the onset, maintenance, and recurrence of multiple disorders
• Engages in impulsive behaviours and temporary escapes, such as self-harm or alcohol and substance abuse
• Leads to poorer sleep quality or sleep problems like insomnia
• Interferes with psychological treatments
• Becomes more prone to physical and mental health issues

Positive consequences of rumination

• Facilitates successful cognitive processing and mastery of an upsetting or traumatic experience
• Prepares an individual for future situations
• Fosters problem-solving skills

Risk factors

• early adverse experiences, such as childhood sexual and emotional abuse
• interpersonal stress
• socioeconomic disadvantages
• stressful life transitions or changes
• history of mental health issues in the family
• unhelpful parenting styles, such as lack of positive support or over-controlling parenting style
• socio-cultural expectancies and socialisation, such as high regard to gender role identities, an extreme value on happiness, e.g., the need to feel happy always, and disregard to the expression of negative emotional states

Mechanisms in rumination

1. Response Styles Theory
   In Response Styles Theory, proposed by Nolen-Hoeksema, rumination is a stable, enduring, and automatic response to low or depressed moods. This response is usually learned in childhood due to adverse situations, passive coping styles, or over-controlling parents. It often starts automatically and involuntarily as a reaction to low or depression. However, it develops into a habit because it is experienced frequently and repetitively under the same context.
2. Control Theory
   Rumination happens when goals are not met, or there is a slow and unsatisfactory goal progression. Rumination persists longer in instances where goals hold special meanings. Until the goals are achieved, or individuals remove their goals, rumination continues. Rumination can be adaptive, but it becomes maladaptive when the focus is directed on unsuccessful attempts at problem-solving.

Factors such as high standards of goals, perfectionism, high value on happiness, and disregard to the expression of negative emotional states contribute to the increased frequency and duration of rumination.

Why is it challenging to stop it?

A single mechanism is not enough to understand how rumination works. Instead, it is an interaction of various factors, such as individuals’ innate characteristics, adverse experiences, environment, and others. For instance, the tendency of individuals to focus their attention on negative information intensifies rumination. On the other hand, impaired executive functioning combined with repeated exposure to problematic goals can increase rumination.

With the continuous pairing of negative feelings and adverse situations, it becomes an automatic response, developing into a habit. It becomes difficult to stop rumination in this situation because once habits are developed, they become resistant to change. Old habits may also recur, particularly when individuals are stressed, exhausted, or overwhelmed or face an old context again.

Other factors contributing to the difficulty in breaking rumination include impaired executive functioning, abstract processing style, and negative information processing biases.

Deficits or impairment in executive functions or the individuals’ ability to monitor, retain, or manipulate information can contribute to the issues. The difficulty in processing relevant information interferes with the individuals’ problem-solving abilities. Furthermore, negative biases reinforce rumination, making it more difficult to override. Moreover, prolonged discrepancy or unsatisfactory goal progression diminishes their cognitive resources, causing them to revert to rumination.

The use of an abstract processing style makes it harder to stop rumination. General mental representations or understandings of a situation increase rumination. Since there is no clear idea of what is happening, various thoughts and scenarios overwhelm the mind, becoming more likely to ruminate.

How to minimise rumination?

• Identify risk factors, innate characteristics of individuals, habits, and other environmental factors that can heighten rumination.
• Eliminate factors that trigger the habit and use alternative responses, such as thought challenging, reappraisal, or cognitive restricting, to counterattack the rumination.
• Adjust goals and adopt a flexible or open attitude towards various life changes to lessen the impact of negative feelings or thoughts.
• Engage in intellectually stimulating activities, such as playing brain games like puzzles or scrabble, reading books, writing, engaging in arts and crafts, learning a new skill, or listening to music to improve executive functions.
• Use a more concrete processing style by using a specific step in decision-making or problem-solving, analysing a situation as detailed as possible, or identifying workable and doable action plans.

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REFERENCES: Watkins, E. R., & Roberts, H. (2020). Reflecting on rumination: Consequences, causes, mechanisms and treatment of rumination. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 127, 103573.