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Do You Ever Find Yourself Chewing Your Mental Cud?

October 5, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

ruminating woman

That’s my definition of rumination—chewing your mental cud. A more elegant definition, provided by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema of Yale University, is “a tendency to passively think about the meaning, origins, and consequences of our negative emotions.” Rumination isn’t the same as worrying. Worrying is usually focused on the future (an anticipated threat), while rumination tends to be focused on past or present events (some type of loss).

We ruminate over external situations and events and about relationships. We also ruminate over our own mistakes and shortcomings. That’s called self-rumination.

Rumination feels like problem-solving, but it actually prevents us from solving problems because it keeps us focused on negative events and emotions. We continue to dwell on our problems instead of attempting to resolve them. Rumination disrupts our self-regulation. Because we want to feel better, we try to distract ourselves or turn to immediate gratification. Rumination also increases stress levels and has a negative effect on our general health.

Rumination is a low level of thinking in which one thought leads to another but never to a solution or a conclusion. Rumination occupies mental space and System 2 (conscious) attention, which is already in short supply. So what can you do to stop yourself from ruminating?

Antidote #1: Practicing Mindfulness

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. –Jon Kabat Zin

Mindfulness correlates negatively with rumination. That means practicing mindfulness is effective at decreasing the tendency to ruminate. Mindfulness helps people:

Observe themselves, events, and other people with curiosity and compassion
Shift their perspective
Become less attached to their thoughts, emotions, and sensations
See the patterns of their own mind more clearly
Recognize changes in their mood
Recognize the onset of ruminative thinking
Switch to a non-ruminative mode

Mindfulness can help you maintain a focused yet relaxed attention on the present moment. Observing your thoughts without judgment allows them to come and go. You don’t have to get carried away with them. The more you’re able to avoid getting attached to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, the less likely you will be to develop a rumination habit. When you’re being mindful, it’s especially hard to slip into ruminating over past events.

Mindfulness correlates positively with self-reflection and self-awareness. While mindfulness is likely to decrease your susceptibility to rumination, it won’t affect or interfere with your ability to be self-reflective. In fact, it will enhance it.

You’ll be less likely to get drawn into ruminating if you remain open and curious about what’s going on around you and within you—and curious about your own actions and reactions.

Charles Tart (Waking Up) says:

The practice of self-observation…is the practice of being curious, along with a commitment to do your best to observe and learn whatever is there, regardless of your preferences or fears.

If you diligently practice self-observation, you will see much that is painful and much that is joyful, but seeing more of reality will turn out to be highly preferable to living a fantasy. You will begin creating “something” in yourself, a quality, a function, a skill, akin to learning how the controls of your automated airliner work. And you will be pleasantly surprised at how much more there is to life.

Antidote #2: Work on Solving the Problem

Problem-solving requires conscious attention. You can’t ruminate and problem-solve at the same time. If you focus your attention on addressing and dealing with the issue, you’re less likely to continue ruminating over it. Grab some paper and a pen and try this eight-step process.

Identify and clearly define the problem.
Ask yourself why you want to solve this problem.
Imagine it solved.
Gather information and/or brainstorm ideas.
Consider alternatives.
Decide on a plan and develop it.
Implement the plan.
Adjust as necessary.

Antidote #3: Write Your Way Out of Your Story

Negative feelings are the fuel for rumination. They can be so compelling they keep us caught up in the story we’ve spun long past the point we know we should let it go. This writing exercise can help you separate the facts from your feelings so you can disengage from the story.

You will need a pen or pencil and paper, a highlighter pen, and a timer.

Set your timer for at least 10 minutes.
Begin writing, describing what happened or what’s bothering you in in as much detail as possible. Keep your pen moving across the page. Don’t stop to think about what you’re writing. Just continue putting words on paper without editing or censoring. (Let it all hang out.)
When your timer goes off, stop writing. Reread what you wrote with the intention of identifying facts (as opposed to feelings, opinions, conjecture, etc.). Either highlight each fact, or list the facts on a separate page.
Reread only the facts. Take a few minutes to summarize in writing what you discovered or how you now think or feel. If there’s something you want or need to do about the situation, write a declarative sentence to that effect.

Antidote #4: Come Up with an Anti-Rumination Image

Rumination keeps you stuck traveling the same ground over and over again, your attention focused inward. It stops forward progress. There are many different metaphors or images you can probably think of for rumination (things that keep you stuck or block your progress or things that take up space, for example), such as:

A roadblock
Junk thinking
Mental clutter
Brain fog
A brick wall
A no exit sign
MindLESSness
Being under the influence

Find an image that works for you. The next time you find yourself ruminating, turn your attention to the image to remind yourself of how unproductive and destructive rumination is.

And if that doesn’t work, just STOP IT! (Thank you, Ana.)

A Case for Lucid Waking

September 7, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

lucid dreaming

You have to hand it to humans. As a species, we are seriously and committedly wrong-headed about so very many things. And we have a high level of confidence about our beliefs and convictions regardless of how much or how little that confidence is warranted.

For example, we think we’re aware (we understand what’s going on) while we’re awake, so it isn’t that much of a leap for some of us to want to be aware of our dreams while we’re dreaming. A Google search for “lucid dreaming” brought up about 673,000 hits, whereas a similar search for “lucid waking” brought up about 10,200. I’m surprised there were that many.

Reportedly, the person who coined the term lucid dreaming—Frederik van Eeden—considered lucid to be synonymous with mental clarity. And therein lies one of the problems. Mental clarity is sorely lacking in the waking lives of most people. This is a fact, not an indictment. We spend most of our days operating on autopilot, at the effect of biases, triggers and cues, and mental processes we have no conscious knowledge of. Most of what’s going on around us is happening outside our awareness. However, we don’t let that diminish our sense of certainty.

We’re very good at coming up with plausible sounding explanations for behavior and events. But just because we can come up with explanations doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Our stories and explanations are developed after the fact to create a cause-and-effect stream that feels like real life. We don’t do it intentionally—at least not usually. It happens automatically, with no effort on our part. It’s how we make sense of the world. Our stories and explanations provide us with a false sense of complacency, comfort, and security. They give us the illusion of mental clarity but not much of the real thing.

And it’s from this vantage point that we set out to develop mental clarity—or the illusion of mental clarity—about our dreams.

My thought is that we might want to redirect our efforts toward lucid waking. If, as a species, we developed greater mental clarity about how we operate while we’re awake, we might be able to take a stab at solving some of the serious problems we face. That seems like a more practical and worthwhile focus for our attention.

The Danger of a Single Story

April 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

This TED talk is very important and very moving. It made me think about and ask myself who are the people and what are the places I have a single story about?

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Stories matter. MANY stories matter.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie

Data’s Cat

February 27, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Data (Star Trek) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is made of stories, not of atoms. –Muriel Rukeyser

There is a world of atoms (the physical world or so-called objective reality). But that’s not the world we inhabit. It isn’t even possible for us to inhabit that world—at least not directly.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. –Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology, University College London

And…

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. –David Eagleman, Incognito

The world we actually inhabit is made up of the stories we construct about the objects, events, and people in the physical world. Our stories are based on our impressions and perceptions of what’s out there. The problem is that we treat our impressions and perceptions—and the stories based on them—as if they are real and true.

The world of atoms constantly impacts us. And as it does, we are constantly interpreting, explaining, and assigning meaning to what happens. From moment-to-moment, we’re not aware of how much we don’t know, how much we’re missing, and how much high-speed processing our unconscious brain is doing to generate our impressions and perceptions.

We’re not robots or androids, nor would most of us choose to be. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lieutenant Commander Data was an android who inhabited the physical world and not the world of stories. He was superior to humans in a number of different ways. He didn’t make the kinds of mistakes people often make. Yet after spending time with humans, he opted to have an “emotion chip” installed so he could be more like us. He got a pet, an orange cat named Spot (who had no spots). There’s no logical reason to have a cat when you live on board a spaceship. Data’s cat signaled his entrance into the very human world of stories.

All of us, both individually and collectively, are driven to create and tell stories about our experience and then to believe that our stories represent reality. It’s how we make sense of life. The consequences can be amazing, amusing, or devastating. But whether our stories are good or bad, as long as we don’t recognize them for what they are, we’re imprisoned by them.

Write Your Way Out of the Story

July 30, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

The left hemisphere of our brain includes what Daniel Kahneman calls an “interpreter.” The interpreter is constantly trying to…well…interpret everything we experience. Since we find it easier to understand stories than details or information, the interpreter spins many a story to explain things to us. We tend to believes that these stories accurately represent reality. Occasionally the stories may come close to doing that, but much more often they miss the mark by a wide margin.

What’s worse, sometimes these stories get stuck in our head and continue spinning out of control, taking up headspace and essentially hijacking us by claiming a portion of our attention. There’s a simple three-step writing tool I’ve found to be really useful in such situations. I call it “Writing Your Way Out of the Story.”

Step 1:

Set a timer for 10 minutes and flow write (write without stopping to reflect, keeping your pen moving across the page). Let it all hang out. Don’t censor or edit. You’re not trying to look good or be reasonable. Think of it as emptying onto the page everything that’s been spinning around in your head.

Step 2:

At the end of 10 minutes, take a highlighter pen and skim what you just wrote looking for actual facts. “Jim didn’t tell me about the meeting” is a fact. “Jim is trying to sabotage me” is not. Highlight only the actual facts. The rest is your story about the facts.

Step 3:

Reread only the highlighted sentences or phrases. Alternatively, copy them on a separate page.

Separating the facts from the story about the facts often has the effect of dismantling the story, draining the emotion from it, and freeing you to either let go and move on or—if there’s an issue or problem to be resolved—figure out what to do about it.

The longer and more frequently we give free rein to the stories spinning around in our heads, the more we come to believe they are true, the less control we have over ourselves, and the harder it is to see things from any other perspective. These stories tend to color our worldview and they contribute to a cascade of stress, anxiety, and a myriad of other problems. Taking 15 minutes to separate the facts from the story has always been time well spent for me.