rumination

We've done some also just questionnaire-based kinds of studies on things like rumination and anxiety.

There are small to medium links where people with a lot of inner speech that in some cases seems to be associated with greater anxiety.

Rumination, so focusing on things, not being able to disengage.

may go hand in hand with higher levels of inner speech.

Interestingly, compared to visual imagery, there are lots of people who wish they could visualize things in a more vivid way.

Reflection is generally directed towards understanding.

It involves reviewing an experience, identifying what happened and considering our responsibilities and deciding what might be done differently.

Rumination, by contrast, involves repetitive patterns of thought that frequently revisit distressing experiences without necessarily producing greater understanding or constructive action.

The other is driven by curiosity.

Rumination loops.

Why did this happen to me? On repeat, never reaching what next? And you need to know it costs you physically.

Research on rumination links it to cortisol staying elevated for longer and recovering much slower after a stressor.

Would you read for us the poem that you brought? Of course.

This is called Rumination.

If I stopped for a moment even, even for a moment, I would not start again.

Like breathing.

No, I fear, I should say, fear, I fear I would not start again.

And it is fear that keeps me up, suspended like an apple in my mind when someone tells me to picture it, an apple on your fingertip.

Rumination, as a cow does, ultimately sustained by it.

as a cow does, ultimately made of grass, sustained by it, and thus an allegory for, a standing in, the thing she eats.

They don't ruminate.

Rumination is brain toxic.

Yes.

So-

They're very different.

But they're both-

Rumination is-

... bad for you.

The problem comes when thinking about the relationship stops helping you metabolize the loss and instead becomes a repetitive system that keeps reactivating it.

Let's talk about rumination, when thinking feels productive but isn't.

Rumination is a psychological term for repetitive, often circular thinking about distressing experiences.

And it's important to distinguish rumination from reflection.

Reflection can actually be useful after a breakup.

That's especially important, reflecting on having been through a previous relationship.

What does that mean for your hopes and fears for the next relationship? And those questions can lead somewhere.

Rumination usually doesn't.

We use that term in psychology.

Rumination is when you kind of are thinking over and over and over about something and trying to flip it around different ways and see if you could have done something better.

And what they show is that in psychology and studies is that rumination actually only increases anxiety.

So I think our brain thinks if we think about something over and over again, maybe we'll see something we didn't see or we'll feel better, but it actually has the opposite effect.

consequences? Yeah, so I guess I do define inner silence narrowly in this book as the absence of inner speech.

And that's partly because as the people working on inner speech, including inner speech and oppressive rumination, have noted that Rumination doesn't have to include just rumination in the form of negative inner speech.

It can also include rumination on negative imagery.

But standardly, it is taken to involve these cycles of negative inner speech that you have difficulty extricating yourself from.