Have you ever noticed how often you ruminate over something that did not go well? You probably look at it from every angle trying to find your error so you won’t have it happen again. Ruminating is basically the mental activity of replaying something over and over again increasing your distress over the situation and looking at all the ways you are to blame, or are the victim of someone else’s poor choices. Most of ruminating centers around thoughts that highlight your mistakes and flaws or how embarrassed or sad you are. I certainly am guilty of this, are you? Research says women as a group actually tend to ruminate during distress far more often than men.
Why is this important?
Because further research at Yale showed that rumination over unwanted situations actually is a predictor of depression. When they studied men and women who did not ruminate, the percentage of depressed people showed no gender bias, even though decades of studies show women to be depressed at far higher rates than men. Their findings led them to believe that not ruminating can actually mediate depression!
A few other benefits to “just letting things go” are:
- Your self-confidence will grow when you are no longer hammering yourself over mistakes repeatedly.
- You will have more mental capacity to find solutions or make new choices that prevent the same things from repeating themselves. (Studies actually show ruminating interferes with problem solving!)
- You will be in a better mood if you are not thinking of what went wrong so often. (Again, research shows a strong correlation between ruminating and bad moods; but you did not need a researcher to tell you that, did you?)
Researchers believe that this tendency to rumination is hard wired in our female brain based on thousands of years of domination. Rumination happens less frequently the more someone perceived they have control over their own circumstances.
The trick is to rewire your brain (and those of your children’s) to let this pattern go. How?
- Take time every day to notice what is going well:
- Start a gratitude journal.
- Tell one person each day what you notice about them that is great (make it someone new each day.)
- Stop mid-thought when you catch yourself ruminating and start something that requires your attention. Be committed to being in control of your thoughts.
- Regularly take time to write down and think about what you have done well:
- List the top 10 things you have ever done.
- List the top 10 things you do well.
- List the top 10 things that have gone well this past year.
- Tell yourself, looking into one eye and then the other, that you love yourself, that you are amazing, that you can do….(fill in the blank).
There is no time like the beginning of a new year to start this type of habit. Once you do this for 30-60 days your life will never be the same.
