Mr. Dr. Jahan Al-Omran
Have you ever found yourself thinking for a long time about a word someone said, an ordinary word on the surface, but it kept echoing inside you like an unfading echo? She begins by analyzing and deconstructing it, wondering what the one who said it meant, then repeating the scene repeatedly until she weaves a whole story of suspicions and interpretations around it. As time passes, distress creeps up on you, and you lose focus on what’s around you?
Or perhaps if you unintentionally committed a small mistake, or behaved poorly toward a friend or relative, do you return to it day and night, repeating the same snapshot in your mind, reviewing your words and reactions, judging yourself mercilessly, and drowning in a feeling of guilt as if you were living the situation all over again?
If you are, you may be suffering from what is known in psychology as mental rumination. A state in which a person is stuck inside his head more than he lives in reality, where thinking is mixed with suffering, and memory turns into a cracked record that repeats the illusion more than it reflects the truth.
Mental rumination is one of the most exhausting mental patterns for the human psyche, as it manifests itself in the tendency to rethink negative events or past mistakes repeatedly and continuously without arriving at practical solutions or decisions. A person who is exposed to an embarrassing situation or failure in a relationship or work may find himself trapped in a closed loop of thoughts, reformulating and exaggerating the event, and blaming himself repeatedly, thus deepening his feeling of helplessness and sadness. Studies have shown that mental rumination is more common among females than among males, and the reasons for this are due to many factors, including: biological factors related to the structure of the brain, hormones that make emotions deeper and more persistent, and social factors that raise girls to be hypersensitive to relationships and others, in addition to daily pressures and high expectations from family and professional roles. An anxious or idealistic personality also plays a role in fueling rumination, as women seek to over-understand every detail or constantly search for perfection, so they do not calm down until they find an explanation that satisfies their anxiety, which is often not achieved. Many people make the mistake of confusing mental rumination with healthy contemplative thinking. Contemplative thinking is a calm mental process through which the individual seeks to understand himself and draw lessons from his experiences. It is thinking directed towards growth and reconciliation with the past. As for mental rumination, it is like repeatedly spinning in a closed circle of negative thoughts, without reaching a result, and thus becoming a prisoner of blame, anxiety, and regret. To break the cycle of rumination, the individual must first be aware of his existence. Stopping at the moment of realizing that “what I am thinking now is not useful to me” is the first step towards liberation. Techniques such as Mindfulness help train the mind to notice thoughts without dwelling on them, and exercising, changing the environment, and engaging in enjoyable activities reduce the mind’s immersion in the past.
Freedom from rumination is not forgetting the past, but rather reconciling with it, so that the individual’s mind does not remain a permanent theater of pain, but rather a space for growth, serenity, and conscious choice of what is actually worth thinking about.
* University professor in psychology