You stumbled over your words in a meeting. Even after getting home, those few seconds keep replaying in your mind. “I should have put that differently” gradually turns into “I messed up last time, too,” “It’ll go badly next time,” and “I’m not cut out for this job.”
The event is over, yet the more you think about it, the worse you feel. In psychology, repeatedly dwelling on unpleasant feelings or experiences, their causes, or what they mean is called rumination. It can look like reflection or problem-solving, but the difficulty is that you keep circling the same questions instead of moving toward a decision you need to make.[3][4]
This article looks at how memory, imagining the future, language, and comparisons with other people can turn one setback into a judgment about your whole self. Rumination alone cannot tell you whether you have a mental health condition. The starting point here is simply to recognize the kind of thinking loop you may have become caught in.
What Is the Difference Between Reflection and Rumination?
The amount of time you spend thinking is not enough to distinguish them. Difficult problems take time, and revisiting an experience can lead to a new insight. A useful guide is to ask what you have gained by thinking it over.
- Reflection: “I left out the context for my explanation. Next time, I’ll start with one sentence explaining the purpose.”
- Rumination: “Why does this always happen? Why can’t I do things properly like everyone else?”
The first gives you something to check and an adjustment to try next time. The second opens up such broad questions that it is hard to see what would count as an answer, or when you could stop. This is a practical distinction for everyday use, though, not a diagnostic checklist.
Rumination about past mistakes and worry about things going wrong in the future can overlap and feed into each other. Researchers sometimes group them under “repetitive negative thinking,” focusing on their shared repetition and the difficulty of disengaging from them.[3]
In a study by Rosenkranz and colleagues, 150 people aged 18–40 completed the initial questionnaire. The study was designed to ask about their everyday thoughts through prompts 8 times a day for 14 days. After participant dropout and data exclusions, data from 120 people were included in the final analysis. Measures of these thinking patterns were associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. However, the study’s main purpose was to examine a way of measuring such thoughts in everyday life. It did not establish that rumination causes illness or determine how effective any particular coping strategy is.[3]
Remembering the Past Can Lead to Worrying About the Future
We can construct scenes in our minds that are not happening in front of us. The ability to recall yesterday’s meeting or imagine next week’s presentation has been called “mental time travel.”[1][2]
Suppose you could not answer a question during your last presentation, so you prepare extra material for the next one. That is a useful way for memory to inform preparation. But the same memory can also generate a string of imagined scenes: “I’ll get stuck again,” “People will lose confidence in me,” “They’ll stop trusting me with work.” The story may make sense in your head, but developments that have not happened yet are still predictions.
It would be too sweeping to conclude that only humans think about the future while animals live entirely in the present. The papers published in 1997 and 2007 are theoretical discussions of human mental time travel and its evolution.[1][2] In a separate experiment, western scrub-jays stored food in locations where they had learned that food would not be available the next morning.[5] Whether this involves the same subjective experience as it does in humans is not something behavior alone can readily establish.
For understanding rumination, what matters is less a ranking of humans and other animals than noticing when we blur the line between what we remember and what we imagine will happen next.
Words Can Turn an Event into a Judgment About Who You Are
“I couldn’t answer a question during today’s explanation” and “I’m bad at explaining things” make claims of very different scope. With “I’m no good at anything,” a judgment about one event has expanded to cover your entire life.
Language helps us organize experiences and ask other people for support. At the same time, a short judgment about ourselves can be easy to repeat in our heads. If you keep returning to the sentence “I’m no good,” it may help to pause and ask whether you are mistaking the number of repetitions for the amount of evidence.
This does not mean language has been proven to cause rumination. It is a way to untangle a thought by checking how much ground a sentence claims to cover.
If the thought is “They don’t like me,” start by bringing it back to “They haven’t replied to the message I sent yesterday.” From there, you can set out other possibilities: they may be busy, thinking about their reply, or needing to check something first. You do not have to force yourself to believe an optimistic explanation. Simply separating what you have observed from what you do not yet know can help you identify what to check next.
Why Can Social Media Make You Feel Like You Are Falling Behind?
Imagine seeing someone’s promotion announcement or vacation photos on an evening when you already feel discouraged about work. You know the full story of your own setback, including how tired you are. Of the other person’s life, you see only the moment they posted. If you place the two side by side as though they were scores earned under the same conditions, the comparison starts from uneven ground.
This does not mean social media causes rumination in everyone. Nor can a person’s distress be explained solely through an evolutionary story such as “The brain’s habit of comparing cannot cope with today’s volume of information, so it breaks down.”
One thing to try is making the comparison more specific. Instead of “Their whole life is going well,” say, “They got a promotion this time.” Then consider what you actually need to understand: the experience you need to gain, dissatisfaction with how you currently work, or simply whether you need some rest today.
If certain posts repeatedly send you back into the same self-criticism, you can mute them for a while or avoid opening the app when you are tired. Keeping up with every update in someone’s life is not the same thing as caring about them.
When You Notice the Loop, Make the Question Smaller
Trying hard to stop a thought can sometimes direct even more attention toward it. You can start instead by noticing, “I’m coming back to the same question,” and taking a little distance from it. The American Psychiatric Association’s public guidance also describes activities that shift your attention and small actions that help change the situation.[4]
Here is one example of separating a thought into three parts. Use it as a note-taking exercise to organize the problem, not as a treatment procedure with guaranteed results.
- Write down what happened. “In the meeting, I couldn’t immediately explain the basis for the sales forecast.”
- Write down the interpretation that came to mind. “I feel as though everyone thought I was incompetent.” Phrase this so it is clear that it is your interpretation, not an established fact.
- Choose one thing to check. “I’ll review the assumptions used in the calculations and send additional information if needed.”
If you cannot check it right away, you could write, “I’ll look into this tomorrow morning,” to give yourself a stopping point. Conversely, if you keep checking something you have already examined thoroughly, another activity may be more helpful than another round of thinking: getting up from your seat, eating a meal, or talking to someone you trust.
And if the unpleasant experience reflects a real problem, the answer may require more than changing your thoughts. An unreasonable workload, repeated harassment, or a schedule that leaves no time to rest may call for support from someone else, adjustments to your work, or ways to create distance. Do not put the entire burden back on yourself by assuming that changing your attitude should be enough.
When Distress Affects Daily Life, Consider Seeking Support
Rumination is associated with conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders, but rumination alone does not determine a diagnosis.[4] Depression involves genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. Describing it as “a high-powered brain simply switching into energy-saving mode” risks overlooking the need for assessment and treatment.[6]
If low mood, loss of enjoyment, or changes in sleep or appetite persist and affect your work or daily life, seek advice from a healthcare provider or mental health professional. In assessing depression, clinicians consider whether symptoms have been present nearly every day for at least two weeks, among other criteria. But you do not need to wait two weeks to seek help when you are struggling.[6]
Before an appointment, it can help to note when this started, what you keep thinking about, and how it affects your sleep and daily life. If everyday coping strategies do not bring improvement, that is not a verdict on how hard you have tried.
Use Your Thinking to Find a Next Step, Rather Than Pass Judgment on Your Life
The ability to look back, imagine the future, and organize experiences in words can help us prepare and learn. It becomes painful when we use the same evidence over and over to put the broad question “What kind of person am I?” back on trial.
The next time those few seconds from the meeting return, try not to rush straight to “I’m not cut out for this.” Bring the thought back to the scale of the event: “Which question couldn’t I answer?” From there, you might check one thing, rest for the day, or talk to someone. A stopping point that works for you right now can be that small.
References (6)
[1] Suddendorf, T. & Corballis, M. C. (1997). Mental Time Travel and the Evolution of the Human Mind. A theoretical paper on mental time travel. https://www.bonobosworld.org/images/zotero/Suddendorf_et_Corballis-1997-Mental_time_travel_and_the_evolution.pdf
[2] Suddendorf, T. & Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? A theoretical examination and commentary. https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/default/files/pictures/Suddendorf-and-Corballis_2007.pdf
[3] Rosenkranz, T. et al. (2020). Assessing repetitive negative thinking in daily life: Development of an ecological momentary assessment paradigm. A study examining a method of measurement in everyday settings. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231783
[4] American Psychiatric Association (2020). Rumination: A Cycle of Negative Thinking. An explanation for the general public. https://www.psychiatry.org/News-room/APA-Blogs/Rumination-A-Cycle-of-Negative-Thinking
[5] Raby, C. R. et al. (2007). Planning for the future by western scrub-jays. An animal experiment investigating food-caching behavior. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05575
[6] National Institute of Mental Health. Depression. Official information about symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression
