“Just stop thinking about it.”
You may have heard it. You may have said it to yourself. The instruction sounds simple until you are lying awake, replaying a conversation you have already examined from every available angle.
You know what was said. You know what you wish you had said. You have imagined the next conversation, revised it, rejected it and started again. Nothing new has happened. The thinking continues.
What interests me is the gap between recognising that another replay has taught us nothing and being able to stop. Someone listening to the repeated account may wonder why we keep returning to it. For the person doing the thinking, stopping may feel like leaving an important problem unattended.
The problem may still need attention. Someone said something hurtful. A disagreement remains unresolved. We may need to decide how to respond. But another hour of thinking does not always clarify what happened or what to do next.
Why does it feel like I am working on the problem?
Because thinking is one of the ways we do work on problems. We compare possibilities, revisit mistakes and try to understand what happened. The same activity that helps in one moment can become repetitive in another.
Researchers have asked people with depression whether they believe repeated thinking helps them understand their feelings or solve problems. In one study, people with current or past depression endorsed these benefits more strongly than people who had never been depressed. The difference remained when the questionnaire was revised to distinguish beliefs about thinking from the severity of depressed mood.1 This does not tell us why a particular person keeps reviewing an argument. It shows that some people regard repeated thinking as potentially useful, even when it causes distress.
It can feel responsible. If I keep reviewing the argument, perhaps I will understand it. If I understand it, perhaps I can prevent it happening again. Leaving the question open may feel careless.
Reviewing the argument may feel like work without producing new information, a clearer decision or a possible next step.
Here, I use rumination for repeatedly thinking about what has upset us, why it happened and what it means. Worrying about tomorrow and replaying yesterday’s argument are different activities, although we may move between them. Neither experience, by itself, establishes a diagnosis. I want to understand when reviewing a painful experience helps us understand or respond to it, and when the review only repeats the same questions.
When does reviewing an experience stop helping?
One place to look is the question we keep asking.
“What happened in that conversation?” can lead to specific details. “What do I need to clarify?” can lead to a next step. “Why am I always like this?” asks us to explain our character through the incident. Even a careful account of what happened may not answer that much larger question.
Ed Watkins and Michelle Moulds tested a related distinction with 40 depressed participants and 40 people who had never been depressed. Some were asked to examine the causes and meanings of their feelings; others were asked to attend to and describe what they were experiencing. Among the depressed participants, the second approach led to more effective proposed solutions to hypothetical interpersonal problems.2
The researchers assessed proposed solutions, rather than whether participants stopped ruminating in daily life. The result does not mean that asking “why” is always harmful. It suggests that describing an experience and analysing its meaning can have different effects on our ability to work out a response.
A thought can also keep returning to a question for which the available evidence is insufficient. What did the other person really mean? Will they do it again? What would have happened if I had answered differently? Some of these questions may become clearer through another conversation or through time. Repeating them alone cannot supply information we do not have.
We may still need an answer. Recognising that we cannot obtain it by reviewing the same information does not make the question unimportant.
Why can the same concern feel more urgent at night?
Imagine going over the argument at three in the morning. The room is quiet. The person you want to speak to is asleep. Now another concern has joined the first: I need to sleep too, and I am still awake.
A quiet room may make the concern harder to ignore. When we cannot have the conversation we want, we may keep rehearsing it. These are possible explanations for the experience I have described; they do not explain every episode of waking and worrying at that hour.
In an experiment involving 41 people with insomnia, Allison Harvey and Suzanna Payne asked one group to imagine an engaging scene, another to distract themselves without a specified task, and a third to follow no particular instructions. On the experimental night, the imagery group reported falling asleep sooner and having fewer and less distressing unwanted thoughts than the group given no instructions.3
The study concerned falling asleep. It did not explain why people wake at 3am or establish whether the benefit lasted beyond one night. It does show that a specific mental task helped some participants with unwanted thoughts before sleep. “Stop thinking about it” gives no comparable instruction about where to direct attention.
A thought may feel urgent at night without becoming more accurate. We can notice that urgency and still ask whether there is anything we can do about the concern before morning.
Why does recognising rumination not always stop it?
Recognising that we are repeating ourselves does not automatically change a habit of reviewing, a belief that another review is necessary, or an ongoing conflict that repeatedly demands our attention.
You can know that an argument is over and still feel upset. You can recognise that a question has no answer tonight and still want one. Naming rumination may help us notice what we are doing without immediately giving us a way to stop.
That does not establish that rumination is a bodily process that changes in thinking cannot affect. Research on treatment gives us a reason to keep changes in thought and behaviour among the possibilities.
In a randomised trial of 42 people whose depression symptoms persisted despite medication, adding rumination-focused cognitive–behavioural therapy to usual care reduced symptoms. More participants had few enough symptoms to meet the study’s definition of remission. The trial did not compare the treatment with an equal amount of another form of therapeutic attention, so it could not determine whether the specific techniques or the extra attention produced the benefit.4
The treatment involved work with a therapist on repeated thinking and behaviour. The result cannot be turned into a claim that anyone should be able to stop ruminating simply by deciding to think differently.
What does another review of the experience give us?
Alongside asking what happened in the argument, I want to ask what happens when we review it again.
Have I remembered a relevant detail? Has a decision become clearer? Is there an action I can take? Or have I returned to the same judgement with more exhaustion and no additional information?
What is happening outside the thinking matters too. If the original conflict is continuing, changing how someone thinks about it may leave the conflict untouched. If a decision depends on information that has not arrived, thinking harder cannot supply it. And if repeated thinking persistently disrupts sleep or daily life, the person may need help to understand and address that disruption.
In my work on TEG-Blue, I want to ask what a person hopes another review will give them: an explanation, a decision, reassurance that they were not at fault? Their answer may help clarify what remains unresolved. It does not, by itself, identify why the thinking keeps returning or how to stop it.
Sometimes there is a practical step, such as clarifying what was said or deciding how to respond. Sometimes we are grieving, waiting for information or wanting a reply that another person has not given. The concern may still matter even when reviewing it again cannot provide what we need.
Sources
Footnotes
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Watkins, E., & Moulds, M. (2005). Positive beliefs about rumination in depression—a replication and extension. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(1), 73–82. DOI. ↩
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Watkins, E., & Moulds, M. (2005). Distinct modes of ruminative self-focus: Impact of abstract versus concrete rumination on problem solving in depression. Emotion, 5(3), 319–328. DOI. ↩
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Harvey, A. G., & Payne, S. (2002). The management of unwanted pre-sleep thoughts in insomnia: Distraction with imagery versus general distraction. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(3), 267–277. DOI. ↩
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Watkins, E. R., et al. (2011). Rumination-focused cognitive–behavioural therapy for residual depression: Phase II randomised controlled trial. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(4), 317–322. DOI. ↩