Do You Have "that Thing"

I would like to know if others of you with BD have the experience of getting stuck on a thought. For example, the thought can be something you worry about. The worry is potentially a real worry, but instead of being in it's place in life it becomes the center of the universe. The worry takes on huge dimensions and layers. It gets all over everything.

OR the thought can be something quite ridiculous - for example, last night after I went to bed I pictured the grocery store I usually shop at. In a section of that store there is a counter made for an employee to work behind. But there never is an employee working there. My mind got stuck on the idea of how the store could be rearranged so that unused counter is not longer there. I was so tired of trying to rearrange the store in my mind, but couldn't fall asleep for a long time. Part of the reason I couldn't fall asleep, besides ruminating on the design of the grocery store, was because the moon is getting full and, although it's beautiful, the moonlight caused me to stay awake. I knew it would be gone when I awoke, and I didn't want to miss seeing it. So I stayed awake to watch it.

I'm wondering about others of you with BD...do you have thoughts that get "stuck"?

I definitely ruminate. Round and round i go thinking the same thoughts over and over with no resolution. Usually this involves anxiety.

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Home » Blog » Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to Stop
Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to Stop
By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
Associate Editor
~ 2 min read
Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to StopRuminating is like a record that’s stuck and keeps repeating the same lyrics. It’s replaying an argument with a friend in your mind. It’s retracing past mistakes.

When people ruminate, they over-think or obsess about situations or life events, such as work or relationships.

Research has shown that rumination is associated with a variety of negative consequences, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, binge-drinking and binge-eating.

Why does rumination lead to such harmful results?

For some people, drinking or binge-eating becomes a way to cope with life and drown out their ruminations, according to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D, a psychologist and professor at Yale University.

Not surprisingly, ruminating conjures up more negative thoughts. It becomes a cycle.

Nolen-Hoeksema’s research has found that “when people ruminate while they are in depressed mood, they remember more negative things that happened to them in the past, they interpret situations in their current lives more negatively, and they are more hopeless about the future.”

Rumination also becomes the fast track to feeling helpless. Specifically, it paralyzes your problem-solving skills. You become so preoccupied with the problem that you’re unable to push past the cycle of negative thoughts.

It can even turn people away. “When people ruminate for an extended time, their family members and friends become frustrated and may pull away their support,” Nolen-Hoeksema said.

Why People Ruminate

Some ruminators may simply have more stress in their lives which preoccupies them, Nolen-Hoeksema noted. For others, it may be an issue of cognition. “Some people prone to ruminate have basic problems pushing things out of consciousness once they get there,” she said.

Women seem to ruminate more than men, said Nolen-Hoeksema, who’s also author of Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life. Why? Part of the reason is that women tend to be more concerned about their relationships.

As Nolen-Hoeksema observed, “interpersonal relationships are great fuel for rumination,” and ambiguities abound in relationships. “You can never really know what people think of you or whether they will be faithful and true.”

How To Reduce Rumination

According to Nolen-Hoeksema, there are essentially two steps to stop or minimize rumination.

1. Engage in activities that foster positive thoughts. “You need to engage in activities that can fill your mind with other thoughts, preferably positive thoughts,” she said.

That could be anything from a favorite physical activity to a hobby to meditation to prayer. “The main thing is to get your mind off your ruminations for a time so they die out and don’t have a grip on your mind,” she advised.

2. Problem-solve. People who ruminate not only replay situations in their head, they also focus on abstract questions, such as, “Why do these things happen to me?” and “What’s wrong with me that I can’t cope?” Nolen-Hoeksema said.

Even if they consider solving the situation, they conclude that “there is nothing they can do about it.”

Instead, when you can think clearly, “identify at least one concrete thing you could do to overcome the problem(s) you are ruminating about.” For instance, if you’re uneasy about a situation at work, commit to calling a close friend so you can brainstorm solutions.

Positive Self-Reflection

Nolen-Hoeksema has also studied the opposite of rumination: adaptive self-reflection. When people practice adaptive self-reflection, they focus on the concrete parts of a situation and the improvements they can make.

For instance, a person may wonder, “What exactly did my boss say to me that upset me so much yesterday?” and then come up with, “I could ask my boss to talk with me about how I could get a better performance evaluation,” Nolen-Hoeksema said.

?Do you tend to ruminate?
What has helped to reduce your ruminating ways?

Photo by Renato Ganoza, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.

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Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S., is an Associate Editor at Psych Central. She also explores self-image issues on her own blog Weightless and creativity on her blog Make a Mess: Everyday Creativity.

116 comments: View Comments / Leave a Comment

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APA Reference
Tartakovsky, M. (2011). Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to Stop. Psych Central. Retrieved on July 24, 2018, from Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to Stop

Scientifically Reviewed
Last updated: 20 Jan 2011
Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 20 Jan 2011
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.


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I get quite obsessive in thoughts. Worry is a frequent one, but often times it's improving or creating

I ruminate my worries too

Heck yeah, thats part of having BP. Totally normal for us haha.

One night I stayed up for 6 hrs sitting in the middle of my bed with a shoe because I swore my cat saw a bug. Every time I tried to turn of the lights and go to bed I’d swear it was climbing up to get me.
I can take the smallest worry and turn it into a life changing event in my head. Plus I worry about things that haven’t even happened yet.

I tend to do this when I’m in an episode but not when I’m stable. I can remember once writing an email to someone at 8:30 (it was only a paragraph in length) and looking up at 12:30 still sitting at the computer just reading it over and over and over again. This is when my kids were really small and needed much more attention. I also obsess over people, like to a stalker degree, and find myself having imagined conversations with people out loud uncontrollably when I am either manic or mixed.

Thank you all, very much. I appreciate that you've shared your experiences with this "thing".

Deejay, Thanks for the article. It doesn't address exactly what I'm getting at, however. For example, replaying a conversation in my mind is a more "normal" type of rumination - strangely, I don't replay things like conversations or social encounters or work issues, etc. very much.

The rumination I'm getting at is not something I have control over, any more than someone has control over a hallucination. This type of rumination is, to me, somewhat delusional. Sort-of. No way can I "choose" to make it go away. cashart, your example of the 4-hour single-paragraph email is exactly the kind of thing I'm getting at. It's like an effing whirly wheel inside my mind that WILL. NOT. STOP. Yes, I do activities to distract the Thing, listen to music (thank God for music), and I have practiced meditation for 37 years. It all helps, but then the Thing just comes right back at first chance. It is definitely an anxiety situation, but different, too.

I guess it's just part of bipolar disorder. I stopped taking the Gabapentin entirely. I'm wondering if maybe I should go back on the 300 mg., that doing so might help.

Oh you guys, sometimes I am just so tired of this. So much noise in my head. I feel like I have Grand Central Station inside my brain.

Worrying about things that haven't even happened yet...a HUGE aspect of my mental illness. A monster.

I ruminate constantly especially when sui and/or in a mixed state. I cannot turn the chatter off in my head. It also usually requires medical intervention to eliminate the rumination.

Yes. Medication seems to be the only thing that really helps calm my mind.

I get stuck in a "loop" too. I've noticed since I went on a higher dose of Zyprexa that my mind has calmed down a lot; still, when bad things happen (like yesterday, when my son lost his job and we had to cancel our Caribbean vacation), my thoughts race and I think up all kinds of rotten stuff. Like somehow this is my fault for encouraging him to take that job and the fact that I've lost a great deal of money that I couldn't afford to lose. I'm on disability and those $100/month payments were just killing me. But I wanted to go SO bad that I sacrificed that money without thinking about it.

OK, at the risk of ruminating I'm going to stop this and go do something. Thinking about it won't do any good.

Here I go again with the bucket full of used motor oil.

I used to change my own oil on Hooker (car) and Maggie (bike) all the time. Never trusted the shops.
The boat is a different animal. Too many sensors, computers, chips, etc. So a mechanic comes to the house and does it, under my very watchful eyes.

Then I got sick. Monstruous depression.
Last oil changes remained in the bucket outside the house, instead of the auto parts.
In time, it developed a miniscule leak. Few drops a day.
I worried about the neighboors. The EPA. The fire dept. The police. The gardener. The passerbys. What if they rat me.

I placed the bucket in a larger bucket. Everything was fine in the dry season.
When the rains came, the big bucket caught the rain plus the oil drops.
Every day I checked the bucket. In silence. Nobody new but me.
When the level got high, I took a plastic glass and a pan, and took most of the water out.
Maybe two or three times a week.
This went on and on for three years. Always thinking about the bucket.

When I felt stronger, I forgot about the damn bucket.
One day, throwing away the trash, I saw the bucket. Overflown.
That was the day the bucket died. It took less than a NY minute.

Yes, mine tend to be things that anyone would worry but I can't let it go for days.

Every reply on this thread is tremendously helpful. The relief I feel knowing that other people understand "that thing" is incredible.
Thank you to each of you.

I’m a worrier, too. And, yeah, I get ‘stuck’ on — anything! — and cannot sleep until I’ve ‘solved’ the problem. I once lived in a comfortable state of delusion but these drugs are draining the life out of me — the ‘sort-of’ type of hallucinations/delusions.

I go for days without sleeping, now.

I think that I’m over-medicated (you wrote of this)... Gabapentin, Tegretol, Lyrica... and those for the Dark Phantom that’ll be the death of Uncle Sam. (Sorry; having a Coover moment — hmm — I don’t know why, but I believe that a well-funded stylometry-trained villain may be on my tail.)

I’m worried for the right reasons. Terrified, actually. I could be in a homeless shelter in the next week. I’ve had my fill of them, I admit. I just don’t want to lose all my ‘stuff’ again.

Ergo: I know how you feel.

You are a stunningly gifted writer; it is a joy to read your posts. What I think is that you and pirilin should have a thread all your own. It would be a magnificent read.

Absolutely. Sometimes triggered by a random thought, but most often by something someone did. At one point, I would stay up all night preparing for confronting the person involved, considering every argument they might give in answer. Invariably I regretted the loss of sleep... sometimes the confrontation too...

My solution: Dumping out my thoughts (in outline form) into a document and saving as a draft. (I NEVER send to anyone on the same day! That's a hard and fast rule for me!) Sleep on it a night (or two, or three - the longer I can the better) then open and re-read. Try to avoid the person involved.

Repeat until it's something I forget about, or that I don't worry about anymore, or until I feel stable enough to confirm it's a real problem (rather than a compulsion). If it's a real problem, I then discuss with trusted people in my life (family, friends, counselor, etc.), get advice and perspective, and plan a way to address it (preferably without having to confront anyone directly). Only then do I act - this approach (along with meds, of course) has allowed me to reclaim my life after several years of being nearly non-functional.