Does Feeling Bad do Any Good? Part I

We all have those times when our thoughts get stuck in what Jill Bolte Taylor calls “neuronal loops.”  You know the experience.  The same worry or anxiety or fear runs round and round in your brain like an electrochemical hamster.  The same hurt or resentment or humiliation bobs up and down in your consciousness like an existential yo-yo.  You lose sleep.  You can’t focus.  Your concentration is shot.

The psychologists call it “rumination.”

It’s not, however, just a loop.  It is, instead, a descending spiral.  Every cycle pulls you a little further down into the darkness.  Before long that pimple on your neck has turned into an imaginary tumor the size of a grapefruit.  That voice mail from the IRS is no longer a request for further documentation.  It’s the threat of an audit followed by jail time.  Your wife who died through an incredible combination of circumstance and mishap pleads in your conscience for some explanation about why it all happened.

It’s called “rumination.”  It feels bad.  Does it do any good?  There was a time in psychiatry, formed by Freudian theory, when the answer was a resounding yes.  “An early view on this question, rooted in Freud’s cathartic model, held that the emotions associated with extreme stressors must be deliberately and consciously experienced or ‘worked through” (“When Avoiding Unpleasant Emotions Might Not Be Such a Bad Thing,” Page 975).  In other words, there were (and still are) folks who once thought that feeling bad, at least for a while, could do a person some good.

Perhaps, however that isn’t the case.  Controlled psychological research studies indicate “that emotional avoidance during bereavement” (for example) “may serve adaptive functions” (“When Avoiding,” page 983).  That “feeling bad” was often a behavior called “rumination.”  Rumination is “the process of thinking perseveratively about one’s feelings and problems” (“Rethinking Rumination,” page 400).  Rumination isn’t the same as worry.  Worry tends to focus on potential threats in the future.  Rumination “predominantly involves going over past events, wondering why they happened, and thinking about the meaning of those events” (Page 406).

Rumination isn’t the same as self-reflection either.  Self-reflection involves use of our cognitive faculties to take some and get some distance from ourselves.  Self-reflection—“why am I feeling this way at this moment and what can I do about that feeling?”—is, in fact a remedy for rumination rather than a synonym for that behavior.

And rumination has a particular connection with a sense of failure.  Nolan-Hoeksema, Wisco, and Lyubomirsky “suggest that the distinct theme of rumination is loss, whether through fate, one’s own failure, or the failure of others to live up to expectations” (“Rethinking Rumination,” page 406).  If that is the case, then rumination is linked directly to a sense of performance failure.  That sense is always linked to a sense of shame.

For me rumination has always been associated with my failure to recognize Anne’s condition for the serious crisis that it was.  Why did I simply accept the notion that these were “flu-like symptoms”?  Was I too focused on my new job, in the first week of that employment, to really pay attention?  Did I put my work and myself ahead of her well-being and health?  Did I just not want to be bothered?  Did I impose my male resistance to seeking medical help on her until it was too late to do any good?  I have spent days and nights occupied in such self-destructive and pointless loops of thinking.

Why is rumination a bad thing?  It interferes with good problem solving skills by absorbing thinking power in that unproductive and endless neural loop.  Rumination interferes with our short-term memory capacity for the same reason.  Rumination drains our motivations and initiative.  It reduces our ability to generate creative solutions and responses to deal with life situations.  And “Chronic ruminators appear to behave in ways that are counter-productive to their relationships with family, friends, and even strangers” (“Rethinking Rumination,” page 403).  When we’re ruminating, we’re not much fun to be around, and the people who could support us the most tend to leave us alone. 

Finally, if we engage in rumination long enough, we may tip ourselves over the line from acute sadness into chronic and serious depression.  In some cases, rumination has been predictive of binge-drinking episodes.  In other cases, it has been associated with self-injury rituals (such as cutting).  Rumination is associated with higher levels of anxiety and post-traumatic stress symptoms.  Rumination creates a negative bias in information processing.  When we ruminate we tend to filter out positive and helpful information and to focus on negative and destructive information.  As the ruminative cycle continues, we become less and less able to attempt positive behaviors and distractions.

So the first conclusion to this discussion is simple.  Find ways to resist rumination.