How to Stop Ruminating

Ruminating is the habit of turning things over in your mind again and again. A little reflection is a good thing, but if you have problems stopping yourself once you get started, you can waste a lot of your time chewing the mental cud. Worrying gets to be a habit, and all habits can be broken.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Catch yourself red-handed (or would it be red-brained). When you find yourself rolling the same worries over and over, admit it. Say it out loud: “I’m ruminating.”
2. Tell yourself to stop worrying and point out to yourself that you are capable of handling anything.
3. Do something else. Take a walk, ride a bicycle or sing the chorus of "Bridge Over Troubled Waters." Do whatever you want to do that makes you feel better than ruminating does.
4. Look at something else. When you ruminate, your eyes (and everything else) lose focus on the real world. Bring yourself back with your senses.
5. Make a specific time in your life for worries. Tell yourself that you will worry about the kids and school and everything else on Tuesday at 9 o’clock, for example. Give your worries a pre-determined amount of time, say, an hour. After their time is up, the worries don’t have to go home but they can’t stay here.
6. After you have given your worries their allotted time, ask yourself what you would rather be doing with that time. Ruminating costs you time out of your life.
7. Schedule a time for celebration. Since you scheduled a time for the rumination, why not give yourself an hour to whoop it up and generally feel good about yourself.

Tips & Warnings

• Ruminating is often a sign that you lack faith in your own abilities. Affirm your good qualities and strengths daily.
• Make a list of your strengths. Make a list of your goals. Put these lists where you can see them every day. Giving yourself a little moral support and a sense of direction can help you stop ruminating.
• Pick up new hobbies and experience new things to keep yourself in a positive cycle of change.
• Beware of the following phrase: “Yes, but….” Everything that follows this phrase of mental dialogue is pure garbage. Here’s how that works. You say that you are intelligent and your inner voice pipes up with, “Yes, but what about that time with the paste?” Who cares what you did with the paste. You are intelligent. Believe in it.
• Do not let your list of goals and strengths become a litany of failures and weaknesses. How does that happen? See the “Yes, but….” Warning above.

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