3 Brain Exercises To Neutralize Negative Thinking And Stop Ruminating

Does your mind often return to an unpleasant or stressful event? Once there, do you ponder every negative detail and end up experiencing once again the emotions of fear, anxiety, or embarrassment that you felt at the time?

If so, you’re prone to ruminating. It’s a word rooted in Latin, ruminare, which, in less elegant terms, means “to chew over again.” Fun fact: goats, cows and other herbivores that endlessly grind away at all kinds of plant material are called ruminants. Which means you’re in good company.

Rumination is different from the practice of engaging in postmortems. Such evaluations of an important event can help glean helpful insights for future use. They are positive because they focus on what is relevant to the future.

The defining feature of your ruminating mind is that it is stuck in the past, in replay mode, so you can’t move on from whatever touched that nerve. It could have been a critical comment someone directed at you in a meeting, an email you interpreted as condescending, or an important presentation you think you bungled.

This is emotionally draining and can deprive you of the restful sleep you deserve. Worse, it can seriously impair your analytic thinking, creative insights, and problem-solving abilities. These are things you cannot afford to do without in a high-performing organization.

The habit of succumbing to persistent negative thought patterns is widespread. While this could, in extreme cases, be associated with a psychiatric disorder, it is more likely to be simply a natural tendency that springs from a good place. You hyperfocus on what you believe went wrong in a situation because you care and you want to be your best self.

Thankfully, there are straightforward ways to regain mental control and reduce rumination to the point where it barely registers as an emotional itch. Here are some science-backed emotion regulation strategies that can get you there.

Redirect Your Attention

From Buddhism to psychology and neuroscience, there is no shortage of research on the topic of attention and how it can be developed and harnessed to live a more purposeful and satisfying life. In 1890, the Harvard psychologist Willam James wrote in Principles of Psychology: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”

We’ve learned that the things we notice—what we direct our attention toward—shape our mind. They also influence our emotions and indeed often generate those emotions in the first place.

Intentionally managing our focused attention is therefore an effective method for interrupting negative thinking. Whenever you find yourself stuck in a loop of obsessive contemplation, you should gently but resolutely guide your attention away from the disruptive thought-pattern and focus on something else.

That something else could be a piece of writing, a picture, or a physical sensation. It could be sipping water, where you concentrate on every aspect of that experience, from the smooth pressure of the glass against your lips, to the taste and temperature of the liquid in your mouth.

Try to immerse yourself in whatever activity you’ve chosen to focus on. Initially, you may be able to do this only for a few seconds. But with practice you’ll be able to maintain your focus longer and with greater intensity.

The trick is to keep bringing your attention back to the neutral or positive stimulus whenever you feel your mind tugged by the gravitational pull of your negative thoughts. Before long you’ll be able to short-circuit unhelpful patterns before they turn into full-blown rumination.

Gain Emotional Distance

It is difficult to slip out of the emotional grip of the obsessive replay of a past mistake or painful moment if you keep re-living it from your own, limited first-person perspective. Instead, zoom out and try distancing, where you imagine yourself experiencing the situation in the third person.

For instance, in recollecting that presentation you gave that you felt went poorly—based on a couple of questions from a colleague that you recall struggling to answer—imagine seeing yourself in front of your audience from the perspective of a fly on the wall. This helps you observe what was happening in a dispassionate way, without harsh self-judgment.

This kind of distancing has been shown to lower the intensity of an emotional response, thereby reducing its potential to foster rumination and unproductive negative thinking. The strategy can even work in the heat of the moment, lessening the chance that the shadow of the moment follows you into the future and hijacks your sanity.

Reframe the Story

If you keep thinking of yourself as a victim or a villain, or as falling short in comparison to others—whatever the narrative you’ve allowed to occupy your mind—then you are tilling fertile soil for the seeds of self-doubt and rumination to take root.

The way to change the script you’ve written for yourself is to reframe the unhelpful narrative. This is also known as cognitive change or “reappraisal,” which involves reinterpreting a situation to alter its emotional impact on you.

Back to that presentation you’ve been fretting about. You can reframe your colleague’s challenging questions as helpful. They pointed out important gaps in your analysis and gave you an opportunity to hone your pitch. After all—and this is part of the reframing—you likely did receive positive feedback on the rest of your proposal. You just discounted it because of the strong emotions your co-worker’s perceived criticism generated in your mind.

You could recognize that your anxiety might stem from a fear that your new manager thinks this colleague is more knowledgeable than you. Challenge that assumption by evaluating whether there is any evidence to support this. You might conclude that you are part of a top-notch team and that your colleague’s knowledge does not cancel out your own.

It is normal and healthy to reflect on previous events, meetings, and conversations. You want to get a sense of things went. But don’t get hung up on aspects you think didn’t go as well as you’d hoped, because by chewing over what can’t be changed, you can miss out on positive lessons that can be learned.