What do you think?

And is it doing you any good?

“You are what you think,” an Australian professor once told me.

For most of us, most of the time, this is not a bad thing. We are homo sapiens, discerning people. We think therefore we are. We have thousands of thoughts every day. We solve problems. We make plans.

Occasionally, we might have bizarre, intrusive, unwanted notions that can be benign (“Is dry cleaning really dry?”) or rather unpleasant (“What if I run over that cat?”) Usually we effortlessly ignore these ideations, and quickly get back to more rational matters.

But thinking doesn’t always serve us well.

Have you ever got stuck on a worry or conundrum that stays with you for days or weeks on end? Curling around your mind like knotweed roots that seem to grip tighter the harder you think?

This is rumination. Obsessive, circular and ultimately worse than futile - rumination is both cause and consequence of mental distress, the ultimate psychological vicious circle.¹

As a classic daydreamer, overthinker and Sunday afternoon philosopher, I’ve been particularly prone to rumination over the years, thinking myself into knots over wildly different things: noisy neighbours, a dreadful manager, health twinges, climate change, career reversals, inappropriate crushes, ageing.

So I thought it would be useful to get in touch with an expert on rumination - a thoughtful thinker who thinks a great deal about thinking itself.

And I asked him what we can do to make the rumination stop.

---

A few years ago, Peter Kinderman led a piece of research² which produced some very interesting insights into the insidious nature of overthinking.

The study analysed more than 30,000 people and their responses to stressful life situations.

It found that, yes, difficult events - trauma, upset, grief, shock, - do indeed cause people pain… but it was actually how the person thought about those events that determined the intensity of depression or anxiety that then ensued. Those who agonised with a narrow, one-track mind about their setbacks suffered more than those who were able to think more broadly, with greater perspective, on what had happened.

“People who deal with difficulties by rumination tend to have higher levels of anxiety and depression than people who use more adaptive ways,” Professor Kinderman told me this week.

But of course, it doesn’t stop there. Because mental ill health can itself be greatly distressing, the mind cannot help but ruminate on this too, clenched, obsessive, in a way that just makes the suffering worse.

“It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” said Kinderman, who is professor of clinical psychology at Liverpool University. “We can’t stop thinking about the problem because it poses an existential threat.” He says there are evolutionary reasons for this. “If a rabbit is confronted by a fox, it doesn’t want to focus attention away from the fox because it will die.”

I like the analogy. The overthinker as a rabbit, lolloping friendlessly through the twilit vale of woe; depression as the fox, mean and thin, always finding a new way in, defecating everywhere.

So how, I ask Kinderman, do we tame this self-destructive type of ruminative thinking? How does the rabbit wrong-foot the fox?

The prof goes back to his original experiment. The people who avoided depression were those who were able to bring a far broader perspective to their troubles. To see it from many sides. He offers another analogy…

Take an old office chair. It needs replacing and you want to chuck it out - but it doesn’t fit through the door. The frustrating way of doing things is to repeatedly try and bash it through the jambs, ruining the paintwork. But what if you flip it, turn it upside down? Take the wheels off? Remove the door from its hinges? Will it go through a window? Can the chair be taken apart?

An office chair last night

This analogy prompts two immediate thoughts. Firstly, that universities need to think more carefully about their office furniture. And secondly that there might be an antidote here for depressive rumination. Fresh perspective. New angles - practical, philosophical, logical, stoical, geometrical, sociological, even cosmological. An end to the overthinker’s old tunnel vision.

But how do we achieve this? The answer might not be as hard as you, er, think³.

Kinderman explains that the very act of talking about our difficulties helps us formulate fresh perspectives on them, which bring hope, relief, lightness. This, he says, is why friends, family - and therapists - can be so valuable to anyone stuck down there in the vale of woe, with the rabbit.

“One of the common processes that happens in good therapy is that people talk about their difficulties, which helps formulate perspective,” he says. “The therapist usually sustains the person’s attention on the difficult issue for long enough so that alternative perspectives present themselves.”

“What we need to do is we need to mobilise our attention such that instead of being caught up in thinking about a problem only from one perspective, we can try out this idea and that idea,” Prof Kinderman enthuses.

“And if we find we are ruminating, we can become aware of where our attention is pointing and we can choose to point it somewhere else.”

This strikes me as a hugely important tool for psychological flexibility: to become aware of where our attention is pointing. Think about it for a moment. Point your attention at it.

After all, if we just let our attention go wherever it wants, we will continue ruminating in the same old patterns; nothing will change. But if we can become aware enough of our attention, we can start to direct it where we want it to be.

‘You are what you think?’ I don’t think this is totally true.

It’s broader, more hopeful than that.

You are what you choose to pay attention to.

Until next week

1. Thinking too much: rumination and psychopathology. Ehring T., World Psychiatry, 2021.

2. Psychological Processes Mediate the Impact of Familial Risk, Social Circumstances and Life Events on Mental Health. Kinderman P, et al

3. Disclosure of traumas and immune function: health implications for psychotherapy. Pennebaker, J. W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., & Glaser, R.