BSB 106
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see me bundled up in a very thick scarf. It is the consequence of that super snowstorm that ran all across the US. Thankfully, I live in Florida, so for us it's just cold weather and rain.
But I hope you weathered that snowstorm well. So welcome, i'm glad you are here. Today I wanna talk to you about rumination versus reflection. Now, rumination may not be a word that you're familiar with. It's not something that we toss around in everyday language, but rumination is really when you get stuck in a thought loop and it's a negative thought loop.
If you're a person with high anxiety, you might be very familiar with this and these negative thought loops or ruminations can even push you beyond the point of anxiety to a full-blown panic attack. But in [00:01:00] rumination, you tend to focus on something that you felt you did wrong. The worst case scenario, what could possibly happen, and often this is not real life, it's a fantasy.
You imagine someone being mad at you or you imagine something you said, and it could have set someone off or you imagine yourself or your loved ones getting hurt, but there's an element of fantasy to it. It's not reality. Or you're ruminating focusing on aspects of your behavior, thinking that you did something wrong when in reality a lot of people didn't even notice, and it's already left their mind. It's only you focusing on the negativity. What could go wrong, what you felt went wrong, and you keep yourself in this loop. Now those loops can last anywhere from seconds to minutes, to hours to days, and I have [00:02:00] some news for you, my friend.
It's up to you to break that loop. Some people wait for the loop to wear off to where their mind just gets so exhausted. They go to sleep, they wake up and often the loop has broken. But sometimes that's not the case. And these things last for days if you can't snap out of it. And I know that may sound a bit harsh.
But we're gonna talk about why that is and why it's up to you to snap out of it and break these loops. So let's talk about the flip side Reflection. Reflection is not focusing on the negative, but it's actually getting curious about what happened. For example, if you were not happy with the way a meeting went, instead of ruminating on, "Oh, I should have done_ this, I did this wrong"._
You ask questions like, _why do I feel that meeting could have gone better? Why do I think or feel that I could have performed _[00:03:00] _better? What would've happened if I did this?_ So it's very much a place of curiosity. There's no blame in it. It's a place of positivity, self-development, and improvementa lot of the time. There's the difference.
So my friends, now that you know the difference are you a ruminator or reflector? Because this matters in how happy you go through life, because happiness depends less on external factors and more on your perception of what is happening. The same thing can happen to two people, and if one person is a ruminator, it is magnified in a negative way.
If the other person is reflector, then they're able to see a lesson in it or goodness in it and move on. Staying power is what matters. Rumination keeps you stuck. Reflection moves you forward. Now, if you've studied [00:04:00] any kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, or maybe you've worked with a therapist yourself, it is a very common tool that after you have been triggered, y ou want to eventually reflect, and here's what's happening from a neuroscience perspective. If you are a ruminator, then you are activating your nervous system for fight flight, freeze. You my friends. It is true that there was some kind of initial trigger that was possibly external to you.
But what happens most of the time is that we have an internal trigger, and that internal trigger is our thoughts. So your thoughts can activate your nervous system just as strongly as something external can. And this is what I mean about really taking accountability. Was it really Something external or something you are doing internally that is keeping the cycle going?
So be really honest with yourself about that. Now
when it comes to rumination, yes, it's true. Your nervous [00:05:00] system has been activated in some way externally or internally. The next piece is completely up to you. When you are activated, your brain sends two signals, one to your brainstem to go, okay, we gotta prepare to fight flight, freeze. Quickly. We need adrenaline flooding the system.
We need our eyes to widen so that we can see all the threats. Our heart needs to pump faster so that we can get more blood and oxygen to our extremities. All of that is happening instinctually. That is true. That is also out of your conscious control. It's also true. However, the brain sends a signal to the prefrontal cortex, which is your logical brain that says, _Hey, can you just do an assessment on this and let us know if this is really something we need to be reacting to?_
_Or am I just blowing this whole thing outta proportion?_ Now, at this point, you have about two minutes to calm down your [00:06:00] instinctual response, and inside that two minutes is your critical window. The thoughts you think matter because it is absolutely possible for you to override that instinctual response and go, you know what?
It was just a crappy thought we were thinking, and we're not really in danger right now, so we're just gonna back things down and we're gonna get to this place of neutrality and calm. There are a lot of different ways to do this. If you prefer somatic techniques, that could be resetting your vagus nerve through massaging the neck.
Humming, deep breathing, long and slow, stretching, rolling your neck around. All of these things are great to help your body feel safe again. Then when you feel safe, you can start reflecting and go, _why did I react like that?_ But what I find, people who are ruminators skip the reflection piece. They just don't do it.
They never really [00:07:00] got to the space where they felt calmed down enough to go, _Hmm. What set that off? Was it something in my environment? Was it a subconscious pattern? Was it a thought I had?_ They don't journal about it. They don't really think about it. They just go, _"Whew, glad that's over"._ And then the pattern keeps repeating and you don't actually get better.
So if you're suffering from chronic anxiety or even panic, this is something you really wanna pay attention to. You do have more power than you think to control your own thoughts, but maybe you haven't been shown how. What's really interesting when you look at the brain, you've seen pictures of the brain and there's this central line going down the middle that if we just chopped down that line.
You know, you would split the brain apart and you have a right side and a left side, and you have the same architecture on the right as the left. And what is very interesting is that if you are a ruminator, you are primarily feeding the right side pathway, which [00:08:00] focuses on the worst case scenario.
Threats. Dangers. But the left side pathway is where you focus on possibility. What could be, and you get into the space of reflection. So right there, it's gonna tell you, am I your right path person, which tends toward danger and pessimism, or am I a left side person, which is optimism and possibility. The great news is both exist right and left. And if you look at it just like right-handed person, left-handed person, you may be dominant on one side. So I am right-hand dominant, but it doesn't mean I can't use my left hand. I do all kinds of things with my left hand. It's just not instinctual for me to do it with my left because I've trained my brain to do it over and over again with my right.
If you are a ruminator, that is exactly what's happening inside your brain. You have trained the right hand pathway to be the dominant [00:09:00] pathway. It doesn't mean you can't train the other one to be more dominant Now. _How do we do that?_ You might be asking, _how do we possibly switch from one side to the other?_
The great news is it is not rocket science. It is a very simple three step pathway that we do this. The problem is knowing about it isn't enough. You actually have to do it, and you have to do it consistently because switching from the right pathway to the left pathway is not instantaneous. It requires effort on your part, and here's how that happens.
The right pathway is very insidious because we are actually engineered somewhat to pay more attention to danger and threats than we are to fantasies and possibilities or pleasure. Because of that, your brain kind of will prioritize that rumination pathway if you don't master your own thoughts to take control.
Now if you know it is a [00:10:00] tendency to be negative, then you have free will, self-agency and you can decide, _I don't wanna do that anymore. I'd like to be positive._ And here's how that happens, because you've trained that right hand pathway to be very active. It's going to slip past your defenses. You're gonna start thinking about something negative, and here's where we do step one: awareness. As soon as you are aware that a negative thought has popped into your mind, stop it. You have two minutes to stop it before it causes a system wide stress cascade. Two minutes. Okay. So as soon as you become aware that your thoughts are beginning to loop in a ruminating or negative way, this is what I do.
I will yell out internally, if I'm alone I may even say this out loud, but I'll go, _*"No".*_ Just like you were training a puppy that's jumping on you. You have to go, *no*. You have to assert mastery. You have to assert control and go, [00:11:00] "_no, this is not the behavior we want"._ Now that you have awareness, we're going to reframe or divert, which is whatever that negative thought was, counteract it with something positive.
Okay. So if you were thinking, _nobody likes me. Then you're gonna counteract that and go, you know what? That's not true. There are definitely people who, like me, I have friends. I am not absolutely alone in this world. There are people that like me,_ so we wanna poke holes in the reasoning of that right-handed pathway because it's going to be like chicken little, the sky is falling and we need to bring actual reality into the picture and go, you know what?
Whatever you're imagining is fantasy. It is not true. But here's what is true. So you're going to replace that negative thought with a positive one, and I recommend that you replace it with a series of positive thoughts because we want to get the train rolling on the other side. We are trying to switch pathways from the right [00:12:00] side, which is doom, danger, negativity to the left side, which is optimism and possibility, and we need to open that up through positive reframing.
So we're going to start rolling that train and thinking, thought after thought after thought that is positive. That is helpful. That is uplifting because we are trying to divert the train wreck that's happening on the right side. Now that you have become aware of the negative thought, you have replaced them with a series of positive thoughts.
Then when you have stabilized within that two minute window and you're not allowing that train to continue, then you're going to switch into reflection and go, _why do I think that stuff popped up for me right now? You know, what possible reasoning could I have? Start to worry? What am I actually afraid of?_
And then you start getting information and that information creates more awareness. And the more you become aware, [00:13:00] the faster you get at stopping that right-sided pathway. And this is a continual process because you're building a new pathway by using new habits, and those new habits need to be practiced consistently, just like any other habit.
For example, if you wanna stop drinking coffee in the morning, you have to choose a different beverage. You have to stop drinking coffee. That's the only way to stop drinking coffee. And when it comes to breaking these rumination, loops, stop thinking negative thoughts. That's literally the only way to do it.
Otherwise, you are just perpetuating bad behavior. Just like a puppy that you never correct. You just let it jump everywhere. And then it says, well, jumping's okay, so I guess I'm just gonna, I'm a jumper now. I'm gonna do more of that. This is not what you want. You are in control a lot of the time about the thoughts that are running through your head.
If you feel that you aren't, I recommend that you listen to my last podcast, number 105, about [00:14:00] self-agency because you may need to do a little work on your self-agency if you feel you can't control your own mind. Everything works, but you have to work it. You have to do your part consistently to create change. Otherwise, you stay stuck.
And that is so frustrating to want to be different, to feel you have the ability to be different, but yet not take the action steps to make it work. That's a whole different subconscious pathway. And if you are struggling with the action steps, because knowing is not enough. I wish it was. I love knowledge and I love mind based activities and I so wish just knowing about something was enough to make change, but it isn't. It takes your effort to actually do action steps to make things change. And if you need some guidance on that, about spotting these hidden patterns that are popping up and [00:15:00] creating these rumination loops for you, or creating these harmful or destructive patterns, then this is my specialty.
I do a system that's called *Decode and Amplify*. In the Decode program, it's private one-to-one coaching, where I'm going to show you why your subconscious is bringing these things up. I'm gonna show you where these patterns originated. I'm going to teach you to speak the language of your subconscious.
And once you have this greater awareness and understanding, you really do increase your self agency to choose something different, and eventually you do have mastery over your own thoughts. You can't always control how your nervous system reacts because there is an instinctual piece to it.
But you can get so much better at taking back control in that two minute window that It doesn't create loops that last for hours, days, weeks, or just never stop. If you would like more information on how to do that, you can go to aprildarley.com and book a free consultation with [00:16:00] me, or if this sounds amazing and you just had a full body "_yes, I want in on this program"_, you can go ahead and skip a consultation and just book your program. I recommend that you begin with *Decode *unless you need high level support, which is extra Voxer hours. You want extra sessions. You want somebody really to be there , for you step by step, then you need *Amplify*. As always, reach out if you have any questions, and until next week, I am wishing you the reflection, the goodness, the optimism that I absolutely know that you're capable of. Goodbye my friends.
