Reducing Rumination
Musings From a Raging Academic
Being caught under rumination is very much like being stuck on an endless record, where the lyrics repeat over and over. It’s fascinating to be writing about this, as I work my way through my second bout of graduate school, and work towards becoming a potential therapist.
Sometimes, we think that replaying this ruminating record will generate new insights. This is simply not the case, as we’ve already exhausted the number of replays and the original song starts to lose meaning.
If you replayed the song once or twice, then this is fine — but when you replay it so many times that it annoys you and interferes with your daily living, it is not particularly helpful.
In other words, we’re caught in a cycle. To get out of the cycle, we need an escape route. Think of a fire. When a fire hits home, we have to escape, otherwise we will get caught in the flames.
It’s ideal to have made a proactive fire safety escape plan, but in the event that we don’t have fire escape plan, then we have to craft one during the fire itself.
