Thinking about the same fears and worries over & over again. Ruminating Anxiety: What Is It? Can It Be Healed? It’s a horrible often unbearable condition …
Imagine being stuck thinking the same negative things over and over again.
For some people this is what can happen. First thought of the day is the stuck negative thought. It repeats all day, often with a dry mouth and severe sweats. Red face. Goes all day. Then into the night. Then when you try to sleep it’s still hanging around.
The heart races, the mind repeats the same obsessions over and over again.
Yep it’s horrendous – and the worst part is it can go for months or even years.
People with anxiety may ruminate on specific fears, such as the idea that something bad will happen to their family. Or they might ruminate more generally, continually scanning their mind for things that might go wrong.
Brain function plays a role in rumination in several ways, but one significant aspect relates to memory. People remember things that are related to each other in neural networks. And when people enter a woe-is-me network, the brain lights up connections to other times they felt that way. Ruminating is worsened by another difficulty of the depressed and anxious brain—an inability to flexibly generate solutions. Brain chemistry makes it hard to switch to another perspective to find the way out of problems, so rumination intensifies. Both anxiety and depression are then reinforced.
What treatment is possible? Will they work?
End rumination by exiting the negative memory network
First, stop ruminating on negatives and activate a neural network of times when everything worked out okay. These might be hard to remember. Neural networks are triggered by mood, and your mood might have connected to other moods when you were afraid of bad outcomes.You can deliberately decide to recall instead the times when things worked out even though you had been afraid. Those networks of anxiety can lead into remembering positive outcomes. However, ruminating may get you too negative to shift into a network of positive thoughts without a memory jogger. What can shift you into a different network?
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