Rumination Quotes

“One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead, walk around with a blank mind and something from somewhere will fill it up.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).”
― Christine A. Courtois, Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach

“Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together.

What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction.

In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.”
― Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

“If you are someone who tends to ruminate, or who suffers from anxiety and depression, it's important that you don't judge yourself for this way of being.”
― Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself

“There was a great deal of good sense in all this; but there are some situations of human mind in which good sense has very little power; and Catherine's feelings contradicted almost every position her mother advanced.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“As cow, deer, and goat chew food again and again in endless circles, overthinking creates an endless loop and exhaust energy. Conscious micro meditation (Laghu gayan kriya) can bring you out of the loop.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

“Flood a pool of bloody thoughts with a pool of happy ones.”
― Trevor Carss

“Rumination is the coin of my realm. Interiority breeds interiority.”
― Gary Shteyngart

“Sometimes, in the long hours of a summer afternoon, when the paralegals at their desks are seeking a distraction, they watch the ghost emerging from her pleat in space and time and wonder if their lives will slip by like hers did, leaving them fastened so hopelessly, so desperately, to the past. As if a life could work any other way. As if that weren't precisely what a life must do.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

“Rumination in grief is a form of avoidance.

We know - this is completely counterintuitive. As we talked about [previously], avoidance is when you work hard not to think about something. How could rumination possibly be a form of avoidance? Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, Maarten Eisma, and an array of their colleagues first suggested this 'rumination as avoidance' hypothesis and then did research to investigate it. There is a lot to say on this topic, but here's what you need to know: studies have found that grieving people will often ruminate on very specific aspects of their loss. This keeps their brains so busy with those very focused events or details that they don't have to face the even more difficult and painful aspects of their grief.”
― Eleanor Haley, What's Your Grief?: Lists to Help You Through Any Loss

“Do I exist in the same physical space as other people? Can I really seek joy and pleasure together with them? Why does the path become narrower the further I walk down it? Why is every place I go to a cliff? Self-pity pins me down like a boulder, and I struggle with it until
I arrive at the subway station.”
― Dolki Min, Walking Practice

“You won't stress over it unless you care.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“But in the silence of the night in this funny little house in my too-big borrowed clothes, alternative narratives had begun to take shape and substance.”
― Lindsay Emory, The Royal Runaway

“Ruminating on none should presume to criticize you and ruminating on someone is always presuming to impress you are the two perilous mental illness”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Life is a series of moments and moments are always changing, just like thoughts, negative and positive. And although it may be human nature to dwell, like many natural things it's senseless, senseless to allow a single thought to inhabit a mind because thoughts are like guests or fair-weather friends.”
― Cecelia Ahern, How to Fall in Love

“His father used to accuse his mother of not being able to let anything go. She needed to learn to put the past behind her, instead of dwelling on what couldn't be changed. "Don't be like your mother," he warned Cole, "unless you want to be depressed.”
― Sigrid Nunez, Salvation City

“Everyone's grief is on a different timetable. You'll know when you're ready. ... I lost my grandmother when I was nine, and while it's not the same as your grief, the loss was like a piece of gum. The longer I chewed it, the less flavor it had. And then one day I swallowed it. So I'm not chewing it every day, but it's still inside me. And I heard that gum takes, like, seventy-two years to digest, so ...”
― Kirthana Ramisetti, Advika and the Hollywood Wives

“Perhaps he is one of those people who are able to go through life step by step, for whom what happens, happens, and that is that. For whom today is uncontaminated by yesterday.”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“When our thoughts turn towards the past, we are often mired in the seductive trap of regret or bathed in the illusory glow of nostalgia. We wallow in the murky waters of what once was, reaching out to the shadows of deeds done and words uttered. Yet, the past is but a deserted stage, the actors long departed, the play concluded. No amount of wandering in its hallowed halls can change the script that was once performed.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The Power of the Present: A Stoic's Guide to Unyielding Focus

“Both past and future are but illusions, mere phantoms birthed by the wanderer mind. They are echoes and whispers, devoid of the tangible solidity of the present moment. We become the masters of time, not by traversing its illusory breadth, but by plunging into the depth of the present moment.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The Power of the Present: A Stoic's Guide to Unyielding Focus

“We must seek to tame this wanderer mind, not by chaining it to the immovable past or the unarrivable future, but by inviting it to rest in the embrace of the present moment. For in the now lies the true journey’s end of the wanderer, a place where dreams take root, grow, and flourish.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The Power of the Present: A Stoic's Guide to Unyielding Focus