Once people start to ruminate, they often find it quite difficult to ‘stop it’. We tend to tell ourselves ‘stop ruminating’ – only to notice that it’s hard to control these unwelcome thoughts.
Here’s 5 tips you might find useful:
- Allow yourself to ruminate, but only for a limited amount of time. It’s important to allow your intrusive thoughts (after all, your mind is trying to tell you something). But usually, it’s not a very productive time. So our advice: go for chunks of 15 minutes of rumination – without interruption – and then decide to stop, until it’s your next ‘moment to ruminate’.
- Foresee moments of rumination, and stick to them. It helps to know that you’ll be allowed another 15 minutes of rumination, for example at 8 o’clock in the evening. When, during the day, you start ruminating, just tell yourself ‘we’ll have time to ruminate tonight’. Your inner self will relax if it knows you will make the time necessary to reflect on all that’s bothering you.
- Reflect how you would react if somebody else came to you with this problem. Often when we have a difficult situation, it seems more difficult to have ‘great ideas forward’. Yet, as you might have noticed, when somebody else comes to you with problems, you are so much more creative. So why not, at the end of your 15 minutes of rumination, act as if somebody else had come to you with the same problem, and reflect what advise you with give?
- Reflect what advise you, at the age of 90 years, would give to you. This tip is quite similar to the previous one. In this case, however, you’re pretending being 90 years old. An age where people usually have developed a lot of wisdom and serenity. Yes, your future self probably has some very good answers within you!
- Define a very first objective to somewhat improve the situation, and go for it. As long as people feel ‘helpless’, the rumination continues. However, when they have an objective implying a possible improvement in the situation (however small), hope is back. Once there’s hope and progress, the rumination will be so much less intense.
Do all 5 of them, consistently, and you will start reaping the benefits!
Good luck!
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