ANXIETY THERAPY

I'm a therapist, I treat anxiety and OCD and I let's do therapy in two minutes. I am a huge believer that if more people just understood and knew how to handle rumination or repetitive thinking, they would be better off. Rumination is replaying the same thought, scenario, worry over and over again in your brain. When you play the same thought over and over again, it reinforces in the brain that that thought is valid and it increases the probability of that happening. And it automatically keeps you stuck in discomfort. Many people think that they can't minimize rumination and that's not true. We can't control those initial thoughts, those fears, those worries, those intrusive thoughts that pop up, but we can minimize our engagement with the thought, which is essentially the rumination piece. It's important to understand what is the initial thought versus what is the thinking about the thought. Thinking about the thought is the rumination. How do you minimize it? The first step is really just acknowledging that you're ruminating. A lot of people are not even aware that they're thinking about something repeatedly and again and again and they're using it under the guise of I'm processing or I'm problem solving. But the issue is that there's no forward movement. You're not actually figuring anything out. You're just thinking about the same thing again and again and even when you feel like you do figure it out, you probably think about it again. In which case that is considered rumination. The second piece, once we recognize we're ruminating, is recognizing that rumination doesn't actually help us. It's the hardest thing to convince your anxious brain because it wants control over something it doesn't have control over. So it wants to keep engaging with this thought because it feels like it's actually solving something. So once your logical brain can recognize I'm not actually solving anything, I can't figure that thing out right now and I haven't many times before. So I'm going to redirect my attention to what else is in front of me. What would I be doing if that thought, that fear, that worry didn't appear? You are still going to feel anxiety. That is not going to go away. But we are going to stop ourselves from getting stuck in the thought loop that just keeps us more and more anxious as time passes. There's so much more I can say about rumination, but really, truly, I think that this is one of the greatest skills that we can learn to do because I think that it is the biggest reason that so many people remain stuck in thought loops, whether it be related to anxiety, OCD or any other type of mental health disorder. You are going to feel anxiety. That is not going to go away. But we are going to stop ourselves from getting stuck in the thought loop that just keeps us more and more anxious as time passes. There's so much more I can say about rumination, but really, truly, I think that this is one of the greatest skills that we can learn to do because I think that it is the biggest reason that so many people remain stuck in thought loops, whether it be related to anxiety, OCD or any other type of mental health disorder.