The psychology of rumination and overthinking can lead us to profound insights Rumination is a part of life.
If you’re a thinking, feeling, hoping human being, you’ve probably found yourself ruminating over something in your life. For many, this cycle of overthinking and overanalyzing a situation can often be precipitated by relationships, and more specifically breakups. But why? Why can’t we stop thinking about that person, or that thing we said, when it’s not serving us anymore and the problem doesn’t get solved in the process? The problem starts with our brains, and what they are hardwired to do. One of the most deep-seated survival mechanisms of the human brain is to try to figure out problems (aka sources of pain and suffering) and avoid them in a future. If you burn your hand on a stove, for example, you learn not to touch it when it’s hot. This logic applies to many things in life. Once we experience pain, our brain wants to figure out what hurt us and then avoid that pain from here on out. As Psychologist Jordan Peterson puts it, there is a pragmatic element to our thoughts. For example, something goes wrong — a relationship, a job, a friendship — and our brains go into hyperdrive trying to trace the root of the problem to its source. The problem is that sources of emotional pain can be a little harder to pinpoint than cutting yourself with a knife or burning yourself on a flame. And that makes it hard for our brain to figure out how to avoid that situation in the future. In its essence, it’s a survival mechanism gone awry. This trait of our brains (the ability to process problems and find solutions) that helps us in some situations — solving math problems, writing stories, doing research — can also cripple us in others. But what’s the problem here? Why can’t we just figure it out, give ourselves the most logical answer, and move on? The problem, my friends, is the complexity of the problem. And what is more complicated a series of events than a relationship (Except for maybe global geopolitics or quantum physics)? When our brains travel back to try to figure out what went wrong in a relationship, we’re often left fishing for a needle in a haystack, unable to ever really pinpoint the source of the problem, or whether there was ever really a problem at all. Trying To Make Sense of the Illogical One theory as to why rumination becomes so problematic after a relationship breakdown is that, in their essence, relationships are illogical. Applying a logical process to an illogical phenomenon is a hopeless thing. Why? Number one: there are just too many variables. Trying to look back at a failed relationship and figure out what went wrong can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. There are just too many things that have happened, too many events and interaction, to accurately ever figure out what the problem was. This is when the rumination starts. Since your brain can’t figure it out, it begins cycling over and over various events in your head, desperately trying to pinpoint one moment (something you said or did, perhaps) where everything went bad. Unfortunately, life doesn’t usually work that way. There are innumerable things that could have been potentially been wrong, and it’s impossible to say how that all these little things interacted and evolved throughout your relationship. And that’s even assuming you can safely say what was wrong or right in any given situation, or whether you’re confused about what the the wrong (or right) thing to do was in the first place. At least in my mind (and I suspect many of you are like this, too), I’m not totally positive about whether some things were right or wrong in certain contexts. There were certain things I said or did during my relationship, such as not committing to a serious relationship right away, or not calling all the time in the first part of the relationship, that could be interpreted either way. After it was all over, I started to think about them as something I did wrong, and that if I hadn’t done them, we would still be together. But who’s to say? Maybe those were the things I did right, or were healthy boundaries I was right to draw in the sand. And to add to this, it might have been that tension that made her attracted to me in the first place (Although maybe I’m overthinking this). There comes a point where the rumination has to stop. And that means letting go of the need for a reason your breakup happened. Letting Go Without An Explanation In the end, I think any attempt to explain life is ultimately in vain. Even the most respected anthropologists and psychologists are dealing with, in the best of situations, incomplete data. Though we do live in the age of big data (meaning there’s more data available now than ever before), there will likely always be something incomplete about our picture of the world. You can partially attribute that to the play of emotions, of the subconscious, and of a billion variables being played out in real time in a dynamic, inscrutable world full of countless surprises. What does this mean? No matter what we know, or don’t know, we have to ultimately move on (with confidence, mind you), even if we don’t have a satisfying answer to why things (whatever those things are) turned out the way they did. We’re humans. We want answers, even when we know that there may not be one, or that it doesn’t really matter in the long run. Our hearts and minds seem hardwired to ask “Why?”, and that’s okay. Keep asking, but don’t let the questions sabotage your own life. There are plenty of other things in this wild, crazy, unimaginably busy world to let your mind be curious about. Eventually, you’ll find a way to sublimate all this, channeling the energy that has been flowing towards an unsolvable problem and siphoning it into another part of your life. This is what the best artists and innovators do, and what you have the ability to do as well. The truth is, cruel things happen to us. How we take those things and move beyond them is where we prove our strength and our resilience. Anything can be transformed, even the suffering of our own minds. As Victor Frankl said: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
1 Comment
Gary Brown
1/12/2023 12:44:11 pm
This article is so well-written and has impacted me in a very positive way. I think it has enlightened me more than anything I've read previously on the subject. I am not religious in any sense. To be brief, a solid 15 year relationship suddenly failed. That was in December 1999. I never really recovered. If you would like any details, please write to me. It's complex but I'd be happy to fill you in. I'm now 75. I'd like to think I have a few good years left. Hopefully they will be productive and fulfilling. Thanks again for a great article dealing with loss and all that goes along with it. It helps seeing things in a new light--in ways you hadn't thought of before. What more could you want out of life than peace of mind?
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Wesley OwensI write about love, life, and all the things in between. Archives
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