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Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Are You Reflecting Or Ruminating? Stop Overthinking To Improve Your Mental Health
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- [00:00]
Rebecca Hunter
If you're waiting to feel motivated before you take care of your mental health.
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Everyday Calm App Narrator
You'Re going to be waiting a long time. Feeling better comes from action, not vibes. The Everyday Calm app gives you short, doable tools that actually calm your nervous system. No journaling marathons, no toxic positivity, just real support. One small step at a time.
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Rebecca Hunter
Get it@studio.com Rebecca in this episode you'll discover the real difference between reflection and rumination and why one helps you grow while the other keeps you stuck. Welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for people who are done with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and a therapist helping busy, big hearted people like you learn practical skills to quiet your racing mind, overcome self doubt and actually be present in your life. If that sounds good to you, you're in the right place. Visit me@takeouttherapy.com anytime. Thanks so much for listening. Well hello there friend. I' so happy you're here for today's session. It's going to be super helpful. In this session you'll discover the difference between helpful reflection and unproductive rumination. I want to talk about why you sometimes might fall into rumination so easily and give you a very simple shift that will help your mind just calm down. I had a client the other day that I was talking to about an issue with her kid, her adult, adult child. And boy can I relate because I have adult children too. And she was saying I've just been thinking about it so much lately, it's keeping me up at night. And I was like, whoa, hold on. How much are you thinking about this situation? How often are you thinking about it and how does it feel in your body when you're thinking about this situation? Because the thing is, is most people think they are reflecting or processing or just thinking things through, but oftentimes they're actually spiraling. And knowing the difference between those two things can really bring some relief and help you get headed in a more productive direction with your thinking. So I want to talk about these two kinds of thinking very clearly with you today so you discern for yourself what you have going on. Because you know what overthinking feels like, right? It's like a whole movie in our heads. We replay conversations and think about over and over and over again the same content. Oftentimes the brain seems like it's searching for the perfect answer and so thus are we. Perhaps you're one of those people, like many of us, who replay conversations whether whether it was a meeting that didn't go like you wanted, or a little bit of a conflict with somebody. The brain churns on that stuff. Perhaps your brain also likes to come up with the answer, right? Brains are problem solving machines, and oftentimes they try to solve things that can't actually be solved up in your head, right? But nevertheless, overthinking leads us to rehearse future outcomes. And oftentimes we think we're just processing through things, but actually, when we're spending all this time in our head, nothing really changes. It feels like thinking, it feels like working stuff out, but it's really draining. Rumination oftentimes for people feels productive, but it steals our energy and it steals time. What happens when our brain churns over and over in the same material is it basically inflames anxiety. It makes it so we can't sleep very well. It makes any presence that we're trying to develop totally ruined because we're just in our heads. And oftentimes the result of rumination is that we second guess every decision that we make, because frankly, the brain gets in the habit of all this churning, and instead of moving forward, all of a sudden, we end up stuck. And I hear it all the time. People blame themselves. They think they're failing. They think they should know better. They're like, something's wrong with me. I keep overthinking everything. Here's the thing. We all want clarity on whatever's going on in our lives, right? And how else do we get to it besides thinking? But there has to be some mental quiet, right? We have to be able to think through things without spiraling into that repetitive pattern of rumination. We have to be able to stop carrying around old conversations and things that didn't go well and imagine futures and start living in the present moment. So one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode is because I got caught in a bunch of rumination recently. And I'm like, it's so easy, easy to get caught here when something's going on. I don't know if I've talked about this or not, but my boys came back home for a little while to regroup. They're 22 and 23. So they came back home to rest, regroup, and go back into that harsh, harsh world. And it's interesting. Like, we went from empty nest and a lot of freedom and just autonomy right back into, like, no, it's not just you and me now. We're parents again, right? We have this role that we play in these people's lives. And honestly, it led me down a road, a. A ton of rumination, Especially when my boys were unsure about what they were going to do. I wasn't ruminating about my own life, but I started ruminating about theirs. I call it momination, right? The worrying, the planning, and frankly, projecting a bunch of my own crap onto them all up in my head. In my desperation, unchecked state, I was about to send my son an application to be a flight attendant, despite the fact that he has literally no interest in that job whatsoever. Because that was my dream, right? Talk about projection. Rumination makes us do unhealthy stuff, my friend. It makes us act outside of our values in our relationship. It causes anxiety, worry. It makes us fearful and not at all present with what is actually happening. I'll give you the end of the story. Both the kids moved out and they're off on their own paths, none of which I planned for them. I think what I really want to express to you today is that there's a line between rumination and productive reflection. And the line is a shift from helpful thinking to harmful thinking. So my suggestion for you is that you learn where that line lives in your own life so that you know when you've crossed it. You have to understand a clear distinction between reflection and rumination. Reflection is a grounded way of thinking through things. There's curiosity. We're rooted, grounded in the present moment with a good perspective of what do I actually have control over here? Reflection helps us move toward clarity, Whereas rumination tends to be that thinking where we just loop and loop and loop. We think about the same thing and really in the same way, over and over and over again. And rumination actually triggers a response in our body that makes it feel really urgent that we work something out. So, of course, when we're looping and repeating and there's an urgency, this type of thinking can really pull us into fear or shame. There's a lot of emotional toll that rumination can take on us, Never mind the exhaustion that it causes, the mental exhaustion of looping and repeating. And it's awful, isn't it? Today, I just want to give you one quick tool to help you continue to work on the overthink thinking, to help you continue to make a distinction between what's productive and what's kind of damaging for you. Actually, I give you just one idea to play with this dynamic between rumination and reflection to help you to start to distinguish between the two. A simple question like, is this helping me move Forward. Is this keeping me stuck? And being able to really discern and decide for yourself which is true, will really help you interrupt it if you need to. If it's. If you're just feeling really stuck and looping, that's rumination. You gotta interrupt it. So it's easy to interrupt rumination, but I think not many people really understand that it is rumination. And so they don't. An interruption can be the most simple thing. It can be just standing up and moving into a different room. It can be shifting your body position or placing more attention on your body. It's definitely. You definitely need to label what's happening. Like when you see that you're ruminating, to be able to just say, maybe even out loud, this is rumination. I don't need to be doing this right now. And then shifting your attention to what you are doing right now. If you're in bed in the middle of the night, like I often find myself in rumination, then where your attention goes is to your body and to relaxing and to just coming back into nervous system regulation where you can choose how you want to approach something. Listen, no grounded solutions or results come from an elevated nervous system. And I think the line that you really have to understand between reflection and rumination, it lives in the body. There's a feeling to rumination that it's really helpful to get to know what that feeling is for you. Because the thing is, is we all ruminate. It's part of the human condition. Welcome, my friend. Isn't it fun? But it's important to understand that, because there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your mind. All your brain is doing is just like an average day in the office, right? When you learn to shift from rumination to reflection, you're going to get your time and energy back, you're going to get your nervous system regulated, and you're going to know the answer or be able to let go of the fact that you don't know the answer and you don't have to. So much of rumination is just, I want to work this out. I got to figure this out. And I think that's where we get duped, because you're not gonna figure it out. Some of these things, like, I can't figure out what my kids are gonna do with their lives. I mean, if they would listen to me, I would totally plan them out for them. But that's not good for them, and it's definitely not good for me. So hopefully this helps you a little bit to discern the difference because I tell you that will save you a lot of mental energy. And if you struggle with rumination and you want more direct help disrupting it and per even building a thinking pattern that brings calm and clarity, you can book a 75 minute coaching session with me at takeouttherapy.com I'm hoping this little conversation that we've had today helps you understand that rumination and reflection feel really similar, but they do very different things to the mind and the body. And you have the power to interrupt rumination spirals once you see that that's what's going because the thing is, reflection is a beautiful thing. It's time spent in a calm state thinking about your life, maybe even strategizing a little bit. Reflection moves you forward. Rumination is only going to keep you stuck in those really irritating loops. I hope that's helpful for you today. Thanks so much for spending your time with me. I really appreciate you just showing up each week and doing your personal growth growth work as always. While this podcast is a great educational resource, get the level of support that you need for your unique situation. Head to takeouttherapy.com to check out my resources until Monday. Take really good care of yourself, friend.
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Everyday Calm App Narrator
If free tips actually worked, you'd feel amazing by now. But scrolling, saving posts and nodding along? Not the same as change. The everyday call map is where you stop collecting advice and start practicing real skills. Five minutes, one tool, one shift at a time. No pressure, no perfection. Get it@studio.com Rebecca.