Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Mindset matters.
[00:00:04] Hi, I'm Dr. Charisse Johnson, a licensed clinical mental health therapist, mindfulness practitioner, and author. One of my primary specialties is working with individuals who want to heal their relationship with their mind, their body and themselves. Welcome to Mindset Matters. All right, come into this scenario with me. Let's say you're in a situation where there is so much going on in your world, but in particular there's something that you can't figure out. There's something that is a chronic source of worry or just a dynamic that you're trying to solve and you're not quite sure what to do.
[00:00:48] So you've noticed in yourself and you don't have to out yourself just yet, but you've noticed that one of the primary ways that you try to solve the things that are happening in your life is that you tend to ruminate over and over and over again.
[00:01:07] Essentially, when this happens, it really destroys your brain.
[00:01:13] It impacts and interferes your physical health, your emotional health, your well being and your appetite. And we're going to get into that over the next two episodes. So to level set this one, let's talk about what is rumination. Rumination is the process of continuously thinking about the same thing, the same thoughts, often related to some level of a stressor or an anxiety. And it's one of those dynamics that once you start, you notice that you can't stop. It interferes with everything. It comes up during times that you're like, I don't even want to be thinking about this right now. But you will notice that your mind will immediately start to trail off and go to the places you don't want it to go. If you've experienced this, there's so many reasons and not enough time in this podcast for me to get into all of them. But hang tight and make sure that you share this with someone that you know. You hear them doing it. Now, I'm not saying go to your friend and be like, hey, you need to listen to this because she's talking about you. That's not what we want to do, people. But it can be useful. If you have a friend and they utilize you as a verbal processor and you notice they're talking about the same dynamic over and over, be there for them, but also give them some tools. Here's the impact on the brain when we are in a state of rumination, whether it's conscious, we're sitting down, we're trying to think about things over and over, or it's subconscious, you're not trying, but that thought that those worries, that anxiety continues to pop up, it leads to heightened activity in the amygdala. If you've been listening to this or you've been listening to me, you may be the point that you remember. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes your emotions, but specifically fear and anxiety. So rumination is not a solve for what you are going through. I'm going to take a quick sip.
[00:03:19] I'm going to sip even more than I probably would in normal because I'm coming off of a cold. But, you know, we've got to take care of business here. So when you're in a situation where you notice yourself ruminating, it is going to activate that amygdala. It is literally like taking fear and anxiety and going, here, I'm going to give you some lighter fluid so that you can be even more heightened than ever before. I want you to understand that because somewhere along the way, trauma life tries to teach us that if we think about something enough, then we're going to figure it out. And that's actually not true. Fun fact. And then I'll move forward. When we consistently ruminate and think about something over and over and over, or ruminate and then verbalize by kind of dumping and emotionally dumping on other people, it tends to make what we're experiencing worse because we're almost wearing down a path that leads to more fear and more anxiety. The other aspect of this is that when the amygdala is heightened, it reduces the activity in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, is that just juicy, lustrous part of your brain where we want to spend as much time as possible? Because that's the part of the brain that allows us to make the decisions that we want. That's the part of the brain that's going to help you choose from a place of harmony. That's the part of the brain that's going to help you make the decisions that help you feel like you are choosing the right things in your life. Notice that I did not say control, but you will feel a greater sense of. Of control, even though that's not really a thing. But you get what I'm saying. The prefrontal cortex, when that part of your brain starts to reduce because the amygdala heightens, emotion regulation is off. It completely goes out of the window. We see this on so many different scans. If you think back to some of our prior conversations, because I know that you have watched every episode of Mindset Matters or Listen, then you also will keep in mind, when emotional regulation is off, when it's being threatened, when it's low, then it impacts our judgment and our ability to cope with stress effectively.
[00:05:54] And typically, if we're not coping with stress in effective ways, then we can almost bet beyond a shadow of a doubt that that means that we're going to be turning to some type of behavior that is not ideal. That's when we find ourselves emotional eating, emotional drinking, shopping, numbing over exercising, overworking. Any level of compensatory behaviors, they start to come on the scene. We also know that when we are ruminating, our neurotransmitters become imbalanced. So prolonged, prolonged rumination affects the levels of your neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. Serotonin is your mood state. Dopamine is that powerful, happy neurotransmitter that we need to stay in a good mood. So those are critical for regulating mood and well being. Let me recap that neuroscience for you. Maybe you stop here and then you listen to the rest at another time because I have so much to share. Okay. Rumination. You get stuck on a thought or thoughts about a stress, a fear, a worry, an anxiety, a person, a situation, something that you can't solve. You consciously or subconsciously tell yourself, well, if I think about this, enough will be able to figure it out. Even though that doesn't happen most of the time, the amygdala heightens fear and anxiety gets lighter fluid from all the rumination.
[00:07:36] Prefrontal cortex reduces activity. So your judgment and your decisions are not in line with your values and what you say that you want for yourself. They're typically going to be in line with impulse. And as a result of all of those factors, your neurotransmitters are off, your serotonin may be depleted, which means your mood is going to go down and you're going to feel even more anxious or depressed. Or you might find yourself in a situation where your dopamine is off, so that becomes low. And again, that takes you down the trail of low mood. If I connect us back to some of our prior conversations or when serotonin is low, when dopamine is low, what do we want?
[00:08:27] We typically want to eat. We typically want food. We typically want some level of impulsive activity. We might want to shop, we might want to stay up later than it's really helpful for us to stay up as a result of trying to balance it out. Now, if you found yourself in this situation, I don't want you to feel horrible. This is always about insight. This is always about you getting knowledge and then applying the tools that you learned here or you're learning in other areas of your life so that you can take yourself out of the cycle of rumination. I almost want to tell you. Well, not almost. I'm going to have you say it right now, right now, in this moment. If you don't hear anything that I have to say, I want you to know you can break the cycle of rumination. It does not matter if it's something that you feel like you've done all of your life. It's a learned behavior. And anything that we learn, we can unlearn if we are willing to do the work.
[00:09:46] So first, understand the impact that it's having on you so that you can get to the point that you decide, you know what, I want to try something different. I know that rumination is my automatic default, but I want to try something different because this is not helpful. So we talked a little bit about the neuroscience behind rumination and how it impacts the brain. Now let's take a moment and talk about how it impacts your physical health. Now, of course, the things that I say are not an all encompassing list of the way that it impacts your physical health, but it's enough that you're going to get the gist of things and it's something that you want to keep in mind as you are considering the whole dynamic of being healthy and what that means for your life. But first, I'm going to take a sip.
[00:10:33] When you are in a place of chronic stress, Rumination and chronic stress typically go hand in hand.
[00:10:41] So rumination then triggers a chronic stress response and that leads you to increased levels of cortisol. Cortisol, if you remember, is your stress hormone when your cortisol levels are high. That is linked to so many significant health issues including weight gain, high blood pressure, and a weakened immune system. Those are the top three side fact. 60% of the physical challenges that we experience in our lifetime are preventable.
[00:11:21] 60%. They are preventable because about 60% of what we experience is attached to not addressing our stress, not appropriately cultivating our health, and not nourishing our our bodies through stress. Are you picking up what I'm putting down?
[00:11:46] We can live better, healthier and longer when we pay attention to the way our stress is impacting us and we do something to interrupt the cycle of stress other than turning to food, to alcohol, to substances, to shopping and behaviors that don't have long term benefits. So Physical health. Chronic stress increases the likelihood that you're going to experience body changes, inflammation, high blood pressure and a weakened immune system, just to name a few. It also impacts your sleep. So persistent rumination. I know those of you who ruminate are like, oh my goodness, yes, that is me. Let's say this. You're sleeping, maybe you don't have a problem going to sleep, but then typically between 2:30 and 5:00am, you wake up and your mind is going a million miles an hour about all of the things that you are ruminating over. So I even love the fact that it not only impacts our sleep. I mean, I'm not saying I love the fact that it impacts your sleep. I'm saying that I love the neuroscience behind the timing, that we know that you haven't entered that deep REM sleep and it's being impacted by your stress and by the quality of your thoughts when you're specifically waking up in between that time frame over and over. So I love that science backs up. You have to do something. We have to understand our bodies are designed to rest. Our bodies need sleep. A few days with inadequate sleep is like the brain being drunk. Now you might be walking around and telling yourself, oh, I feel great. I'm used to a lack of sleep. You think you're functioning at a high level. You are not. You might be getting away with it now or you got away with it when you were younger. But let me tell you, as you get older, you will see the impact of not getting adequate sleep. You will not be able to turn the next day around the way you typically would. And when sleep disturbances are present, when we have disrupted sleep patterns, that further exasperates our physical health issues. That's going to increase your cortisol, your stress hormone, even more. When sleep is disturbed, observed, it's also going to increase your ghrelin, which is your appetite hormone.
[00:14:30] Am I wrong? You have a few nights where you don't sleep well and then you are constantly in search of more food, more caffeine or more sugar to take yourself to a place that you could get to in terms of your energy if you were just adequately managing your thought life, your physical health and your emotional health. We also notice. I love this one because I am a somatic nerd. Soma, meaning body, nervous system. We will continue to get in that more and more. When you are ruminating, it creates somatic system. I cannot talk today. Somatic symptoms.
[00:15:15] That means it manifest in, in physical ways like headaches, stomach issues or chronic pain, which is often referred to as psychosomatic disorders. I'm going to take one more sip and then we'll go from there.
[00:15:35] I see somatic symptoms occur so frequently, more than most people want to acknowledge. Here's something that I want you to consider.
[00:15:47] The body is actually designed to feel good, slash great every day. If our life is set up in a way that we are caring for ourselves and we're making the needed adjustments in order to nurture ourselves and to nourish ourselves, in other words, when we're doing what we need to do to support ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally, it increases the likelihood that we'll have a consistent level of energy and a well balanced mood each day. When we think that we are invincible, when we avoid facing the things that we need to address, when we try to carry a load that is not ours to carry, it puts us in a bad situation. When that bad situation occurs over time, then physical symptoms occur. And it can be really frustrating because you might go to the doctor and go, something is wrong. I know something is not right. I do not feel right. I feel off. I feel different. They take tests, they can't find anything. You get in your head or feel like, am I in my head? But you're in your body. Now, there can be multiple reasons why that happens, but there are a lot of moments where you're experiencing or potentially experiencing psychosomatic symptoms that are a direct result of what's happening to you mentally.
[00:17:25] I see this so much. Here's a side note that I want you to consider for application. What are you noticing about your physical health right now over the last two to three weeks? What hurts?
[00:17:39] What feels off?
[00:17:42] How's your quality of sleep? How is your energy level from start to finish of the day? Please take the time to answer those questions because they're going to give you insight around what you might be experiencing. And then once you identify that, next I want you to identify, how's the quality of my thoughts? What am I noticing about the way that I am talking to myself? What do I notice about my ability to focus my attention to task? Or do I recognize that there's a level of thoughts and a level of worries and anxieties and fears that are interrupting my daily thought patterns and kind of sending you over to the edge trying to solve something that may be completely outside of your control? And when this happens, then we find that rumination, right, not only impacts the brain, not only impacts our physical health, but then our emotional well being. If ruminating is a pattern for you, you are going to find that depression or anxiety may be more prevalent. Rumination is a significant risk factor for the development of depression and anxiety disorders. It creates a cycle where negative thoughts lead to emotional distress. I'm going to say that again.
[00:19:10] Negative thoughts lead to emotional distress.
[00:19:17] Repeated negative thoughts will lead to emotional distress. Even if you're not aware of them all the time. That means any thought that you recognize and you don't deal with is going to deal with you.
[00:19:36] So it's important that we recognize that cycle because negative thoughts will lead to emotional distress and emotional distress will lead to more negative thoughts. And then you're in that cycle of rumination that exhaust you and drains you. It's like that moment where you feel like you want your brain to stop. You are searching for rest and calm and can't find it. And then when we're caught in that cycle of a depressed state or anxious state because our mind is going a million miles an hour, it decreases our capacity. It diminishes our ability to bounce back from stress or bounce back from adversity. So then we're in that state where if someone says something to us where we're fragile or defensive. So recognize that being defensive is also kind of a symptom of feeling fragile. It means that your tolerance level is paper thin. Then we have less personal agency and well being. It means that anything that we need to do feels like a struggle. The last thing that I want to hit for this current podcast is rumination will also impact your relationships. And I want to pause and be very sensitive to this nature because you have lots of different relationships in your life. You have the relationship with yourself.
[00:21:07] Rumination will impact the way that you view yourself, what you believe is possible about who you are and what you can accomplish. It will impact your relationship with your partner.
[00:21:21] It will impact your relationship with the people in your life that you say that you value, friends, loved ones. And it can impact your relationship in your professional life. So it makes it very challenging to then hear any type of constructive feedback. If we're in a place where we are so in our heads, ruminating, filled with chronic stress, not sleeping well, cortisol levels are high, appetite is chaotic, then all of the information that we take in on any given day is going to be impacted by that cycle of dysregulation. So when we are in a state of rumination, we might want to withdraw from social interactions or struggle to communicate effectively because it feels like things like, oh, it's not worth it, no one ever listens to me. There are Misunderstandings because we interpret the way that people are engaging with us, and then that can create conflicts. Let me give you an example. I often find when I'm working with someone and we are working through their level of rumination because they are so in their head about a number of different things, it doesn't always have to be just one thing. It changes how they perceive the exchange between them and other people. People, they are more sensitive and they overthink and then overread how other people are talking to them. So they could be in a good relationship with someone. There's never been any issue. When they're in that high cycle of rumination, someone doesn't show up the same way that they normally do. And then all of a sudden, they tell themselves things like, oh, my goodness, what have I done? Something must be wrong. This is all my fault. They don't like me anymore. So there's this element of projection that happens when we are ruminating and not feeling good about ourselves. We can also become an emotional drain on other people, and we're not as enjoyable to be around in those moments. We don't know how to stay in a conversation that's not about us. Maybe that's been you, Maybe that's been someone that you know that you're like, oh, I love them. But it's hard to talk to them because every time we get into a conversation, it moves back to whatever's on their mind. It's unintentional. Try to give them some grace, but also put up boundaries for yourself. But if that's you, it's also important for you to recognize that and how you're showing up and how you might be wearing other people down. And then we can also have a level of reduced empathy. So when we're ruminating and when we are worried, our focus is so narrow that all we can think about is our own personal distress. So we don't empathize with other people? Well, we don't engage in the level of support that we would be able to have if we weren't so caught in our heads. Tough question, but I want you to lean into it.
[00:24:30] Where in your life do you recognize some level of rumination is impacting your relationship with yourself or others?
[00:24:44] Where is your focus so narrow and so centered on your own personal distress that you are struggling to be there for other people in the way that they deserve?
[00:25:03] Right. Some big questions that I want you to give thought. This is just an opportunity for you to be educated and to understand and to explore. Wow. How is this habit, this autonomic habit that you picked up somewhere along the way, impacting and interfering with your quality of life? Because that level of negative feedback loop will affect your mental processes. It will impact your physical health and your interpersonal relationships. So you need some strategies. And don't worry, I'm going to give them to you.
[00:25:42] Stay tuned.
[00:25:52] It mindset matters.
