Rumination: chewing over and over again on an idea.

Rumination is a form of preservative cognition that focuses on negative content, generally past and present, and results in emotional distress (Tolin, 2016). When we ruminate we think about the same thing over and over again being unable to stop it and causing us emotional discomfort.

Usually, when those thoughts are referred to past they tends to be negative evaluations about a past event or critical evaluation about our performance (why I said such this stupid thing, I was so awkward, why I can’t be social successful?). When the rumination referees to future it usually appears as worry.

Worry is a maladaptive effortful cognitive process triggers by intrusive, scary thoughts (what if…if this happen, it is going to be terrible…how I going to deal…everything is going to be worst). Worry is an illusion of handle with problems…we mentally and anticipatory take care of a problem imagine repetitively potential catastrophic outcomes that might be current in future.

“Some individuals believe that worry is a good idea—they may believe, for example, that worry motivates them to do better, prepares them for the worst, or prevents negative outcomes” (Borkovec & Roemer, 1995; Davey, Tallis, & Capuzzo, 1996).

But it’s not problem solving method, because we don’t take action and solve the problem being focus on possibilities of solution. Unlike this, with rumination we only focus in the same kind of potential scenarios (negatives, catastrophic) and perseverate in them: the same negative thoughts over and over ignoring other alternatives of results.

Although these cognitive processes may be rooted in our way of being, we can change them by implementing some psychological techniques to prevent or reduce the maladaptation and emotional discomfort they cause.