Mind Drama

One

The Power and Peril of Rumination

I’m sitting in a small, dark room, half-office, half-lab, staring at a computer screen showing what looks like a bright red cyclone barreling across scans of my brain. Next to me sits clinical neuroscientist Mark Trullinger, PhD, who uses AI, fMRI-like brain scans, and electrical brain waves to read an individual’s brain state as if he’s reading their personal biography. Without knowing much about my current life, he’s certainly doing a great job of reading mine.

“What is that?” I point to the ominous red swirl on the scans of my brain he’d taken at our previous appointment.

“These are little earthquakes of rumination that are erupting all the time in your brain.” Trullinger moves his cursor over the scarlet blob. “See here? Some sort of long-standing emotional stress is triggering regular spurts of rumination.” He moves the cursor slightly to the right. “And here, I can see that chronic health conditions are triggering more little explosions of rumination.” He sits back in his chair and turns to look at me. “The problem is that once this area of the brain becomes hyper-primed, it’s very hard for your brain to toggle back out of your ruminating thoughts”—those recursive and distressing thought loops in which so many of us become entangled.

“What area of the brain are we looking at here?”

“The default mode network. This network is the seat of your sense of self. It’s also your brain’s storyteller, where you spin stories about who you are, how you got here, what’s happened to you in your life—and who you can become. Think of it as the birthplace of all the self-referential thoughts that shape how you judge yourself and others.” As its name implies, the default mode network is a network. It’s made up of three brain areas that, together, generate our ruminations: the posterior cingulate cortex, which helps us recall our memories; the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which brings forth our difficult emotions; and the parietal lobe, which generates our physical sensations.

Trullinger is a neuroscientist who also practices psychology, which makes him a unicorn in the field. He can examine our brain activity to gain a unique perspective on our hidden emotional life, past, present, and future. Trullinger also serves as the director of NeuroThrive, a clinical practice that assesses individuals’ brain function and how to improve it, and sits on the advisory board of the research advocacy group BrainFutures (which, in full disclosure, I also sit on).

The problem, Trullinger continues, is that “when chronic stress levels stay elevated, the brain can shift into prolonged bouts of rumination and get stuck there. And that’s not good, because over time this heavy pattern of rumination can lead to anxiety, mood changes, mental fatigue, and years from now, when you’re older, memory issues.”

Trullinger seems to be reading the tea leaves of my life right now. I stifle the urge to tell him that despite my increased episodes of ruminating, I am a normal person, a get-it-done, practical person, someone who has a career I love, and loving relationships with my husband, children, and friends.

Perhaps he sees the consternation fall over my face, because before I can speak, he adds, “You also show some beautiful strengths in your brain.” His cursor slides toward another area of my brain, to the posterior cingulate cortex, the part of my default mode network that plays a role in higher-level cognitive functions, including awareness, perception, social cognition, and information integration. “I can see you have an acute ability to make complex associations between abstract ideas in a very deep way—here, your brain is functioning more optimally than the norm. And your perceptual awareness about everything happening around you is unusual. You are probably one of the first people in any room to sense how people are feeling; the first to know when something is off, or if there is danger, if someone needs help. You also show a heightened ability to switch into a positive, productive type of ruminating and mind-wandering—creativity, imagination, ideation.”

Because I’ve become so acutely aware of the ways in which rumination has been draining me, I’m thrilled to hear that there is a positive form of rumination, one that could potentially feed my creativity and yield more moments of insight.

“But once you get stuck in negative recursive thoughts, your brain becomes tired and anxious,” he adds. “And it drifts away, shutting out everything but those darker storylines.”

Now I’m really worried. “Are you saying I ruminate more than other people?”

“Well, that’s a tricky question.” Trullinger exits out of the images we’ve been looking at and pulls up several recent research papers. “When we compare people’s brains from five years ago, before the pandemic, to today, we can see that people are, in general, more likely to become locked in unhealthy, ruminating thoughts.” There are, he says, notable alterations in the default mode network that correlate to our collective hyper-ruminative state. “The pandemic is unlikely to be the only cause, but we do know that something significant has changed.”

I consider the overall apocalyptic feel of the world right now. Ideological and political divides that feel uglier, more volatile, and more impassable than ever. A yearslong pandemic that was terrifying only slightly in the rearview mirror. A growing epidemic of loneliness. Too much Zooming, too little in-person connection. The barrage of negative news and discord blaring our way morning, noon, and night. Mass shootings, an unprecedented mental health crisis, the growing disaster of climate change, and several hate-fueled wars. Even traffic fatalities are at their highest levels in decades thanks to unprecedented bouts of road rage. Then there’s the dark, addictive rabbit hole of social media, spewing such a fire hose of news and opinions about political events and social turmoil that it requires a constant and exhausting effort to distinguish the real from the fake. The same week I was in Trullinger’s office, Oxford University Press had announced that after analyzing language data and holding a public vote in which thirty-seven thousand people participated, their word of the year was brain rot, referring to the deleterious effect of consuming too much “low-quality” online content, especially on social media.

It does seem some days like it would be best to pull the covers over one’s head or move to an island off Fiji. Could this vitriolic world in which we live be making it harder than ever to stop ruminating about both external events and the problems that plague us in our personal lives?

I share with Trullinger that I already meditate every day, do yoga, take long walks in nature, exercise, see my therapist. “But none of it seems to be quite enough anymore.”

“These are excellent things to do. Imagine how much worse it would be if you weren’t doing them!” He laughs. “But research shows that as beneficial and important as these are, they may not be enough. People often need additional tools that more directly target rumination.”

“Such as?”

“That’s one of the hottest topics in neuroscience.” During my subsequent meetings with Trullinger, as well as other neuroscientists and psychologists, this was one of the subjects we would explore.

As I leave Trullinger’s office that day, I’m even more curious and determined to understand the damage rumination does to our mental health and cognitive clarity, and how we can wrest ourselves free from it. Having heard Trullinger say that rumination can offer something positive, fueling our imagination and our creativity, I also want to know how we can flip the switch and transform our dark ruminative energy into something empowering and purposeful. What can science tell us about the upside of rumination, the creative state of ideation and ingenuity that fills us with joy and an intense, palpable feeling of interior well-being? Clearly the ruminators among us, and apparently there are more of us than ever, need better tactics and strategies to escape our looping thoughts and exchange them for something creative and insightful.

This gives rise to other questions on my mind: How big a problem is rumination, really, for everyone? Is it as widespread as I think, or is it just that I don’t want to feel so alone?

When I get home, a search of the recent literature on the National Library of Medicine corroborates what Trullinger already told me. Compared to prior to the pandemic, our brains today are a lot more likely to show not only markers of increased emotional distress but “alterations” in activity in the default mode network—the seat of our ruminating thoughts. And yup, most of us appear to be ruminating more than we did five years ago.