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On Resolving the Unresolvable: The Difference Between Thinking and Ruminating

Much of my time is spent thinking, reading, and interrogating myself and others about the myriad problems caused by existence. How can we know the unknowable?

How do we make conscious all that which is unconscious?

How do we make certain all that’s uncertain?

And how, as Rilke instructs, do we live with all that is unresolved in our hearts?

While these are questions I’ve been grappling with for most of my life, they make living more interesting—they don’t stop me in my tracks, or interfere with my daily functioning. It’s the thoughts that get caught in one place and repeat that ruin me; this stuckness is called rumination, and it’s a beast.

If I’ve learned anything over my thousands of weeks being alive, it’s that there is a way of pondering and worrying that is productive, and a way that can be quite unproductive.

When we think or worry productively, we move through a process that includes some amount of closure—when we think, we get somewhere. When we ruminate, however, we get nowhere. We become trapped in a spin cycle of questioning with no foreseeable escape—we remain unresolved.

People with a proclivity toward anxiety (hello!) often believe that worrying will solve their problems. Worrying is active; it offers a false sense of control over a situation, and anxious people tend to rely on it, misusing it like a self-soothing blanket.

The problem is that anxiety traps us in place, and so does ruminating. And just like anxiety, ruminating often causes the ruminator to feel out of control. There is a very thin line between worrying and ruminating—while both are symptoms of anxiety and depression, worry is more lenient, it’ll allow any thought in, no matter what it’s wearing.

Rumination, on the other hand, has a dress code. It prefers its thoughts to behave in the same manner—stuck and recycling the same negative material over and over again.

Ruminating is a trap posing as a good plan made by a bad friend. And like a bad friend, rumination is poisonous. When it surfaces, it’s a signal that something else inside of you needs attention.

A couple of weeks ago, I got caught in its crosshairs. A worry got lodged in my brain and caused me so much discomfort, I could not carry on with my day until I dislodged it.

I was so stuck in my head that I felt like this ruminating thought was now me, permanently—One-Thought Amanda.

It lasted for DAYS. It was finally resolved when a friend asked me a question that helped prod the worry out of its wedge. She approached the question from a different angle, offering me some objectivity that I couldn’t provide myself.

While I was grateful to my friend, I wanted to do for myself what she had inadvertently done for me. But first, I wanted to get a closer look at rumination and ask it some questions.

I could think of no better person to help me do that than Dr. Tamar Chansky, psychologist, author, and founder of the Children’s and Adult Center for OCD and Anxiety in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

“Rumination is the process of having repetitive thoughts that your mind gets you stuck on,” Dr. Chansky explains to me over email. “They are usually about a negative situation—a past relationship or interaction, a mistake, or some unfinished or pending problem—an upcoming test or challenge at work.”

In other words, thinking, like dreaming, is a way to process and digest information and rumination is a way to stymie that process.

“We don’t feel in charge of ourselves when we’re ruminating,” says Dr. Chansky. “Sometimes people can feel that it’s useful to ruminate, to be responsible, to analyze a painful event or relationship to try to gain a better understanding, but the retreading feels miserable.

It’s like trying to iron and re-iron out every wrinkle—what’s the point? People may describe their ruminations as they can’t stop their brain, they are overthinking it but can’t stop, their mind is in overdrive, or they feel trapped in their own head.”

I assumed that the opposite of rumination was simply just thinking, but it turns out, it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

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